How faith looks to one who lives it
Reviewed by Frank Wilson
Inquirer Books Editor
Donegal Suite
By John P. McNamee
Dufour. 62 pp. $13.95
Donegal Suite is just the book to have in hand as another St. Patrick's Day approaches.
The Rev. John P. McNamee's collection of poems provides a useful corrective to the vulgar take on Ireland and the Irish that the day - populated with leprechauns, decorated with shamrocks, awash in watery green beer - has come to represent.
It also provides a corrective to the vulgar take on faith being put forth in best-selling books by the likes of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins.
McNamee is pastor of St. Malachy's Catholic Church in North Philadelphia and is best known as an author for his Diary of a City Priest. The poems in his new book, many of them written during a trip to Ireland, are all exemplary of what faith looks like from the inside by someone who happens to be living it.
"Prayer Walk," for instance, begins an account of a stroll by the sea by noting, "The Exercises of Saint Ignatius say / the Mystery will be as intrusive in us / as we by listening allow." It concludes by admitting, "We are / more the sandpipers skittish / about staying dry than fat gulls / sitting Buddha-like gazing out / with an attention that evades me."
"Come back to the closeby," McNamee writes in "Hedgerows," and he takes his own advice, bringing a sharp eye to details likely to be overlooked but whose poignancy conjures a strange, uncomfortable - though not altogether uncomforting - beauty:
Brick walls dust sidewalks
with rust crumble as far
as the empty factory
worn as the body
I force snail-like
to my morning window
where sunrise now burns
glass shards and paint peel.
These stanzas are themselves worth taking a closer look at. "Brick walls dust sidewalks" - all nouns, though dust serves as a verb as well. The empty factory is worn as the body is by the soul, the same body the speaker forces to the window to see the burning sunrise. With its seemingly casual rhymes and assonance, this is very well-crafted verse.
Critics of religion often presume that faith settles all questions for the believer - "no more doubt or fear," as the song would have it. It isn't that way at all, of course. As John Henry Newman noted, faith doesn't eliminate doubt. It simply makes it bearable.
There is certainly no sense of complacency in these pages: "The demon is doubt / the silence like nothingness." Or take "Habitare Secum" - the title refers to dwelling in the presence of God: "The aim is emptiness," but "the vacant spaces within... both invite and frighten." And so:
I succumb. A cabinet in the next room
has spirits to soften the lump of self
a switch and a blank screen fills
with distracting color.
On the tube is a program about the poet Philip Larkin, and McNamee quotes Larkin: "Boredom and fear and with the years / more fear than boredom." "And," observes McNamee, "more spirits to ease / the terrors and death spirits softened and hastened."
It is McNamee's awareness of his own shortcomings - or, to use the traditional term, sinfulness - that makes these poems so humane. From the old bachelor sitting alone in an Irish pub, passing "the short or long Irish nights hearing / songs he has heard a thousand times," to the bus driver "who cradles / the huge steering wheel as ably as / she does grandchildren off somewhere in daycare," to the old and young man (the younger with Down syndrome) "side by side in a front pew" and "more a homily than / any words I am about," these poems teach us to see people as we ought to, but seldom manage to.
The poet John Hall Wheelock wrote that a poet is "an eye that watches in secret... a mouth to tell us something we have forgotten... to tell us all over again / Something we always knew."
McNamee fits the description, drawing our attention to the rising sun, "already shaping the black roof / of night into a blue dome... a finger- / print of the singular that is every dawn"
Try thinking about that before you sip any of that lousy green beer Saturday night.
29th May 2006
http://www.taoiseach.gov.ie
The Taoiseach, Mr Bertie Ahern TD, visited New York on Wednesday to attend a United Nations High Level Meeting on HIV Aids. The Taoiseach also attended the first UN Special Session on HIV/Aids in New York in June 2001. At the time, Ireland along with the other Member States adopted a Declaration of Commitment to HIV/Aids.
The 2006 meeting reviewed the progress achieved in realising the targets set out in 2001. The High-level meeting included worldwide Heads of State and Government, representatives from civil society and from the private sector. The Irish delegation included the Minister of State for Development Cooperation, Mr. Conor Lenihan TD. On Friday 2 June, the Taoiseach formally addressed the General Assembly.
The Taoiseach met the United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan on Thursday 1 June. He presented the Secretary General with a report of the Irish Government’s response to the challenge of HIV Aids in developing countries, from 2001-2006. He reiterated the Irish Government’s commitment, made in September 2005, to increase Government expenditure on HIV and other poverty related diseases to €100m per year.
While in New York, the Taoiseach also met with senior Irish-born executives of US companies and attended other business related events organised by Enterprise Ireland.
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