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 1,767 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.
And the novel keeps vision separate from virtue, which is the sharper point. Second sight runs down the maternal line — “Second sight has been in your family for years” — but it is a burden, not a moral credential. The one character who never sees a ghost and doubts the visions outright is the book’s moral center: “He saw goodness in me that I never felt.” The sighted narrator, by contrast, is complicit in theft and cruelty, tormenting an aunt and admitting “I wanted to get a rise out of her,” while the sighted mother is institutionalized as crazy. The gift skips the generation that feared it most, and it confers no authority. Virtue belongs to the unsighted, which is the novel’s quiet refusal to let the supernatural stand in for goodness. The novel is equally careful about what it will not prove. Its strongest corroboration is put in a hostile mouth — the rationalist aunt who concedes only that “Sean and I were the only people who knew about the pearls” — and the one piece of hard physical evidence, a severed finger, is destroyed by the witness himself. The narrator even borrows the sceptics’ line, “There’s a rational explanation for everything,” while a ghost stands in the room. So when the coda finally speaks in the present tense of doctrine, with the dead in the next room “whispering loveliness in our ears,” it arrives with no witness, no object, and no scene behind it. A book that spent four hundred pages supplying scratches, pocket watches, and pearls declines to supply anything at the end. The consolation is offered on the accumulated credit of what the reader has already granted, and the reader is left to decide whether it covers the claim.
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.
The Marian names in that novel are also dated, and the dating is the study’s newest finding on the book. Three feasts carry three turns: May 31, the Visitation, is the birthday of Molly’s mother, Maria, disclosed posthumously over a keepsake box holding a Sacred Heart locket and a statuette of the Blessed Mother; August 15, the Assumption, is the day Mrs. Muldoon seeks “a cure” in the sea and the date later found forged on her wedding photograph; October 17, the feast of Saint Margaret Mary, is the day a cab driver named Bea discloses Molly’s own devotional name and Molly walks into the water. The Assumption scene withholds the doctrine and performs it instead: the feast is completed when a seventeen-year-old lifts an old woman out of the surf — “Now raise me quickly, Molly, before the next wave… At last she rose from the sea” — and the novel’s last page repeats the motion with no one to lift her. The devotional reading and the forensic one arrive together, since the same widow is legally Margaret Mary and was in fact murdered, which is characteristic of this corpus: religious pattern survives the collapse of the narrator’s certainties rather than confirming them.
A second finding records an unnamed structural debt beside the Joyce parallel already noted. The classroom scene in which the student Mary Grace throws a book, attacks a boy named Leo Turpin, and tells the teacher “you’re no better than Turd, Ms. Bonamici” transposes Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation,” in which a girl of the same name hurls Human Development at Mrs. Turpin and calls her an “old wart hog”; O’Connor’s Wise Blood lies open on the student’s desk inside the borrowed scene. Mulhern moves the target from the antagonist to the narrator, who accepts the rebuke as true — “uttered a truth about me” — and the novel keeps O’Connor’s premise that grace can arrive as assault through a messenger no one admires. As with the Joyce finding, the allusion is structural rather than quoted, and it is logged as inference from the parallel rather than as an authorial statement.
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.
One further distinction keeps the claim honest. A religious writer in the critical sense — O’Connor, Greene, Hopkins — is a writer committed to a faith. Mulhern is not that writer. His work is religiously saturated but doctrinally withheld: every supernatural claim carries a rational alternative, usually in the protagonist’s own voice, and the presiding vocabulary is Transcendentalist, the Oversoul rather than God. The accurate label is writer of religious architecture — an imagination structured by Irish-Catholic and Transcendentalist imagery, using that material as form and allusion rather than as confession or apologetics. The revision history of the poems confirms the point from a different direction. Across the three states of the verse — the magazine texts, Family First, and Crossings — Mulhern repeatedly trims the abstract theological noun and keeps the embodied gesture. In “Brother Mike” the later text deletes “what we call the sacred,” “the words of your prayer,” and “the creed in your gesture,” and keeps only the sign itself: the brother “crossed yourself in the dashboard light,” then “traced the cross.” The revision polishes the ritual and cuts the sermon, which is exactly the disposition the whole corpus shows: the sacred lives in gesture, not in stated creed. The same division runs through the voices themselves. In the nonfiction essay “Teaching at Fifty-Six,” the adult professor can name the sacred and doubt it in the same breath — “a palpable energy (the Holy Spirit?)” — while the stories name it only through objects, a chalice or a cross handled but never defined. The essay says the word and qualifies it; the story shows the thing and says nothing. And the claim is a judgment the evidence supports, not a fact it proves: the concordance establishes that the recurrence is real and does interpretive work, but whether that recurrence is deliberate architecture or instinctive idiom is a question the text alone cannot settle. The author’s own testimony — most compactly, the line in the poems, “My family members are my prayers. My poems are my prayers” — bridges the gap, and it is consistent with everything the concordance finds. But it is testimony, not proof. The honest formulation is that the corpus strongly corroborates the philosophy; it does not definitively demonstrate it.
How rare is this allusiveness? Three measures rank it differently. By density — 1,767 catalogued passages, of which 1,070 are rated strong, in kitchen-sink realism rather than fragment-poetry — it is unusually dense. By range it is narrow but deep: scripture, liturgy, Catholic devotion, Irish and Italian folk-Catholicism, and a fixed canon of Joyce, Yeats, Dante, O’Connor, Dickinson, Emerson, Hopkins. By recurrence it is genuinely distinctive — the same images returning across three decades, the seawater cure, the mourning dove, “Up you go. On the count of three.” The honest comparison is to a tradition, not a single writer: within the Catholic line, O’Connor, Percy, Greene, and Hopkins; within the allusive modernists, Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Milton, Dante — all denser and wider-ranging, but none a single-tradition recurrence of this kind. What the study does not claim is a ranking; no one has measured allusiveness across writers this way. What it claims is that the density and the recurrence are real and documented — more than can be said for most writers, because most have not had it counted.
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.