Preface

In the etymological connection between the words "heal" and "whole," we encounter an example of the wisdom embedded in language. If healing is to make whole again, to make "free of wound or injury" in the Merriam Webster definition, then in our suffering, in our woundedness or vulnerability, we can seek the path leading to a wholeness in which we know ourselves to be healed. The Catholic tradition knows such a path well and illuminates such a path by exploring the meaning of suffering and by studying and contemplating the revealed image of human wholeness in the unique form of the incarnate God. The necessary link between healing and wholeness presents us with a constellation of themes appearing in countless forms in the Catholic intellectual and artistic traditions.

This connection between healing and wholeness crystallized for me while reading These Black Stars ,a new collection of poems by Paul Murray, a Dominican priest born in Ireland and now teaching in Rome.¹ Murray indicates the source of the title in an epigraph to his book from Iris Murdoch: "There are times of suffering which remain in our lives like black absolutes, and are not blotted out. Fortunate are those for whom these black stars shed some sort of light." This quotation is from Murdoch's 1973 novel, The Black Prince , and an exploration of the context brings out the grim, unflinching encounter with suffering from which such words emerge. The novel's narrator in the paragraph preceding the passage used by Murray declares, "The world is perhaps ultimately to be defined as a place of suffering," and goes on to enumerate such suffering in a manner calculated to make us feel its oppressive weight: "This is the planet where cancer reigns, where people regularly and automatically and almost without comment die like flies from floods and famine and disease, where people fight each other with hideous weapons to whose effects even nightmares cannot do justice, where men terrify and torture each other and spend whole lifetimes telling lies out of fear. This is where we live."² Black stars indeed.

Murdoch's narrator speaks of it being "fortunate" when dark suffering emits its strange illumination. Murray's poems, however, turn away from fortune, and a careful reading of the poems would call for a significant transformation of the thought expressed in the epigraph: blessed are those who find light in suffering. This transformation is not accomplished by turning away from the stunning face of suffering in our lives and in the world around us. The poems guide us through the perplexity and danger of suffering, noting moments of unexpected encounters with the seeds of grace in such suffering but also refusing to explain suffering away. This is seen in "Lines for Natasha," in which the speaker, in mourning the death of Natasha, rejects easy consolation:

I will not shape out of loss or try to name the meaning of that hour which had no exit. I will make no pact with your death.

In other poems, such as "In the Making," suffering emanates from the lack of wholeness we experience in ourselves, "from that hurt void you feel / after actual loss," and the vocabulary of brokenness accumulates: "mere absence," "lack," "need." This opening poem in the volume prepares us for the Christian vision of suffering (and of the corresponding vision of human wholeness) in its first words: it is "the gift" that emerges from such suffering.The gentle music of the poem guides us through the encounter with suffering to the recognition that the gift we receive comes to us from a giver, from a Creator, and is for us "like a new Eve emerging." Surely, on one level, this poem marks the poet's celebration of the gift of poetry and hints to us the collection itself gives witness to the quickening power of the spirit within us, the poems marking an awareness of the Holy Spirit at work within our lives beyond our full awareness.

Many of the poems in part one of the collection carry the reader down the path of suffering leading to a surprising encounter...