The Religious Architecture of the Work

The Case in Brief

James Mulhern is a religious writer. Not a writer who occasionally uses religious imagery, and not a lapsed Catholic who cannot quite shake the furniture of his childhood, but a writer whose entire corpus — story collections, two novels, a full book of poems, and two decades of magazine publication — is built on a Catholic substructure that is continuous, deliberate, and almost never announced. This study makes that case as plainly as the evidence allows.

The substructure works by a consistent method. Mulhern almost never writes a symbolic sentence; he writes a plain sentence containing a loaded noun. A crown of thorns becomes “a laurel of peach fuzz.” Stigmata become spilled juice. A chrism becomes tanning oil. A shroud becomes a housedress. An entombment becomes a wig folded into a paper bag. In every case a realist explanation sits in the very same clause that carries the sacred one, so the reader can never quite convict the story of allegory — and yet the sacred reading, once seen, cannot be unseen. This is not decoration. It is architecture: a working theology of judgment converted, image by image, into a working theology of mercy. Hellfire becomes light on water. The stone raised to throw becomes the stone laid at a burial. The Cross becomes a Father’s crossed arms mid-embrace.

The evidence for this claim is not impressionistic. It is more than seven hundred individually verified passages, drawn from three story collections, two novels — Give Them Unquiet Dreams and Molly Bonamici — the complete poems, and independently confirmed pieces published in literary journals over the past decade. Each entry was checked against the primary text, quoted verbatim, and rated for how explicit its religious content is. This study presents the strongest of them: the fullest reading of the keystone story “Assumptions,” a curated selection of the single best-attested passages from across the whole body of work, and a condensed statement of what the pattern, taken as a whole, amounts to.

The through-line, feast to feast and book to book, is the Feast of the Assumption of Mary — the 1950 dogma that her body, “having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” Mulhern’s recurring cast of bald, aging, dying, or discarded women are given, again and again, their own small assumptions: a suicide on the feast day itself, a swim that becomes a rising, a scalp anointed with tanning oil that “shone like a miniature sun.” The argument, compressed here, is that this is not incidental imagery borrowed for texture. It is a whole religious grammar, used with discipline for thirty years, brought finally into the open only at the ends of things — a swim, a deathbed, a last paragraph — where the story has earned the right to say plainly what it spent five thousand words saying obliquely.

None of this requires the reader to share Mulhern’s faith, or even to know it is there. The stories work first as stories — a bald woman is loved, a family argues, a con artist dies — and only on a second look does the architecture beneath them become visible. That is itself a kind of evidence: a substructure this disciplined, this consistently deployed across thirty years and every form a writer can work in, does not happen by accident of upbringing. It happens because a writer decided, early and permanently, that the sacred belongs inside the ordinary sentence rather than announced above it.

The Story: “Assumptions”

“Assumptions” is Mulhern’s keystone text, and its title does triple work before the story has said a word. It names the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, celebrated August 15, the day the story’s events unfold. It names the ordinary meaning of the word — the unexamined assumptions the child narrator, his sister, and the neighborhood make about the woman next door. And it names an act of interpretation: the story itself performs an assumption on its subject, lifting a discarded woman into glory the way the Church, in 1950, declared Mary bodily lifted into heaven.

The epigraph announces the method directly: “You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you” (Song of Solomon 4:7) — the Latin Church’s Marian antiphon Tota Pulchra Es, its central claim being macula non est in te, there is no stain in you. The story takes that promise and immediately tests it against a body that seems to refute it: “there were red stains at the end of her sleeves from where she had spilled some juice.” The neighbor, Peggy Fleming — called “Lovely Peggy” by the grandmother — is bald, poor, and treated by the neighborhood as a figure of pity and mockery. The story’s entire operation is to take this stained, mocked, discarded body and prove the antiphon true of her despite the stain, not by erasing it but by carrying it through to the end.

Peggy is Christ throughout, quietly and cumulatively rather than announced. Her baldness becomes not shame but crown: “the sunlight highlighted a laurel of peach-fuzz hair… a few long silver strands… garlanded the area by her temples.” The grandmother anoints her exactly as a body is anointed for burial or consecration: “My grandmother rubbed tanning oil into Peg’s bald scalp, forehead, and the nape of her neck; she shone like a miniature sun.” She passes with difficulty through a strait way — “My grandmother helped her through the narrow doorway and down the hall” — and the visit ends at the shore, the family’s private Golgotha and the site, later, of a Sunday dormition: a small, unremarked death and rising folded into an ordinary beach afternoon.

