Fr Michael McCarthy.
Michael McCarthy was an Irish born poet-priest whose compassionate and humane vision is a moving witness to the gifts wrought by love. Many of his poems reflect a profound pastoral sensibility and his awareness of ‘the small miracles that transform life’ in the daily round of visiting the sick and burying the dead. Anglican priest and author Dr Sarah Bachelard* reflects on how his poetry, his pastoral ministry and ability to see God in the fabric of the world and ordinary lives, has nourished her own faith and ministry.
Michael McCarthy’s poem, ‘In Memoriam’, seems a fitting introduction to him:
In Memoriam
Let’s say the year is twenty-one-sixteen.
The headstone says I died in twenty-thirty-six.
Though I’ve been dead these eighty years
I’m pleased to see I lived to ninety one.
The graveyard perched
above an S of sea where boats can rest
along a lonely curve of shore
where tourists no longer come.
Beneath my name: the dates of birth and death,
some long-forgotten lines I haven’t written yet.
Beside my grave a grass-grown gravel path
unused except by fishermen at night.
I see a woman, pushing back the grass.
She’s twenty-five or so.
Research for her PhD, her subject:
Forgotten Irish Poets.
She found some poems of mine on micro-disk
buried in the archives of a library
in Edmonton Alberta, where
I was almost famous once.
She stands among small raindrops
as I once stood
in the graveyard at Drumcliff.
She weeps as I wept over Yeats.
A strand of hair clings to her face.
A briar sways in unnoticed wind.
Far below the waves say hush.
Close by a blackbird sings.
In the poem, set in the year 2116, he imagines himself long dead – these eighty years. By then, he is a ‘Forgotten Irish Poet’ though he dares to hope that a young PhD student might one day be interested in his work – he who ‘was almost famous once’.
A Roman Catholic priest who lived and worked for most of his ministry in England, McCarthy depicts his final resting place as deserted and easy to miss, ‘a lonely curve of shore where tourists no longer come’, and beside his grave ‘a grass-grown gravel path unused except by fishermen at night’. It is a lonely or at least solitary image, yet it doesn’t seem to me necessarily desolate. It’s more as if McCarthy imagines himself humbly and peaceably returned to the elements and the earth, perhaps to the Ireland of his birth.
The unknown woman weeps by his grave as he himself had long ago wept for another dead poet, the generations following each other, while ‘a briar sways in unnoticed wind. Far below the waves say hush. Close by a blackbird sings.’
And probably he’s right about this imagined future. Although his books of poetry have won prizes and novelist Hilary Mantel nominated his 2015 collection, The Healing Station, as one of her books of the year, Michael McCarthy is unlikely to become a literary celebrity, nor his grave a site of pilgrimage.
I wouldn’t have come to know of him myself except that in 2006 he spent a few months as writer in residence at St Mark’s Theological College in Canberra, leading the faculty in a retreat and sharing his poetry and wisdom among us. In person, I remember him as he appears in print – down to earth, with a self-deprecating sense of humour; a gentle soul with compassionate insight into the human condition. Alas, he did not achieve his imagined 91 years. He died in 2018, aged only 73 (b. 1945).
The poems of Michael McCarthy I know and love best come from his collection Birds’ Nests & Other Poems, published in 2003.[1] This collection includes several striking poems on biblical themes, including a sequence about Moses called ‘Not Written On Stone’, as well as others inspired by the stories of the Annunciation and Visitation, and others which draw on memories from his childhood.
In many of them he attends to intimations of the divine in birds, stones and light. His poems are often austere – refusing sentimentality. Like these opening lines, for example, from a poem titled ‘Beatitudes’, which imagines the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount like this:
It was after the silence, some small crack opened in the rock.
His words: a scattering of feathers first, then
birds let loose below the high cliffs.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit”, he said, “for they will have
the smells of the earth in their bones, will care
with a tallness not known to armies.
