Donald Sheehan

Don Sheehan's early life, plagued by his father's alcoholic violence, was at the same time blessed by the good stories this intelligent man read aloud to his children. In his teens, unhappy in school, Don joined a street gang and then the Army Reserves, where he found he had renounced violence. On his eighteenth birthday, happening upon his post library, he walked straight to a book of Japanese poems. It went, in turn, straight to his heart, for eight hours. He'd come home at last. The house of Don's pilgrimage encompasses a wide territory: spiritual, lyric, scholarly, usually all at once. At our best, what we can take from engaging these essays is a way of falling into the heart to embrace, suffer, and, in Christ, transfigure the world's "ruining oppositions." In doing so, we fulfill what St. Maximus the Confessor saw as our human calling: to unify the polarities embedded in God's creation and thus make, not only ourselves, but all Creation whole.

"In this rendering, the Psalms become once again what they were for Christian believers from the very beginning: the hymnal of the Church. They remain, certainly, the songs of Israel: from its cries of lamentation to its shouts of exultation. But for the Christian reader, they become as well hymns of petition and praise that express both the joy and the longing of those who live 'in Christ' . . . At the same time their very language can convey to us the assurance that, as he has throughout the millennia, God hears our prayer and responds to it with boundless mercy, love, and compassion."--from the Preface by Fr. John BreckProfessor Sheehan's brief introductory exposition of the Davidic roots of Psalms and the poetics of chiasmus guides us in understanding how the ruining oppositions of actual experience are held in Psalms within the musical disciplines of lyric art: held, until God Himself can be seen in the ruins: seen, and felt, and overwhelmingly and gratefully loved. The psalmist's world doesn't change as he turns his experience toward God. What changes is he himself. How he changes is toward acquiring the very mind of Christ, to which each of us is called.