Peter CostelloJohn Quinn will already be a familiar figure to many readers, from both his days with RTÉ, but also his previous publications including the popular Goodnight Ballivor, I’ll Sleep in Trim.
This new book is a collection of encounters with well known figures around the country in very different areas of life. They were asked to respond to his questions on their faith, their beliefs and the spiritual aspects of their life. To those who speak about a sad decline in belief, his interviews will be a revelation.
Now of course their experiences have given rise to a variety of outlooks. This is natural, indeed inevitable. The book opens with Fr Harry Bohan saying the God he believes in is the God of his childhood home. It ends with John Quinn himself admitting that his God is more depersonalised, more a presence rather than a person, but around this belief he has built a life of religious practice that sustains him.
Contrasts
These contrasts between the certainties of childhood or upbringing, and the doubts of a vague and unresolved kind engendered by the world around, in which for many God seems an alien presence, the 20 contributors explains their varied faiths.
People often talk casually of everyone singing from the same hymn sheet. But these days the choir of faith in the Catholic church is many voices singing different refrains, but some achieving a sense of harmony which arises from what they are trying in their different ways to given expression to.
Readers will find in this book such contrasting people as John Lonergan and David Norris, Breda O’Brien and Michael Coady – fresh, alive, vital and with a sense of purpose and hope.
John Quinn is to be commended on drawing out their professions of faith in the 21st Century which will enlighten in different ways all his readers.