Last Saturday night, I shared a wonderful dinner with Fr. Paul Murray at a little restaurant not far from the Pantheon in the heart of Rome. Fr. Paul is an Irish Dominican priest who has been teaching at the Angelicum University in Rome for the past twenty years. We met when he was a visiting professor at Mundelein about ten years ago. He is an extraordinary spiritual writer and poet, and one of the great expositors of the particularly Domincan school of spirituality and prayer.
Several years ago, Fr. Paul invited me to give the lecture for the commencement of the school year at the Angelicum, and during that trip, he took me to Santa Sabina, the Dominican Headquarters in Rome, and showed me a courtyard that Thomas Aquinas knew when he lived at Santa Sabina in the 13th century. We later used that courtyard as a setting for one of my speeches for the Catholicism Project.
He was also a good friend and spiritual advisor to Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta. You might remember that I wrote
a review of his splendid book on Mother Teresa, in which he put her "dark night of the soul" into context.
You can't be with Paul Murray for long without laughing; he is a master jokester and storyteller. He embodies the joyful spirit of his father St. Dominic. Better than almost anyone I know, he proves that joy is perhaps the principle fruit of the Holy Spirit.
Peace to all from Rome!
Father Barron
Father Paul Murray is also the author of "The Journey with Jonah: The Spirituality of Bewilderment," which offers a beautiful reflection on the humor of God and its relation to our own propensity for joy. Father Murray states, "In the Book of Jonah itself, by choosing to employ different types of humour, Jonah's author not only 'delights his readers," as Hans Walter Wolff has observed, 'but also makes it easier for them to perceive God's loving laughter over narrow-minded piety'. Clearly, therefore, the humour in the work is no ornament. In fact, one can say, it forms part of the book's core-revelation. For what is at issue in Jonah, from start to finish, is the transcendent mystery of God's freedom and God's love. And, after reading through the book of Jonah a number of times, one begins to sense that, at the heart of that freedom and that love, there is imaginable joy." [1]
As Father Barron points out, this joy is overwhelmingly observable in the life of Father Murray. Insofar as we open ourselves to participation in the life of Christ, we, too, will radiate joy.
[1] Paul Murray, OP, A Journey with Jonah: The Spirituality of Bewilderment (Dublin: The Columba Press, 2002), p.60.