Do you know the first question we face when we go to meet God? After warmly welcoming us home, God asks: And how did you enjoy my world? When Sister Maureen McMahon reaches that encounter, in about twenty years’ time – after all she is only 90 – I have no doubt that she will say Thank you, Lord. It was brilliant.
The Messenger Office has published a collection of Maureen’s reflections on forty-five of the Irish paintings which she has featured in the Messenger for years past. Irish art with Reflections is a beautifully produced volume, and all through it you get a sense of how she relishes life in all its aspects. You are given access to Maureen’s heart; and as you know, the heart shows itself not in our jobs or our duties but in our joys. Art has always been one of Maureen’s joys. Her taste is catholic: from the abstractions of Gerard Dillon’s stones and Tony O’Malley’s Midsummer Window to the precision of Leo Whelan’s Fiddler or the classical landscape of James O’Connor.
In the suburb of Blackrock, in the city of Dublin, the Dominican sisters used to have a big house on Mount Merrion Avenue, just up the road from Sion Hill. Years ago, in one of the out-houses, Maureen started to gather a few friends who wanted to paint together, with Maureen as a guide to help them. They called their room the High Loft – I believe the title was chosen by Maureen herself – and it became the name of an art school which had to change location a couple of times, but which grew and grew. At one stage it was the biggest art school in the city.
Maureen taught generations of women and men to paint, which is largely a matter of training your eye and respecting your medium. Now we can profit from that same tuition. When the eye starts to see well, and the medium is mastered, the struggle starts, as the artist is troubled by a vision. In these reflections Maureen moves from a pithy and revealing word about the artist to the way that troubling vision develops and moves towards visual expression, in oils, pencil, pastel, watercolours, glass, wood or stone. Open her book and you see her comment on the left, and the art work on the opposite page. There is nothing obvious about her choice of picture. These are not the standard stuff of holy pictures. The black sun of Colin Middleton or Jack Yeats’s mysterious Men of Destiny, or William Orpen’s The Wash House point deeper, and Maureen is a quiet, gentle guide into their depths.
That is where the spiritual and the religious cannot be avoided. When we think about God, we commonly use language, or even, God help us, rules and laws to express the ineffable. In this book the search for God is in colour, light, movement and texture. Part of the Dominican mission is expressed in two Latin words: Contemplata tradere: to look at, and contemplate in depth, and then to pass on that vision to others. It was there in Fra Angelico’s frescoes in Florence, and you see it in Maureen’s volume.
So much of our spirituality has been passed on through language, the printed or spoken word. But God’s world surrounds us and fills us as infants before we can speak or understand a word; and it is still there to be seen and smelled at the end of our life when words start to fail us. Young children can teach us to contemplate, as they marvel at a bubble, the smell of a flower or a kitchen pot, the splash of a stone in water, the red of blood from a scratch on their skin, or a smile on a familiar face. We do not have to process everything through our minds, and through language. What we see and smell and touch can be equally a way to God. Children have an instinct for enjoyment. If their body is healthy and free, they can teach us. Manufacturers try to foist expensive “creative toys” on parents. But for young children, grass and water and thistledown, and the smells and sights around them, are more marvellous than man-made plastic objects.
There are many ways of learning to pray. One of them is to take this book slowly, read the reflection, and then linger on the painting. Maureen leads you in unexpected ways from the image to the spiritual. She reflects on Harry Kernoff’s painting of the Grand Canal near Baggot Street, Dublin: “Familiarity tends to dull the senses. Places lose their magic. People are taken for granted, and at times we even take God for granted. So let us look again at the familiar: the tree-lined streets of our cities, the rivers and streams, the creatures of the woodland and field, the birds of the air, the people with whom we live or meet daily in work or play, and see something of beauty and goodness. Open our eyes and our hearts to your love in the world, O Lord.”
Maureen did not make this volume alone. She acknowledges many of those who helped to make it. But one thank you is worth stressing. This gorgeous book is the first publication of this sort from the office of Messenger Publications, and is a reminder that the Sacred Heart Messenger is not only healthy at 120 years old, but is renewing its youth like the eagle’s, with a brilliant staff and (as the brewers of Carlsberg beer would say) probably the best set of writers in Dublin.
So when you have produced your €24 and opened your lovely book, do what God instructs us to do as we are launched into life: Enjoy!
Paul Andrews, S.J.