Olive Trees by Van Gogh Matt Talbot: An Introduction
(Veritas, €4.99)
Though this little book is unsigned on the title page, it is actually extracted from Mary Purcell’s Remembering Matt Talbot published in 1954. Mary Purcell was once a well known writer and her authorship should be recognised on the title page.
When local veneration of Matt Talbot began to emerge in 1930s Dublin the focus was on Matt Talbot’s stoic abasement of his flesh – this is the figure of Tom Kilroy’s play Talbot’s Box. Today, however, as his shrine in Sean McDermott Street shows, his name is associated with prayers for those who struggle with addiction to drugs or drink.
He was a quintessential working class Dubliner, and his life and circumstances will always be of interest. His escape from poverty was through the wonders of religious faith and a vision of something better, though the sinner in Matt Talbot was easier for the Church he lived with to encompass than the saint was.
Irish society has so greatly changed that many of the younger generations have only the vaguest idea of what life and religion were like in the early part of the 20th Century. This little booklet will be a step towards deepening their knowledge.
***
A Beautiful Fragrance: The Life of Margaret Sinclair
by John Watts (Office for the Cause of Margaret Sinclair, Edinburgh, £4.99)
Mary Sinclair was born in Edinburgh in 1900 and died of TB 25 years later. Yet she lived in those short years a remarkable life. Leaving school at 14 she worked until 1923 when she entered a Poor Clare convent. Given her experience of life she was made an extern sister for the convent.
She was declared Venerable and there are many in Scotland working for her beatification. John Paul II once said of her: “Margaret could well be described as one of God’s little ones, who through her very simplicity, was touched by God with the strength of real holiness of life, whether as a child, a young woman, an apprentice, a factory worker, a member of a trade union or a professed sister of religion.” John Watts’ little book will introduce this remarkable woman to a wider audience.
***
Loneliness Knows My Name
by John O’Brien OFM
(The Franciscan Priory Athlone; available on Amazon.UK, £10.00)
The painter Vincent Van Gogh passed his final years in an asylum at Saint-Remy in Provence. Fr O’Brien takes his cue from one of the paintings he did there, Olive Trees which recalled to him the experience of Jesus “the ‘man of sorrows’ in the Garden of Gethsemane”.
This is the inspiration for this reflection of loneliness and how it endangers the spirit in a way which mere physical pain, dreadful as it often is, never does. It is widely recognised that in this era of specious “communication” all too many people have lost the comforts of love and companionship, and live out lives of lonely desolation. Fr O’Brien explores this phenomenon and ways of counteracting through faith and friendship.
