Unquenchable Fire

About the Essay

Where Judgment Turns to Grace

“Unquenchable Fire” takes its title from the Gospels—the phrase used in Matthew and Mark for the fire of Gehenna, the fire that judgment cannot put out. Mulhern follows that phrase into his short story “Assumptions,” where it is read as a quiet reversal: the fire of damnation becomes the shimmer of sunlight on water, as two women wade into the sea to be healed.

The essay traces a pattern that recurs across Mulhern’s fiction, poetry, and teaching—the conversion of fearsome, punitive imagery into imagery of mercy. Fire becomes sunlight. A crown of thorns becomes a laurel of sun-bleached peach fuzz. Stigmata becomes spilled juice on a child’s hands. A burial shroud becomes a housedress hung to dry. The Cross becomes a father’s crossed arms. Each substitution retains some of the weight of the original image while shifting its emphasis toward tenderness.

“Unquenchable Fire” first opened Essays: Criticism & Craft, the series of close readings published on the author website. It now forms a section of “Altogether Beautiful,” the full study of “Assumptions,” read beside “What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up,” “The Sacred in the Shabby,” and further essays on recurring imagery, religious interpretation, and the working beliefs behind the fiction and poetry.

Read “Unquenchable Fire” in Altogether Beautiful