One recurring approach in James Mulhern’s work is more specific than the claim that the sacred is merely hidden in ordinary things. A concordance of 1,295 catalogued passages traces associations across the fiction, poems, and online work: a plain domestic action remains plain, yet may press against a second vocabulary drawn from scripture, liturgy, folk Catholicism, art, and song. The result is not a code in which every object has one fixed answer, but an ordinary world whose objects invite more than one form of notice.
“Assumptions” is the clearest instance. Its epigraph, “You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you,” is not simply a love-poem quotation from the Song of Solomon. In the story’s liturgical setting it is Tota Pulchra Es, the Marian antiphon proper to the Feast of the Assumption, the very day on which the action takes place. The word macula, stain, makes the first close description of Peggy’s sleeves — marked with spilled juice — more than incidental detail. The story places a feast-day promise of unstained beauty against a body already exposed to mockery, illness, dependence, and death.
That pressure does not turn the story into a disguised Mass, Rosary, Stations, or novena. Recent formal work has tested each of those analogies and found that none governs the narrative as a whole. The story’s memories leap across years; the dove, rising, doctrine, and crown arrive in non-devotional order; the adult’s learned explanations interrupt rather than arrange the child’s experience. What endures is a local, cumulative pattern: washing, anointing, carrying, covering, feeding, helping, and remembering are allowed to suggest sacred forms without being stripped of their practical, awkward, or comic reality.
This is why the grandmother’s care matters more than a claim that she is covertly administering a sacrament. Helen can be loving and cruel in the same exchange; Peggy receives assistance and also protects the children; a failed physical cure still yields laughter, touch, and a hand extended in the water. The work’s recurring question is not whether a domestic action can be certified as holy. It is whether dignity can survive when no one involved is fully worthy, competent, or kind.
The pattern travels. In Useless Things and Other Stories, bathing, lifting, rubbing ointment into a heel, feeding, making a safe path, phoning, and asking another person to speak form the book’s actual care catalogue. The collection makes no lasting cure out of them. Attention creates value; it does not reverse decline. In The Weight of Small Mercies, women perform much of the practical ministry, yet ordained men still bless, heal, read scripture, and lead acclamation. The distinction is not between a female Church and an absent male one, but between ceremonial authority and the continuing work of carrying a family.
The newer reading of Give Them Unquiet Dreams adds another restraint. Its dead are not purgatorial souls waiting to be released, and its danger is not a Christian demon. Second sight is hereditary, the dead return under rules of kinship and unfinished relation, and the hostile force is the Irish folk pooka. Catholic consolation and Irish folk belief coexist without being collapsed into one system.
Mulhern’s own classroom essay gives the method its plainest statement. In “Teaching at Fifty-Six,” he names “a sacred self” and calls teaching “communion.” The phrase does not make the classroom an altar. It makes attention to another person’s interior life a serious, daily practice. The fiction and poems make the same claim in more oblique forms: the sacred does not wait for good conditions, and it does not remove the shabby conditions in which it appears.
One paratext states this inheritance more directly than the stories do. Crossings, published by Silver Current Press, carries a dedication to a woman remembered by four things: “your crooked toes from shoes / passed house to house, / your rosary and Daily Missal / that sit on my desk, / your accord with all that life brought, / your devotion to God.” The sequence places poverty, devotional objects, temperament, and belief together — and locates the rosary and missal not in a church but on a writer’s desk. The lines offer a compact image of devotion inherited as an object, kept where work happens, and honored through attention rather than assent.
The objects behave the same way, and a collection named for useless things is the place to test it. Nothing in these stories is holy on its own account. A piano in a basement makes grief audible; a photograph invites a hand to it, and the age spots on the fingers touching the glass belong to the image as much as the face does; a mint from a handbag consoles for as long as a mint can. What these things have in common is not sanctity but relation. Set against them is a shop where chalices, crystals, tarot cards, prayer flags and jewelry sit in one display case as interchangeable stock — devotion arranged for sale, with kneeling and gifting and careful placement all present and no one served by any of it. The difference is not the objects. It is whether anybody is on the other end of them.
One photograph gets told twice, which is the clearest evidence the object itself carries nothing until someone reaches for it. A prose story in the collection opens with a grandmother caught mid-visit: “My grandmother quickly hid her donut behind an old photograph.” A poem elsewhere in the same book returns to the identical afternoon, opening on the identical gesture: “When we arrived, you hid the donut behind the picture.” Same photograph, same hiding, same grandmother — narrated once in dialogue-driven prose and once in address-based verse. Nothing about the photograph changes between the two tellings except the distance the writing keeps from it. The object stays a photograph in both. What differs is only how closely the writer stands next to the person holding it.
The stories are also unsentimental about what cannot be recovered, which is part of why the sacramental reading holds elsewhere. Spoiled cream goes down the sink. Meatloaf on a floor stays meatloaf. A smashed vending machine and the sweets left scattered around it are not redeemed by anyone noticing them, and an empty pill bottle beside the space where a photograph hung offers residue rather than revelation. A Christmas tree sold as an heirloom cannot supply the descendants it was meant for, and ornaments taken from a house are theft rather than salvage. Very little here is resurrected. What the collection does insist on is smaller and harder: a woman squatting to pick up broken glass in a corridor, a man clearing a windshield before he apologises. The body of another person is the one thing the stories will not let be treated as disposable.