Shouldering the Lamb: Reflections on an Icon
by Richard Clarke (Dominican Publications, €12.00)
This is the second book of Dr Richard Clarke, the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh. It has already won praise from his episcopal neighbour, Archbishop Éamon Martin. Taking the almost universal image of Christ as a shepherd carrying a lamb to safety around his shoulders, originally derived from ancient art, he reflects on aspects of a common Christian faith. It consists of 12 chapters, which are really a set of reflective essays.
Dr Clarke brings to the essays not only feelings informed by his own long years of pastoral work, but also (which is less common) an intense interest in poetry and literature. He draws on both poems and novels, for examples of insight beyond the ordinary, to aid both himself and his readers.
He quotes in the preface from that stern Welsh Anglican R. S. Thomas, a priest of the small Church of Wales, admired as a granite-like fixture of modern English poetry. The first two essays, going further, deal with the image of the pastor in Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos and Anglican poet George Herbert.
This makes for a multi-faceted book, filled with striking passages. While the service of a pastor is the theme of the book, it is intended for the lambs. In its gently expressed way it is a call to a deepening sense of prayer, to enter into what he alludes to as “the silence of God”. He admits to the difficulties of life and faith, but provides in those moments of bleakness common to all, a sense of peace.
So You Can’t Forgive: Moving Towards Freedom
by Brian Lennon SJ (Messenger Publications, €8.95)
In writing his new book, which deals with what is for very many people, a very difficult matter, Fr Lennon draws on his experiences over three decades of life in Northern Ireland. He was greatly involved in the search for peace – a peace which has brought relief and a sense of hope to many, but has left others, especially the families of victims, burdened. They feel that they can simply never forgive what was inflicted on them, that some things are unforgiveable.
This is a book, as he explains, that is focussed not on forgiveness, but on forgiving. The person he has in mind is not the person who has inflicted the pain and harm, but those persons who have been hurt and harmed. In Ireland we are often called upon to “forget the past”. This is not possible, but we can move beyond it to seek a future. Brooding harms ourselves, harms our relations with those we love, and harms our relations with others in general.
This is indeed a difficult area, but Brian Lennon’s chapters will be intensely valuable, not only in a political context of civil violence, but also in those other more social, more domestic areas of life, where there is present an urgent a need to forgive so as to live again, for ourselves and for society as a whole.