Courtney McGrailThe Dark Night of the Shed
by Nick Page
(Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99)
Many of us have the wrong dreams, Nick Pages suggests. We don’t need a new Porsche, we need a new purpose.
His book is an attempt to come to terms with what our friends the psychologists call the “mid-life crisis”. That sense of incompleteness that assails many men in middle age. The years devoted to the company have somehow turned out to be slightly futile – especially when the company is taken over, turned into something else by its new owner and your position vanishes in restructuring.
Nick Page recommends a different kind of restructuring: building a shed. That is code for finding that new purpose – or indeed purposes – in life.
Echoes here of St John of the Cross and of St Thérèse of Lisieux, the recast in a style and language that reaches out to a modern person unfamiliar with their mystical profundities. Such a spiritual state afflicts many, though saints are more aware of its real nature.
Artists, too, are afflicted with a sense that the poem, or the painting, or the novel is not quite what was intended. Each is a failure of intention which masks from the artist what has been achieved. The artist finds the answer in trying again, trying something different.
And this is the basic message of this book. Don’t let life get you down. Stay with it. Just do something, perhaps something very different. An amusing book, but one with a profound message worth attending to.
Rest and Be Thankful: Autobiography of a Belfast Missionary
by Daniel Cummings C.Ss.R
(Colourpoint, £12.99)
Here is a message from the past. The author died in 1977, asking that this book which his niece had asked him to write should remain unpublished till now. This was in part because in his native town he had in later years lived through a difficult period as director of the Belfast Clonard Confraternity and its activities among non-Catholics in the city. This brought him into contact with a then young and very belligerent Ian Paisley.
However, the story had really opened back in 1922 when in his mid-teens he entered the Redemptorist College in Limerick. Eventually ordained at a time when the order was famous for their missions at home and abroad he threw himself into the work, which took him first to the Philippines and later still to Europe, where he followed the invading armies in 1944, and was a witness to the discovery of Belen.
Later in Ireland his work was more academic as a professor of Scripture in Galway and the prefect of the order’s church in Dundalk.
It was his then 10-year-old niece who asked him to write his life. The result is a most interesting document, filled with personal sidelights on historical events. One cannot really see why he could not have published the book when he wrote it, but it has lost none of its interest over the years.