Peter Costello
A seeker of the truth finds what he needs in the mess of life. A Holy Mess: Making the Most of Our Misfortunes,
by Donagh O’Shea
(Dominican Publications, €14.99 / £12.50)
I was only a few pages into this excellent book when I came upon a passage discussing the 1951 catechism, so well known to an older generation. From time to time efforts are made by well meaning but (so O’Shea thinks) misguided efforts to get it back into circulation for a younger generation.
He has good reason for this view, which he outlines in an early section of his book called ‘God is Watching You’. Recently he looked into that catechism. He found it very “rules oriented”.
There was, for instance, no mention in the catechism of the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12), a central presentation of what Jesus taught. He went further and read through the old text and found to his astonishment that the word “love” appears nowhere in it. “Nowhere did it say God loves us, much less that God is love.”
With a void where the heart should be, how could it be a framework of the faith. The result was that a generation of Irish children “bracketed God out of their real lives”.
In this book he seeks to redirect people into more fruitful ways of life and love. The material is laid out over some ten chapters making use of queries addressed to the author, from real people we are to assume. They present him with a series of problems or cruxes which will be for the most part familiar one way or another to all of us.
But the answers will be quite unfamiliar I suspect, for O’Shea ranges freely and insightfully over centuries of what might be called spiritual writings, but which are in fact manuals for life. We are encouraged to see in our misfortunes, whatever they are, a new way opening up: doras feasa fiafrai, as used to be said in Gaelic, perhaps paraphrased by Joyce that an error in life can be “a portal of discovery”.
This is exactly right. The rest of the book sets out to explore another path, or rather paths, for the book is filled with a plentitude of voices from all ages from Evagarius Ponticus and Cassian to the Zen poet Buson (d. 1784), one of whose haikus is quoted:
butterfly asleep,
folded on the temple bell –
the bronze gong booms.
But to return to his central image of mess. We all live in a mess, especially I am afraid some classes of literary people (like the man in the image here) are surrounded by “good reads”. It is all a mess, yet these things by their very presence present to the writer a multitude of different views on which the imagination, and the spirit can thrive.
O’Shea he quotes a remark by Johann Tauler, a friend of Meister Eckhart: “When we have gone into our when we have searched for god in the depths of our souls, God comes and searches for us and ransacks our house… and when I say that God seeks us in our house and ransacks it I mean that in this house, in the depths of our souls, we are utterly deprived of all the ideas and conceptions of god that we ever had before.”
We are to understand the word mess in the title in a very literal sense. The man in the image is up to his oxters in the mess, and yet and yet… He has found in one book just what he has been seeking and becomes absorbed in it. He has found what he needs in the mess.
This book is quite simply, a book which everyone should read and gain from, for there is something interesting, illuminating, perhaps even life changing on every page of Donagh O’Shea’s A Holy Mess.
But when you do, think about that butterfly aroused from its peaceful rest unexpectedly by a call to the faithful.