Fire undergoes the same conversion the rest of the story’s imagery undergoes. What could easily be hellfire becomes instead the fire of glory: “The waves beyond glimmered like sparks from an unquenchable fire.” The phrase carries its threat and cancels it in the same breath; an unquenchable fire is what damns in one register and what never stops burning with love in another, and the story chooses the second without ever disowning the first.

The beach itself becomes the story’s sacramental ground. Helen dresses for it “arrayed in a white and gold sundress, a wide-brimmed hat with a spray of lilies” — white and gold being the liturgical colors of the Assumption itself, lilies the flower of the Annunciation. At the shore, Helen coaxes Peggy out of her boots and pours salt water over her feet before leading her into the ocean, an unshoeing on holy ground answered by an informal washing of feet. A dove rises from the scene exactly as one might expect at a baptism, and a wave then does forcibly what the foot-washing had only begun gently — Helen and Peggy are “razed” by a breaker and knocked to their knees, arriving at the posture of prayer by accident, grace administered here not by request but by ambush.

The story’s final image resolves the whole structure and answers the epigraph directly: “And the Sun’s great light shines upon and caresses her warm skin, like the flesh of a Father’s hands as He cradles His child’s head before lifting His crossed arms to kiss her soft cheek.” The Cross, present throughout the story only as a shape withheld, appears here at last not as an instrument of suffering but as an embrace. The story’s very last line completes the transfiguration it has been building toward for five thousand words: “Completely awake–laughing, altogether beautiful, and divine–she rises once again to sing her favorite song.” Altogether beautiful returns the epigraph’s own words to a body once described only by its stains. Tota pulchra es. There is no flaw in you.

Selected Passages

The complete study documents more than seven hundred passages across three decades of published work, rated and sourced individually. A representative selection follows; the full concordance — fifty fully annotated passages spanning every book — is available in the downloadable edition below.

What It Amounts To

Seven hundred passages, read together, support four findings.

First, the doctrine is quoted, not gestured at. Mulhern puts the actual text of Munificentissimus Deus into a short story. He reads Scripture verbatim over caskets in Molly Bonamici. He opens that novel with a Yeats epigraph and closes it with Dickinson’s “I dwell in Possibility,” ending on the word Paradise. In an essay under his own name he admits he is angered by “the hate, misery, and evil that Christianity has caused,” and then writes, of an ordinary classroom morning, “This is communion.” A writer who does all of that is not being interpreted by this study. He is being read.

Second, the same images recur across three decades and five books. The Feast of the Assumption. The seawater cure at Nantasket. The wet silvery scalp and the crown of the head a boy will not touch. The mourning dove out of its cleft, rising and then descending over the water. This is a personal liturgy — a small set of formulae Mulhern returns to on a cycle, the way a missal returns to the same readings every August 15.

Third, the abject is never removed from the corpus. It is reassigned, and this is the signature move, consistent across every genre Mulhern works in. Nothing squalid is cut from this body of work in order to make it presentable for a religious reading. It is absorbed and reissued as evidence.

Fourth, and most important, Mulhern says it himself, in one line of the poems: “My family members are my prayers. My poems are my prayers. My family members are my poems.” That is not a figure of speech in a writer whose every book performs the same operation, over and over, on people the world has already finished judging. It is a statement of genre. He believes the work is prayer, and the rest of the study exists to show that the belief is not incidental to the writing — it is the writing’s engine.

What, finally, does the whole body of work amount to? Not a devotional tract, and not a novelist’s private guilt about a Catholic childhood he can neither keep nor discard. It amounts to a sustained act of noticing — the discovery, made and remade across three decades and every form Mulhern has worked in, that a life the world has already finished judging can still be found, examined closely enough, to have no flaw in it. That is not catharsis, which purges. It is not nostalgia, which preserves. It is canonization — the formal, deliberate declaration that a discarded life was in fact glorious, made by the one person who was ever willing to say so. Tota pulchra es. There is no flaw in you.