And yet, for all their austerity, McCarthy’s poems don’t express the wrestling with God, the dramatic agonies of doubt, found in the work of other poet-priests like R. S. Thomas who circled endlessly around themes of God’s silence and absence, or Gerard Manley Hopkins facing the ‘cliffs’ in his own mind, or John Donne calling on the ‘three-personn’d God’ to ‘Batter my heart’. I don’t get the sense, for McCarthy, that he struggled with faith. Rather, it’s as if God were simply part of his awareness of the fabric of the world, the fabric of ordinary lives.
Some of the poems I appreciate most are ones that emerge from his pastoral ministry. I find these a source of nourishment in my own priestly vocation, and I’d like to share three. The first is a poem called ‘Sufferings’.
Sufferings
I talked sedately
about love: how the grass
grows in the freedom
of God’s forever
how each name is
sung, sweet
as the blackbird you heard
before the early worm
and how every hurted thing
is made into
the image of a king.
Afterwards, he caught me like the sweep of a scythe; said
I never mentioned the other side, never a word
about the sufferings of Christ. His rr’s rolled
in a great skirl, leaving shivers
resonant in the air.
I saw what he meant
as my sermon lay dying. There
cloudless as lace, despair bunched
on his daughters’ shoulders
the sufferings of Christ
on his wife’s face.
I think this is an extraordinarily powerful poem. It evokes the terrible hardness and barely suppressed violence of the man, the hellish entrapment of the women under his rod. It captures too the preacher’s vulnerability and inadequacy, the distance he fails to cross in his words. ‘I talked sedately about love’, says McCarthy, repeating perhaps a little tiredly, perhaps a little sentimentally, well-worn truths. As preacher, he shares what he thinks he knows, what he sincerely believes, and yet the scything words of this parishioner cut him and his words to shreds, ‘as my sermon lay dying’.
What McCarthy manages to show, I think, is that although there had been nothing overtly wrong with his theology, his words had been insufficient for addressing the tragedy of the world. They lacked the aliveness and power to speak in a converting way to the angry self-righteousness of this man with his great skirl of rolling ‘rr’s’. Lacked too the aliveness and power to make real for these despairing women the love of God to which he had testified.
McCarthy, in this poem, allows judgement to befall him. And in doing so, ironically, he does speak of what the man has accused him of avoiding, ‘the other side’ of our life in the world, the suffering of the innocent, the suffering of Christ.
This is another poem about suffering – evoked by a pastoral visit.
Scarthingwell Park
Still recovering from last week’s fall
Molly’s forehead is an autumn coloured bruise.
Would you like communion? Yes, please.
What day is it?
- hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come
- give us this day our daily bread
I forget what age I am
I was born in 1882, I think
how old would that be?
Is this Oxfordshire?
My son is in the navy.
That’s him over there
and that’s my grandson’s wedding.
Have you met my family?
What day is it?
Outside, on the lake,
three Canada geese diverge
leaving separate silver wakes.
In the narrow lane the last leaves fall.
It’s Friday.
I find this poem almost unbearably poignant. There’s the evocation, familiar to anyone who visits in nursing homes and dementia units, of Molly’s vulnerability and confusion, her receding connection with her personal history, family life and the busy world, and the pathos of her attempts to orient herself in time. Fragments of her old life remain – the photos, the words of prayer – but the season is decisively turning to winter and departure. The bruise on Molly’s forehead is autumn coloured, the geese are migrating, the last leaves falling in the narrow lane.
And yet, there’s a hint of divine presence abiding, even here. In Celtic spirituality, the goose symbolises the Holy Spirit – here the presence of three geese diverging on the lake, leaving separate silver wakes speaks to me of the Trinity, while the poem suggests that all Molly suffers, she suffers in and with Christ. ‘What day is it?’ ‘It’s Friday’.
St Benedict wanted his monks to chant the whole Psalter every week, so that their way of seeing and imagining the world would be saturated by the vision of God, so they would come to know all things theologically. It seems to me this is how Michael McCarthy knows too. Where a casual visitor might see only a frail and dementing old woman coming to the end of things in Scarthingwell Park nursing home, McCarthy sees her sufferings drawn into the suffering of Christ and he suffers with her. He has compassion.
The final poem I’d like to share is called ‘After the Wedding’. This is also the last poem in the Birds’ Nest collection.
