Our contributor Fr Kieran O’Mahony OSA – readers will know him through his Hearers of the Word section in this paper – was buried last Friday at seventy-five, after an illness, and the tributes that followed called him what he was: a gifted teacher of Scripture, an Augustinian who spent decades making biblical texts breathe for people. He ran the Tarsus Scripture School, taught in parishes from Blackrock to Finglas, and used his final months of health to write to The Tablet magazine arguing that Scripture gives no grounds for barring women from ordained ministry. He was, by every account, a scholar’s scholar.
Which makes it worth pausing on who stood up to eulogise him. Not a bishop. Not a fellow Augustinian. A layman: Sean Goan, a retired teacher and lecturer in biblical studies who has spent his own career doing, quietly and outside any pulpit, exactly what O’Mahony did from within one — opening the Word of God to ordinary people.
Psalm
Goan didn’t reach for a psalm to open. He reached for Philip Larkin’s ‘Days’ — a poem, he noted dryly, written by a man who “didn’t believe in anything.” “What are days for?” Larkin›s question, stripped of any religious comfort, became the door into everything that followed: an affirmation that all of us, believer and unbeliever alike, are seekers after what is true, what is good, what is beautiful, and that Fr Kieran had simply chosen to embrace that seeking as a pilgrim, in the light of faith, to the end of his life. It was Fr Kieran himself who chose the funeral›s readings, we were told, and the choices told their own story. From the Book of Wisdom, a meditation on the meaning of existence — “the spirit of wisdom came to me”. From Paul›s letter to the Romans, chapters five and eight — peace and hope, and God’s unshakeable love. As Goan put it, he was a scholar and a priest who never settled for easy answers, who understood that the tradition handed down to him was not a dead weight to be carried but a living word to be spoken again.
He recalled standing with Fr Kieran in front of that image once, watching his eyes dance with delight, and saying to him, ‘Kieran, you are beside yourself’”
The image on the funeral booklet, Goan said, drew out the same thread: the risen Christ, the great Anastasis fresco in Istanbul’s Chora Church, one of the most celebrated depictions of the Harrowing of Hell in all of Byzantine art — Christ straining downward with both arms to haul Adam and Eve — us — up out of the dark. Christ did not just hold their hands, Goan said, he is depicted grabbing them by the wrists and “hauling them out”. He recalled standing with Fr Kieran in front of that image once, watching his eyes dance with delight, and saying to him, “Kieran, you are beside yourself.” Kieran’s answer came back without a pause: “How else could you be?”
Emmaus
It is why, Goan said, Kieran chose the Emmaus story for the Gospel reading— the two disciples walking away from Jerusalem because it had all become too hard, and a stranger falling into step beside them to open the Scriptures until their hearts burned again. Kieran, he said, walked that road with so many people over the years, and set a good number of them free from tyrannical notions of God and from superstitious faith. All the while he was simply being true to his own humanity, in the light of what he believed, and living it to the full. Goan closed with “a poet of faith” T.S. Eliot — “we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time” — and a simple, warm send-off, Goan’s voice cracking with emotion: “enjoy this eternal now, and don’t forget the rest of us following behind, missing you.”
It is worth recalling that one of the key concerns of the laity in the original consultation of every diocese was for better homilies”
We hear so much about rights and wrongs of eulogies, but when done well they are moments of evangelisation. And it is fitting to point out that this one was delivered by someone with no collar, and no ordination to his name, but a scholar no less.
Synod
As we approach the National Synod in October, it is worth recalling that one of the key concerns of the laity in the original consultation of every diocese was for better homilies. People long for the Word to be broken open for them by those who have studied it and prayed with it. Properly educated, a layperson can open Scripture, hold a room, and preach the meaning of a life and a death with as much depth, than plenty of ordained voices manage from the same script. Sean Goan didn’t need to argue that case. He simply stood up and did it.
It is interesting that a priest who spent his last public words defending the idea that ministry belongs to the whole Church and not to the ordained alone was eulogised by a layman making exactly that argument, without once naming it as an argument at all. Kieran O’Mahony spent his life trying to convince people that the Word was theirs, not on loan from the sanctuary. At his own funeral, it turned out to be true — and the man proving it did so simply by knowing, better than most of us, how to arrive where the Gospel started and hear it for the first time. The National Synod should take note.