Mary Kenny
Aidan Mathews. 
Fasting and Feasting: Radio Reflections on Christmas and Easter
by Aidan Mathews
(Veritas, €12.99)
The Archbishop of Dublin recently bemoaned the lack of lay Catholic intellectuals in Ireland. Well, this is the very moment to commend to Dr Martin the writings of Aidan Mathews, which combine a profound intellectual reach with an astonishing lyrical gift for describing, often in an elliptical way, the beauty that lies within faith.
Poet and playwright Mathews, a radio producer in drama and religion at RTÉ, is also one of the most uplifting and sensitive of Irish fiction writers today (his recent collection of short stories Charlie Chaplin’s Wishbone (Lilliput Press, €20.00) was wonderful), and he wears his religious – even, I would say, Jesuit and Loyolan – sensibility with delicacy, wit, nuance and style.
This collection of radio reflections for the high feasts and fasting times of the Christian year is rich in wisdom, information and reflection, and wide in its genuinely ecumenical sweep: Mathews is aware of the Hebrew roots of our faith, of its Greek dimension, of our connections to Eastern Orthodoxy and our links, too, with that other Abrahamic faith, Islam. He’s also not afraid of the sensual – that the incarnation does mean, after all, made flesh – and he is always alert to the fact that Christianity is for losers, or for those not afraid to be broken and wounded in the world’s eyes.
Interwoven in these often scholarly essays are vivid stories from his own life: St Francis of Assisi more or less invented the Christmas crib, but Aidan’s daughter, Lucy, charmingly added, to the Holy Family, Isaiah’s ox and ass: shepherds, kings, camels, cocks, hens, angels, mongrels, “and most recently, a pig”.
In the most subtle way, our author queries whether Pope Benedict was being just a little too Germanically literal when he declared that there was no historical evidence for the ox and the ass. The accretion of tradition sometimes has its own authenticity.
Insurrectionist
The author remembers the angels of his childhood as heavenly messenger-boys; recalls the great-uncle who was a chaplain on the Somme, and the other great-uncle who was a Republican insurrectionist; vividly captures his grandmother’s “disembowelled animal in a mink stole around her neck” – yet she mothered him and grand-mothered him, and “gave me faith in faith itself”.
He also writes touchingly of his mother as “an illegitimate child brought up in a happy orphanage by tireless Sisters of Charity, those single and secular women, who cherished her just as she cherished them”. He writes about his brother who took a thousand days to die from a brain tumour (he wrote a moving play about this, Communion, performed at the Abbey Theatre.)
He’s truly learned, and yet puts it over with the lightness of a soufflé, and a well-honed gift for the jeu des mots. He informs us about Cicero and religion, Ovid and René Girard, the life of St Joseph (there is a tradition that Joseph might have been a widower, with children already), dwells on the texts of Luke the gentile and John, so beloved by the Orthodox Church, and reveals the etymology of words – “hypocrite” merely means play-actor in Greek).
His observations are compassionate as well as wise: an alcoholic, he writes, is a disappointed mystic.
For those who are worriers, it may be a consolation to read that “only a psychopath has peace of mind”. We idolise children, he writes, “Because we’ve lost faith in being adults.” He has Chesterton’s knack of paradox: “Foretelling the future is a straightforward affair…Predicting the past, on the other hand, is a very complex undertaking.” Yes, we change the past constantly.
In his musings about Vatican II, he remembers, nostalgically, what we have lost of the old rituals, as well as what, astonishingly, we have gained. He eschews ideologies that become fanatical, and yet he defends what is faithful in faith. He chronicles the changes we have seen, and wraps them up in the rhythm of the year: the connection between the crib and the cross, the dying and the redemption, the Annunciation and the Passion.
This is stunning text to nourish faith with stubborn confidence that “the birth at Bethlehem did not just come to pass; it came to stay”.