By Scott Graber
It is Monday, early, and I have been reading John O’Donohue.
O’Donohue was an Irish priest who wrote and spoke with uncommon eloquence. His eloquence touched on topics largely unseen — one’s spirit, one’s relationship with God, one’s efforts to find and to explore one’s spiritual landscape.
But O’Donohue was also interested in imagination, creativity and living a meaningful life.
“The greatest sin,” he wrote, was the “un-lived life.” The greatest regret, he said, was lying on one’s deathbed knowing one had been “absent” and missed out on the “whole thing.”
Now O’Donohue is deceased.
Fortunately O’Donohue wrote several books; poetry that transports one straight to Ireland; and was sometimes interviewed — leaving beams of pure light illuminating a mystical, magical inner landscape.
This morning I have one of his books — “To Bless The Space Between Us” — helping me understand the journey that I took and, to use a battered metaphor, “the road not taken.”
When I was at the Citadel I had friends who arrived with a plan — a plan to fly airplanes.
Earlier in their lives, perhaps they were teenagers at an air show, they decided that their college degree would be a passport to the U.S. Air Force — as well as a bridge to a life in aviation. They followed this path even though this route would likely put them into an F-4 Phantom flying missions against well camouflaged anti-aircraft batteries around Hanoi.
I did not have this yearning.
I had a father who wanted me to follow him into medical research. In this connection he choreographed summers that had me field testing pharmaceuticals in Trinidad; collecting urine samples from cotton farmers in Bowman, S.C.; and looking for traces of lead (in children) living in the shadow of the Cooper River Bridge.
But those jobs ran counter to my efforts in the classroom. In high school I failed trigonometry; in college I struggled with chemistry; in every quantitative, science-related course my grades were borderline or somewhere south of that border.
For reasons that had more to do with chance than choice, I wandered into a course called Constitutional Law. This was my third undistinguished year at the military college.
I found that I loved the debate and the actors that surrounded the writing of our Constitution. I also loved parsing the legal cases that followed ratification.
But what I really liked was the compromise that was a part of this process. Notwithstanding the cursed compromise postponing the prohibition of slavery; I began to think that compromise was a uniquely American trait — singularly so — and the “secret sauce” that made our system durable.
But a large part of the deal was a young professor — Larry Moreland — who made “Con Law” fascinating. He also brought humor, irreverence and irony into to the classroom. Somewhere along the way I decided I should look at law school for my own passport to a meaningful life.
Generally speaking I enjoyed law school — especially the classroom clamor of the late 60s — but the “practice of law” was largely focused on winning, and fees, and so I pin-balled through an uneven, unhappy landscape sometimes wondering about making a living as a piano-playing lounge singer.
All of which brings me back to John O’Donohue.
“The interesting question is, What happened to the lives you once had as options but did not choose? Where do they dwell? Perhaps your unlived lives run parallel to your current life and in some subtle way and continue to influence the choices that you make. All of this may be happening beside you and in you yet unknown to you.”
And what about one’s inner life — that inner dive that requires imagination, courage and a willingness to think there are worlds and realms unknown and uncharted?
And what about the duties that come with the privilege that most of us enjoy. The duty of compassion, empathy and the duty to take honorable risks. The duty not to judge; to give some of one’s treasure to the poor; the duty to explore the possibilities?
O’Donohue was once a priest and he provided the oils and the prayers for those ready to cross-over,“People feel most alive when they attend a funeral.”
At one point he was attending a dying man and he asked, “Well, tell me what you think about your life — the whole thing,” he said.
The man paused, then chuckled and said, “Jesus, I did get a big squeeze and hug out of it …”
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