After the Wedding
I leave the revellers at midnight.
Southbound on the M6 the phone rings
and before answering it, I know.
At 9.30pm tonight my mother died.
The car cruises, the curve of the wipers
responding to sporadic showers.
My engines have shut down.
Dull at the edges, raw in the centre
I can feel my toes tingle.
Yesterday she sat out in the sun.
I wait an hour, then call you.
I hear the texture of your voice
as you retell each moment slowly.
This morning she said to you, “I’m dying”
and you asked “are you afraid?”
She told you she was not.
After the priest had come and blessed her
with the final rites, the day went quietly.
She slept a little now and then.
In the evening she told Ita she was going.
“Maybe I’ll wait until the morning”.
In the event she didn’t.
At 93 years, and conscious to the last
her breathing stopped. I ask about
distress. You say there was none.
Arriving home at 3.00am, there are
nine messages on my Ansaphone.
I don’t need to answer them.
I check the Internet for flights, then walk outside.
In a while I hear the first birds sing.
Memories begin.
At one level, this is a simple prose poem – an account of McCarthy’s mother’s final day, his conversation with someone (I imagine a sister), his preparation to fly home. At another level, it seems to me this poem speaks of the loneliness inherent in priesthood, especially Catholic priesthood.
He’s been officiating (I assume) at a wedding, stayed on at the party for a while, but left to go home on his own. He’s performed his public role at private cost, and now, alone, he receives the news he’s been expecting, drives through the night ‘dull at the edges, raw at the centre’, arrives to an empty house and a flickering answering machine.
And in all this, I seem to hear the faint echo of another mother and son, another wedding. At Cana, Jesus too is not a participant like all the other guests; he too ends the day exposed, led by his mother into a different space to face a new and more vulnerable future.
And whether or not this allusion was intended by Michael McCarthy, it speaks to what I have found so nourishing in these poems sourced in his pastoral ministry. A priest is called in the midst of daily life and ordinary suffering to mediate the presence of the divine. Mostly it doesn’t look dramatic – it’s preaching the weekly sermon, visiting the sick, marrying, baptising and burying the dead. But these poems, without drama or resentment, remind me that it takes something to keep inhabiting this place and this faith, to be this exposed. To mediate the reality of God for others costs something.
It is also the most extraordinary privilege imaginable. I took the title for this talk from McCarthy’s words at the front of this collection – a collection he dedicated ‘in memory of my mother’. He wrote: ‘The small miracles that transform life are offered almost by accident. I give thanks for those whose happening upon me made poetry possible’.
I do not know where Michael McCarthy is buried, whether he is laid to rest ‘above a lonely curve of shore’ by an overgrown path, back home in Ireland. But I am glad to remember him with you, to attend through his eyes to the small miracles that transform, and to hope that the compassion of his vision and the fidelity of his life may nourish you as well.
Dr Sarah Bachelard is the founder of Benedictus Contemplative Church in Canberra, Australia. See: https://benedictus.com.au/
She is a theologian, retreat leader and a teacher in the World Community for Christian Meditation, and she has led retreats and taught contemplative prayer nationally and internationally. She is also the author of Experiencing God in a Time of Crisis, Resurrection and Moral Imagination, A Contemplative Christianity for Our Time, and Poetica Divina: Poems to Redeem a Prose World.
This article is a slightly edited version of a talk she gave at The Well on 29 June. See the recording here (use Passcode: X%Cy*M8@):
The Well provides an online opportunity to drink deeply from the Well of Living Water offered by the mystics and poets. These online Sunday night sessions consist of a reading, a 20-minute meditation, and a talk in which the speaker reflects on how a mystic or poet has been life-giving, a source of Living Water, in their lives.
The next talk at The Well will be on Sunday 12 October at 7.30pm via zoom, and will be given by Frances Mackay on the poet Christian Wyman. For more details and the zoom link, see: https://www.thelivingwater.com.au/events
Footnotes
[1] Michael McCarthy, Birds’ Nests & Other Poems (Cork, Ireland: Bradshaw Books, 2003).