18.12.2017
‘Shouldering the Lamb’ – Launch of the Archbishop of Armagh’s New Book
A new book by the Archbishop of Armagh, the Most Revd Dr Richard Clarke, was launched last week. Shouldering the Lamb: Reflections on an Icon is published by Dominican Publications and was launched in St Mary’s Priory in Tallaght Village on Wednesday December 13.
Shouldering the Lamb contains 11 meditations on the ancient figure of the shepherd carrying a lamb across his shoulders. Archbishop Clarke views this image from many angles and reflects on how any carrying of another in the loving service of God and humankind is an echo of the God who is Love.
The reflections are not just for the ordained, but will speak to the needs of anyone whose life includes an element of identifying with the fear or pain of others. This can never be from a safe distance and will involve occasions when the care–giver must accept being carried without succumbing to a sense of being, in any way, a burden.
Speaking at the launch, poet, playwright, novelist and radio producer Aidan Mathews, described the book as a meditation on the privilege and precariousness of priesthood. He said this privilege and precariousness were emphasised by the general culture which, “far from shouldering the shepherd, let alone the lamb, has been pretty well cold–shouldering pastors and all their presumptions since well before the start of the third millennium”.
Mr Mathews said that the greatest peril for the “professional or career Christian” was to disguise the fragility of his or her faith. “Now I’m not suggesting that priests swap sins with their penitents, which was, in fact, the early practice of Francis Xavier, but when there’s a pregnant pause, a sort of caesura, between our home–grown feelings at the angle–poise in the study and our homiletic flow at the lectern in the church, we are doing what Bishop Synesius of Cyrene incorrectly boasted about to a correspondent in the fifth century: “In private, I philosophize”, he wrote. ‘In public, I mythologize.’ That is a hairline fracture in prayer and practice that can only fester,” he stated.
He concluded by quoting a letter he had received from a priest who said of his life of service: “I have worked in the gloom of people’s grief, moved about amid the noise and confusion of their conflict, and talked when I could make myself heard. I have eaten my bread salted with their tears, my fingernails dirty from the grime of our broken lives, and I have laughed and celebrated the arrival of every new–born infant come among us in splendid individual perfection. I have coaxed and encouraged the fragile, loved the sight and the smell of them in all their idiosyncrasy, and considered myself blessed when they groaned in the night and cried out for help. The Lord Jesus was always there in the sweat and the muck and the fever of the struggle that we share”.
You can read Aidan Mathews speech in full here.
Archbishop Clarke explained that the origins of the book lay in a visit to a primary school when a child asked him how much his cross cost. The cross, which depicted the shepherd Christ with the lamb over his shoulder’, was made of pewter and he had told the child that it was fairly cheap. “Afterwards I asked myself why I had said any cross is cheap… the symbol on the cross became more and more entrancing and enticing,” he recalled and later, when the Bishop of Connor asked him to lead a retreat for his younger clergy, he took it as his theme.
“It is not intended as a primer for clergy. It is intended to express that all of us in our own way are called to shoulder – shoulder others and the needs of others and at times to be shouldered,” Archbishop Clarke said. He thanked all who assisted in bringing the book to publication.
The publisher, Bernard Tracey OP, explained that part of the mission of the Irish Dominican Province was to facilitate the search for the eternal truth. “We have a sense of calling to illuminate rather than to shine… It is great to have people of different traditions to join us in our exploration,” he said. He added that Archbishop Clarke saw poetry of a sensitive means of accessing the divine.
Shouldering the Lamb is published by Dominican Publications and costs €12. It is available through the Dominican Publications website.
