Divine Beauty
by John O'Donohue
One year in university at the end of the semester
I returned home for the summer holidays.
When I walked into the kitchen my father looked up at me
and I saw something in his gaze that I had never seen before.
Some finality had entered his looking.
Whether it was out in the mountains or among the fields around the house,
his eyes had glimpsed a door opening towards him.
His countenance had become more luminous
and his natural gentleness was being claimed by a new silence.
As we held each other for a moment in that gaze
I knew death had picked his name out.
Days later illness arrived and in three weeks the door of death had closed behind him.
The gaze had revealed everything; time had stood still.
The image of that gaze has always remained with me
for it was a moment of the deepest and most tender knowing,
a momenta radiant with the strange beauty of sadness.
John O'Donohue
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