Communion, in James Mulhern’s work, rarely arrives near an altar. It shows up instead in a classroom full of unconvinced teenagers, in a pelican wounding its own breast to feed its young, in a bald woman led by the hand into the sea, in a poem addressed to someone who can no longer read it. Mulhern names the sacrament directly only once, in the nonfiction essay “Teaching at Fifty-Six”: describing “a palpable energy (the Holy Spirit?)” moving through an ordinary lesson, he writes, “This is communion, and teaching will be the pond that I bathe in each morning, every new day.” Once named, the same structure becomes visible everywhere else in the corpus — a rite performed by unqualified, unreliable people, in rooms that have no business being holy, that turns out to be holy anyway.
The most doctrinally exact instance sits inside the story collection Give Them Unquiet Dreams, where a character explains the old bestiary emblem to a child: “A pelican is a symbol of Jesus… a mother pelican will wound herself, striking her breast with her beak to feed the babies.” This is not folklore invented for the scene. It is the medieval pelican-in-her-piety, a standard Eucharistic emblem carved into altar rails and stitched into vestments for centuries — a bird who feeds her young from her own wounded body, exactly as the Eucharist feeds the faithful from Christ’s. Mulhern hands this precise theology to a child as if it were merely a fact about birds, which is the same move he makes everywhere else: communion arrives disguised as something else, verified only on a second look.
“Assumptions” performs the same rite at the level of the family table, minus any of its dignity. Peggy Fleming — called “Lovely Peggy” as a joke, bald, poor, mocked at cards — is nonetheless taken by the hand and led into the ocean by the narrator’s mother: “Lovely Peggy reached for me… I gave her my hand and she rose from the sea. ‘Jimmy, you’re my angel,’ she said, and kissed me on the forehead.” No one in the scene is behaving especially well; the family has spent the whole day being casually cruel to the woman they are now, without ceremony, receiving into their circle. That is precisely the point the author makes explicit elsewhere, in the essay “Credo,” published on this site: “I believe in the narrow doorway — that nobody gets through it alone, that we are all helped along by someone else’s arm, and that this is not a diminishment of the journey but the entire point of it.” Communion, in this reading, is not a reward for good behavior. It is what happens when an imperfect hand reaches for another one anyway.
Mulhern states the underlying claim about who is eligible for the table even more plainly in the same essay: “I believe a book, a poem, or a classroom is a place where a person can be told, truthfully, for the first time: you are altogether beautiful, and there is no flaw in you.” That sentence — borrowed from the Song of Solomon and the Marian antiphon Tota Pulchra Es, and examined at length in the companion essay “Altogether Beautiful” — is communion’s actual content in Mulhern’s theology: not bread and wine administered by a priest, but a declaration of worth administered by whoever happens to be paying attention, in whatever ordinary room they happen to be standing in.
The poems extend the rite past the boundary of the living. In their front matter, Mulhern writes: “My family members are my prayers. My poems are my prayers. My family members are my poems.” The three clauses collapse three categories — the dead, the devotional, and the written — into a single act. To write a poem for a person now gone, in this account, is not a memorial gesture performed after communion has already ended. It is communion continuing by other means, the table simply extended to include an empty chair.
Read together, the pelican, the tide at Nantasket, the narrow doorway, and the poems written as prayers describe one consistent claim: that communion does not require a worthy minister, a consecrated space, or even a living recipient, only two parties — however unequal, however unprepared — willing to reach for each other across whatever separates them. Mulhern has said as much himself, without the critical apparatus, in the companion essay “Writing as Communion.” The classroom was the pond he said he bathed in every morning. The fiction and the poems, read this way, are the larger water that pond has always been quietly emptying into.