On Being With Christa Tippett is supported in part by the Fetzer Institute, helping build the

Spiritual Foundation for a loving world. Fetzer's sharing spiritual heritage report asks,

how will we hold on to ancient wisdom traditions while applying them creatively in today's time?

Learn more at Fetzer.org.

Beauty isn't all about just nice, lovely, and slight. Beauty is about more rounded,

substantial becoming. So I think beauty in that sense is about an emerging fullness,

a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming

for the enriched memory of your unfolding life. No conversation I've ever had has been more

beloved than this one with the Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue. He insisted on beauty

as a human calling. He had a very Celtic lifelong fascination with the inner human landscape,

and what he called the invisible world constantly intertwining with what we can know and see.

This was one of the last interviews he gave before his unexpected death in 2008. But John O'Donohue's

voice and writings continued to bring ancient mystical wisdom to modern confusions and longings.

I'm Christopher Tippet, and this is on being.

Anum Kara was published in 1997, and it became an international bestseller.

John O'Donohue's final work was to bless the space between us, published posthumously.

He was born in 1956 in County Claire in Western Ireland. Historically, this part of the world was

a crucible of Celtic Christianity, merging a strong sense of mystery with a passionate embrace of

nature, the body, and the senses. The divine is understood as manifest everywhere in everything.

John O'Donohue entered seminary at a young age and was a Catholic priest for 19 years.

But in the 1980s, he went to Germany to study the philosophy of Hegel. He eventually left the priest

to it and devoted himself a full time to meditating and writing on beauty, friendship, and how the

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