Sublime

John O’Donohue, a former Irish Catholic priest, philosopher, poet, and, in his own words, mystic

A theologian, essayist, orator, and poet, Emerson is variously described as America’s own philosopher, our first literary giant, the father of the environmental movement, and the founder of what literary critic Harold Bloom calls “the American religion,” a distinctive blend of individualism and self-reliance. Emerson’s philosophy, Transcendentalism

Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.

Freedom is openness is love.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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His interest was in the principles that unite us, not the doctrines that divide us. Following Jesus’ insistence that the kingdom of Heaven is within you, Emerson sought moral universals, what he called “interior truth.” He insisted, for example, that if the Confucians in China, the stoics of Athens, the noblest Buddhists, and the wisest Christians

(Ralph Waldo Emerson), free intellectual exchange (Margaret Fuller), ordinary people in their daily lives (Walt Whitman), and mystical experiences found in religion, visions, and drugs (William James).53

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