Faith & Spirituality in Review

God will take care of us all: A spirituality of Mary MacKillop, Pauline Wicks rsj, St Paul’s Publications, Strathfield, 2009, 144 pp, pb, rrp $24.95.

We have heard much of Mary MacKillop’s life over the last year as we have celebrated her beatification. It is good also to have a small book on her spirituality. Sr Pauline Wicks is a Josephite sister, and so has living connection with the spirit of Mary MacKillop. This little book is based on her university thesis on the topic. It bears the marks of its origins – full documentation and full seriousness, but also the evidence of deep and careful reading of Mary’s writings. That alone makes it worth reading by those who would like to explore a little more deeply the person within the events of Mary MacKillop’s life.

The book sums up her spirituality under headings that correspond to spiritual attitudes. The risk of this method, of course, is that saints can finish up looking like a chest of drawers full of virtues, carefully folded. They become systematic examples with their humanity catalogued out of them. But this book avoids this temptation, principally by the many telling quotations it offers from Mary MacKillop’s letter. She is always direct, occasionally tart and often amazingly forbearing given the nonsense she had to put up with.

In the face of malicious rumours spread about her and her supporters, she writes, ‘May God’s holy ends be worked out in all these sad things. They must sadly try the faith of many. But for God’s mercy mine would be in some serious things much shaken … I am in the hands of God—ready to suffer all he pleases—and as he pleases.’

These lines contain the heart of Mary MacKillop’s spirit. She has a deep and consistent faith that God is with her in her life, both realism about the damaging way in which people act and great forgiveness of them, and a vision of the cross at the heart of the Christian life and of her own life. Like all saints, she encourages us to reflect gently on our own lives.

Our Lady of Coogee: Eileen O’Connor and the founding of Sydney’s Brown Nurses, Mary O’Connell, Crossing Press, Darlinghurst, xxx pp, pb, rrp $xxx.

The life of Eileen O’Connor and the unlikely story of her central role in the founding of the Brown Nurses have attracted much interest. In the last twenty years Tom Boland, John Hosie, and now Mary O’Connell, have told her story.

It is easy to see the fascination of Eileen O’Connor’s life and work. That a young woman of 21, crippled and in pain from her earliest childhood and almost bedridden, should be the founding inspiration of a group dedicated to nursing the poor is remarkable enough. That her mission should ultimately come out of a vision of Mary when she was near to death, that it should be made possible through her deep friendship with a young priest, that the enterprise should lead to both being condemned by Archbishop and to the priest being excluded from his religious congregation, and that her practical as well as spiritual wisdom should help the group to survive, is the stuff of religious melodrama.

Mary O’Connell tells the story of this remarkable woman and of her work vividly. Her distinctive contribution to the studies of Eileen O’Connor lies in her interest in the symbolic structure of Catholic life, and particularly in the place given to women within it. She explores the roles within Irish Australian Catholicism that people could give to Eileen, and the tensions between these roles and the reality of her spirit. This is very helpful in understanding why Eileen was identified as the joyous young woman who had suffered much, and why people accepted easily that she had been given extraordinary religious experiences. She also fitted the part of the poor and innocent young woman destined to come into conflict with men who were naturally suspicious and uncomprehending.

Theories of symbolic structure can be quite helpful in illuminating aspects of Catholic reality that we might otherwise miss. They can also take on a life of their own, so that people are boxed in the costumes that theory prescribes. Although the overlay of theory in this life is heavy, it is a measure both of its value and of Eileen O’Connor’s quality that she, her achievements and her relationships finally remain mysterious and attractive.

Priesthood; A life open to Christ, Daniel P. Cronin, St Paul’s Publications, Strathfield, 2009, pb, rrp $27.95.

This little book for the year of the priest contains a number of very short reflections by a number of priests and bishops. It is a little like the collections of personal accounts, popular many years ago, which explained why people became Catholics. They offer many different perspectives.

Some of the contributions are written in strongly theological language. The most engaging I found described experiences where the writer’s experience of priesthood had come alive. But the diversity of the perspectives is itself interesting to reflect on because they hint at different styles of being a priest and a variety of conversations that priests have with themselves about their priesthood.

As always, Timothy Radcliffe, the English Dominican, has wise words. Reflecting on the leadership offered by priests he says, ‘perhaps in the universal ethos of the market, our leadership will be in daring to let fall the mask of competence, to face our own limitation and failure, and not be afraid of them. Leadership above all means taking the first step into vulnerability.’

As I read through the book, I began slowly to realise what was missing in it. It told many stories of what priesthood meant to priests. It left me wondering what priesthood in the church meant to the men and women for whom the priests were ordained.

Under the Huang Jiao Tree: Two Journeys in China, Jane Carswell, Transit Lounge Publishing, Yarraville, 2009, 272 pp, pb, rrp $29.95.

When we travel, says Jane Carswell, not only do we make the physical journey, we also make an interior one: our minds, our lives are changed. A teacher of music, she was encouraged by her husband to visit China. After a brief and beguiling visit to Beijing, opportunity later arose to do a year’s teaching of English in a foreign language school in Chongqing, a city in the south-west of the country. The book is an account of that year.

While a music teacher in Christchurch, Jane had a number of Chinese children among her students, and she found herself treasuring ‘the bright red patches on my teaching timetable’. Something about the Chinese spirit drew her, and this was at the heart of her inner journey. Living away from family and friends exposed an inner unease and longing. The simplicity amidst poverty of so much of living in China had an unsettling appeal.

A visit to New Zealand from Benedictine Lawrence Freeman, head of the World Movement for Christian Meditation, revealed to Jane a new way of praying and thinking, and prompted a move into the Catholic Church, to the discipline of meditation, to the Benedictine Way, and to following Benedict’s Rule as a Benedictine oblate.

Jane tried to explore what it was that drew her to China: ‘I wondered if my passion could possibly be Christ … what else but a passion can you call a hero who won’t go away? … What name can you give to the point at which your dreams converge and are held, and what to a light that spills more glory than you can bear to look at? … I don’t know exactly who Christ was and is, but I know he’s connected to the truth about us.’