A Prayer In This Season

From the incomparable John O'Donohue's To Bless the Space Between Us (New York: Doubleday. 2008):

For Citizenship

In these times when anger

Is turned to anxiety

And someone has stolen

The horizons and the mountains,

Our small emperors on parade

Never expect our indifference

To disturb their nakedness.

They keep their heads down

And their eyes gleam with reflection

From aluminum economic ground.

The media wraps everything

In a cellophane of sound,

And the ghost surface of the virtual

Overlays the breathing earth.

The industry of distraction

Makes us forget

That we live in a universe.

We have become converts

To the religion of stress

And its deity of progress;

That we may have courage

To turn aside from it all

And come to kneel down before the poor,

To discover what we must do,

How to turn anxiety

Back into anger,

How to find our way home.

John O'Donohue, Irish poet, former Catholic priest and Hegelian philosopher, died this year at the age of 53. Too young, too soon gone.