Prayer: Entering the Interior Landscape

To live a life of prayer means live with as much awe and wonder and curiosity toward the vast inner landscape within you  as any scientist looks the earth or sky.  It means you live with as much respect and honor toward the beauty within you as any artist shows toward a desert landscape or jagged seacoast. Near Stromness, OrkenyJohn O'Donahue's a praying poet you ought to know.

The Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue was beloved for his book Anam Cara, Gaelic for "soul friend," and for his insistence on beauty as a human calling and a defining aspect of God. In one of his last interviews before his death in 2008, he articulated a Celtic imagination about how the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible worlds intertwine in human experience.

Here's a link to this remarkable interview on the audio program Speaking of Faith (which you also ought to get to know)