The Case in Brief
The religious architecture of James Mulhern’s work can be described with some precision. A line-by-line concordance across two novels, three story collections, the poems, and twenty-eight verified online publications has catalogued 1,295 passages, of varying relevance. The point of the count is not to turn reading into arithmetic. It is to establish that the Catholic, folk-Catholic, biblical, liturgical, and literary material is neither an occasional mood nor an inherited prop. It is a recurrent compositional resource, differently handled from book to book.
The method is usually quiet. A loaded noun sits inside a plain sentence; domestic action carries an older ritual or scriptural pressure without ceasing to be domestic action. Suntan oil can recall anointing, a towel can recall a mantle, a shaken hand can recall blessing, and a work of care can retain its practical meaning while acquiring a second register. The recurrent effect is not allegory with its labels attached. It is a realist surface that permits more than one kind of attention.
The Story: “Assumptions”
“Assumptions” remains the keystone text because its title, day, epigraph, and ending are placed in unusually close relation. The action occurs on August 15, the Feast of the Assumption. Its epigraph, Tota pulchra es, amica mea, et macula non est in te, is not simply a line of love poetry borrowed from the Song of Solomon. It is the Marian antiphon Tota Pulchra Es, proper to the feast the story occupies. Its crucial word is macula: stain. The red stains at the ends of Peggy’s sleeves therefore answer a liturgical promise of unstained beauty before the plot has begun to explain itself.
The adult narrator places dogma, art, and childhood memory beside one another rather than fusing them into a single voice. The movement from the child’s search for “flying Mary’s” to the later account of Pius XII’s definition is explicit; the return from Titian to the prospect of a roller coaster is deliberately bathetic. That doubleness is a formal resource. A private remembered life is allowed to bear the pressure of public doctrine without being reduced to an illustration of it.
What the story’s form does — and does not do
The newer formal work makes one important correction. The story does not sustain the Order of Mass, the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary, the Stations of the Cross, or a novena as a governing macro-form. Those frameworks supply local vocabulary and useful analogies, but the narrative arranges their elements out of sequence and moves by irregular memory-blocks. The beach scene may gather images of water, rising, food, and service; it does not become a disguised liturgy.
The closest formal analogue is instead a qualified saint’s life: origin, humiliation, hidden charity, death, and retrospective glorification. Even that description must be modest. There is no cult, relic, shrine, or public petition. The story’s canonization is literary and private, performed by a remembering witness. Its most exact structural supports are the braided time frames, the repeated verbs of remembering and helping, the recurrent laughter, and the final shift into a present tense in which Peggy “rises” again.
Patterns across the books
The concordance confirms recurring material without making every recurrence an identity claim. The Assumption feast, the sea cure, the wet silvery scalp, the dove, the chalice, the phrase “Up you go. On the count of three,” and the vocabulary of goodness and uselessness return as altered situations. Across the collections, recurrence works through doubling and revision: a later scene changes the moral pressure of an earlier one rather than merely repeating it.
The Weight of Small Mercies provides the clearest corrective to a romantic account of this system. Its practical ministry falls chiefly to women and families: they intercede, touch, wash, anoint, transport, feed, protect, and keep silence for the vulnerable. But ordained men are not absent. They bless, heal, read scripture, and lead acclamation. Their ceremonial functions simply do not bear the pastoral weight that the household carries, and the book refuses to treat any cure — clerical, medical, charismatic, or domestic — as complete.
Give Them Unquiet Dreams supplies a second necessary limit. It takes Catholic consolation, prayer for the dead, and communion across death seriously, but its ghosts are not purgatorial souls awaiting Masses or release. Second sight is hereditary; the good dead return to complete relational work; and the hostile presence is the Irish folk pooka, not a Christian demonology. The book borrows religious language without allowing that language to flatten its folk otherworld.
Molly Bonamici makes the same layered practice visible in names. Molly is a nickname joining Margaret and Mary, so she carries Mrs. Muldoon’s Margaret Mary Alacoque association from the first page; Bonamici means “good friends,” an irony the novel places inside a damaged family. Its final chapter draws Dantean, Marian, and domestic material together without making belief a simple reward for good conduct.
What It Amounts To
The poems test the same system in miniature, and they answer differently than the prose. They do not inherit religious form: the verse is free, governed by syntax and breath rather than by the hymnal metres, and where a poem looks devotional it usually declines the actual shape — no invocation, no petition, no doxology. What survives is analogical. A catalogue of animals behaves like a creation litany; a repeated word of care behaves like an invocation; a commendation of a student carries a benediction’s cadence while blessing no one in particular. The endings make the argument plainest, closing on a small action, a sentence-stop, or a question rather than on assurance. Hope in the poems is a matter of restraint, not of doctrine.
The selection made for Crossings: Selected Poems sharpens that reading, because choosing twenty poems out of a larger manuscript is itself an argument. The most explicitly Passion-imaged poem in the manuscript did not survive the cut — the one that asks of a woman wiping a face, “What does Jesus say to her? / Thank you, I suppose,” where the iconography of Veronica is named almost to the point of caption. What was kept is quieter and more domestic: a poem in which the whole of grief and service arrives in two lines of overheard speech, “My father’s dead. / Can you shine my shoes?” The pattern of the cutting is not secularization. It is the removal of the most legible religious picture in favour of the gesture that carries the same weight without announcing it — which is the same instinct, exercised at the level of the table of contents rather than the sentence.
A word about where this body of work physically lives, since it bears on any future reading of it. Twenty-eight of these pieces were published by small literary magazines, and that archive is materially fragile. All the core pages remain reachable, and two of the longest-standing — “Assumptions” at Fiction on the Web and “Blindfolded” at The Writing Disorder — carry religious and supernatural content word for word identical to their earliest archived snapshots, which is reassuring about editorial stability. But three pieces have no archived snapshot anywhere: “A Crystal Wolf” at Impspired, the five-poem set at Academy of the Heart and Mind, and the original BoomerLitMag printing of “The Wrong Way.” Two of the venues that hold this work show no sign of active publishing since 2021 and 2017 respectively. The two new Silver Current Press volumes matter partly for this reason: gathering scattered magazine pieces into books moves them out of reach of a lapsed domain.
A more modest conclusion is neither that the work is a devotional tract nor that every object has one correct key. Mulhern’s books make religious language answerable to bodies, failed cures, ugly rooms, compromised caretakers, and forms of attention that do not secure salvation. The sacred is structural because it repeatedly changes the terms in which a damaged life is seen; it is not a mechanism for cancelling damage.
That is why the Assumption remains central. The Marian antiphon is not used to deny Peggy’s stains, sickness, dependency, or death. It creates a pressure under which the narrative asks what it would mean to speak beauty of a body already judged otherwise. The answer is not catharsis, which purges. It is a literary act of attention that refuses to let the last word belong to contempt.