Wholeness of Grace: The Vision of Donald Sheehan

FR. JOEL BRADY

In the spring of 1983, Donald Sheehan went to visit his father’s grave, for the first time since the funeral seven years prior. His father’s alcoholism, violence, and abandonment of his family had left Sheehan with deep wounds, but he had come to the grave to forgive and to ask forgiveness. Sheehan was a literature professor, living in New Hampshire, where he oversaw a poetry center at the former home of Robert Frost. Though he was something of a spiritual seeker, he didn’t have a church home. He had never been inside an Orthodox Church. Nevertheless, a week after his visit to the gravesite, he woke up one morning to find the words of the Jesus Prayer—so well known in Orthodox spirituality—“spoken within me, filling me.” The prayer had come to him of its own accord. 

The following year, Sheehan happened on a copy of The Way of a Pilgrim in the library at the college where he taught, and to his astonishment, he found those familiar words printed on the page: “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me.” He started attending a parish near his home, and he was received into the Orthodox Church in December of 1984.

This experience, recounted in In the House of my Pilgrimage: Violence, Noetic Healing, and Personhood (Resource Publications, 2023), is a key moment that seems to illuminate what comes both before and after it: the mystery of love and grace overcoming the wounds of human violence is a theme that runs, implicitly or explicitly, through the book’s every page. 

In another detail of this same story, we see one of Sheehan’s other favorite themes. He notes that when he found The Way of a Pilgrim, he remembered having heard of it, and the Jesus Prayer, in J.D. Salinger’s novel Franny and Zooey. To some this might seem to “explain away” the apparent miracle of the prayer appearing uninvited in Sheehan’s mind. But it gives an example of something no less miraculous: God’s ability to use the apparently profane in mysterious ways to reveal Himself. Throughout the book this is illustrated both through autobiographical accounts of grace revealed in unexpected situations, and through studies of literary works that, under Sheehan’s eye, reveal subtleties of the spiritual life in wholly unexpected ways.

Many will be familiar with Donald Sheehan from his writings on spiritual life, literature, and the Psalms collected in his books (The Grace of Incorruption, The Shield of Psalmic Prayer, and his own translation of The Psalms of David), all edited and published posthumously by his devoted wife Xenia. This latest collection of his work contains much of what those who appreciated the earlier books have come to love in his writing, but also opens for us more of the life out of which his thoughts and writings emerged. 

The first section of the book, through prose reflections and poems, carries us in a not-always-linear fashion through Don’s childhood, with its painful intertwining of beauty and violence, his rejection of the violence and pursuit of beauty in literature, and the conversion described above. Along the way we’re given a spiritually perceptive reflection on alcoholism and a study of St. Symeon the New Theologian that includes Sheehan’s richest presentation of the idea of personhood—which runs through much of his work. And that idea of personhood, seen in light of the autobiographical material, is not at all abstract. It expresses Sheehan’s own experience, both of the world’s disfiguring and depersonalizing violence, and of emerging out of that violence into the wholeness given by divine grace.

In the second section, we have a series of literary reflections: on Dante’s Paradiso; on the poetic structure of the Akathist hymn; on Robert Frost; and on the Psalms and the story of David. Throughout this section there runs a strong theme of uniting apparent opposites: the struggle of reconciling life’s oppositions and contradictions is seen as an important means by which we know God and experience the noetic healing referenced in the title of the book (that is, the healing of our nous, our inmost spiritual being and the faculty responsible for spiritual perception). 

This is expressed in part through Sheehan’s fascination with chiasmus: the method of reading a text as radiating out from, and converging on, a key central point. This becomes not just an interesting way of looking at a text, but an image of how, in Christ, apparent contradictions are drawn together and resolved (sure enough, the essay on the Akathist hymn falls almost at the center of the book, and addresses this theme of antinomy in particularly direct terms). This union of opposites is a fascinating philosophical and theological concept, over which much ink has been spilled in scholarly books and journals, but here it has a certain concreteness. By bringing together autobiographical material of a sometimes-tumultuous life with writings from throughout that life, the book as a whole shows us how grace in a person’s life can bring together apparently disjointed and contradictory elements into a beautiful (one might say iconic) whole.

The third section contains several studies of Shakespeare. Here Sheehan draws heavily on the thought of the French scholar René Girard, putting it in conversation with the writings of St. Isaac the Syrian and Fr. Pavel Florensky. In his analysis, Girard is not only a foil for the Orthodox writers, but part of a real synthesis (even if the synthesis is finally more Orthodox than Girardian). Girard believes Shakespeare’s work lays bare the dynamics of envy and violence that drive human society. This reading appealed to Sheehan, given his own formative experiences of violence. But for him, the way out of (or, perhaps better, through) this violence comes not from Girard, but from Florensky’s notion of countenance (the “face” of true personhood) and even more so from St. Isaac’s teaching on scripture and inner stillness. 

St. Isaac, significantly, is given the book’s “last word.” The writings in this third section of the book are not explicitly “personal,” for the most part; but in light of what comes before them, we can see the vision of divine light emerging from the darkness of human violence as autobiographical.

Interspersed with Sheehan’s writings throughout the book are several essays and reflections by people who knew him. These reveal more information about the author’s life, but they also demonstrate the effects Sheehan had on people around him, and the ways his life and thought continue to bear spiritual fruit in the lives of others.

This is not a book to read quickly, in hopes of extracting a few interesting ideas or useful concepts. It’s a book to spend time with—sometimes feeling illuminated by its moments of brilliance, other times exasperated by its ambiguities. As one might expect in a posthumous collection of writings, sometimes thoughts are simply left unfinished, and a careful editor can only go so far in finishing them. But to read this book carefully, through its difficulties and frustrations, is to glimpse a lifetime of thought, and to see how Christ works through it all, drawing all to Him. Rather than giving the reader neatly packaged religious ideas, it offers a vision of Christ working in the thoughts and words and events of a whole life. By showing this in the author’s life it suggests, perhaps, how it can also be found in the reader’s. Approached this way, it’s a deeply rewarding work.