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LIGHT at the TORN HORIZON

There is a fresh candor and a new ease of utterance in this fifth volume of poems by the Dominican writer Paul Murray. What most immediately impresses, in lyric after lyric, are the moments of quiet epiphany. But such moments of vision have not been easily achieved. Throughout the work, rather than avoid the “torn” and wounded areas of our lives, a range of feelings and experiences—unnamed, invading, threatening, desired—are courageously explored. In the end, the vision, the spiritual awareness that is attained, is the more persuasive and convincing for having first been tested.
There is a fresh candor and a new ease of utterance in this fifth volume of poems by the Dominican writer Paul Murray. What most immediately impresses, in lyric after lyric, are the moments of quiet epiphany. But such moments of vision have not been easily achieved. Throughout the work, rather than avoid the “torn” and wounded areas of our lives, a range of feelings and experiences—unnamed, invading, threatening, desired—are courageously explored. In the end, the vision, the spiritual awareness that is attained, is the more persuasive and convincing for having first been tested.
Mark Galli was the editor in chief of Christianity Today for seven years, a Presbyterian pastor for ten years, and a passionate evangelical Protestant since first responding to an altar call in 1965 at thirteen years old. But in 2020, Galli formally returned to the faith in which he was baptized as an infant: the Roman Catholic Church. 

With All the Saints: My Journey to the Roman Catholic Church is the compelling memoir of one man’s search for the fullness of truth. Through honest and engaging storytelling, Galli recounts the various spiritual, theological, mystical, and ecclesial tributaries that led him to “cross the Tiber” back to Catholicism. Each tradition he passed through—Evangelical, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Anglican, and Eastern Orthodox—he embraced without satisfaction and left without bitterness, drawing him finally to the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church: a Church of saints and sinners, all striving together in the great company of heaven; a Church that he could finally call home.

Honest, insightful, and entertaining, With All the Saints is a memorable love letter to Christ and his Church.
Light at the Torn Horizon
By Paul Murray, OP
Published by The Word on Fire Institute on May 31, 2022
Paperback  |  112 Pages  |  6" x 9"
Light at the Torn Horizon received award winning recognition in 2023!
  • First Place: Poetry and Cover Art (Catholic Media Association)
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ABOUT the AUTHOR

Paul Murray, OP, an Irish Dominican friar, lives in Rome, where he teaches courses at the Angelicum University on the literature of the Western mystical tradition.

This is his fifth book of poems. His other works include Saint Catherine of Siena: Mystic of Fire, Preacher of Freedom; A Journey with Jonah: The Spirituality of Bewilderment; and Scars: Essays, Poems, and Meditations on Affliction.

WHAT PEOPLE are SAYING

“Paul Murray’s poetry is something very rare in literature: absolutely authentic, visionary, and consoling. Some of the subjects that he contemplates are innocence, memory, prayer, woundedness, grief, and divine joy. He takes us on a journey of brokenness and wholeness, unswerving in his scrutiny of darkness, but always—in breathtaking ways—showing us flashes of hope and insight that are lit with the presence of the divine and conveyed with disarming simplicity. This is a book to reach for in times of both tranquility and turbulence.” 

- Sally Read, author of Night’s Bright Darkness
“Paul Murray is doing something rare and unsparing: in these poems, he is drawing from the deep sources of the Christian creative tradition confidently and without anxiety or apology, so that that tradition, and the spirit which animates it, feels just a hand’s-breadth away.”

- Paul Elie, author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own and Reinventing Bach
“Fr. Paul Murray’s Light at the Torn Horizon has turned out to be a rare gift I had not expected. Reading these poems, poring over their beautiful clarity and humility, has been like meeting a soulmate—a Virgil, a Dante—on the journey toward that Light, conversing with words that crack open and sparkle with the divine Word.”

- Paul Mariani, author of The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernity
“In this new volume, in poem after poem, Paul Murray stands before the world, at once attentive to the raw and befuddled human condition and the intimations of wisdom that come, like music and mystery, to draw us toward the real. At times echoing the Eliot of Four Quartets, these poems call on us to return to the wonder in which every life begins.”

- James Matthew Wilson, author of The Strangeness of the Good, Including Quarantine Notebook
“Reading Paul Murray’s poetry is like entertaining an archangel. Each poem in the collection announces a new incursion of the divine into the wounded world, offering us glimpses of beauty bodied forth in the most mundane objects, the everyday faces and places we encounter in our daily journey toward eternity. These are poems that celebrate and poems that save, sure poems, written by a seasoned poet confident in his voice and his vocation, a late collection wherein Murray repeatedly asks himself and joyfully answers the same question his master Rilke did: ‘And poet, what do you do?—I praise.’”

- Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, author of Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor

TABLE of CONTENTS

A Reading (featured below)

I - The Shaken Branches

5 - Weather
6 - Source
8 - Perspective
9 - Questions
11 - Naming
12 - Fate
13 - The Question
15 - The Dying Poet
16 - De la Musique
18 - Interrogation
20 - Survivors
21 - The Origins
22 - Praise
23 - In the Forest
24 - The Walk

II - Look, There Is the Shore!

27 - The Voice
29 - Mountain
30 - Wind
31 - The Flourishing Shrub
32 - The Believers
33 - Beginnings
34 - A Winter Story
35 - Light Remembered

III - The Wound of Longing

39 - Noli me Tangere
40 - Prayer
41 - Divine Hide and Seek
42 - O Merciful One
43 - In the Future
44 - Words of the Mystics
45 - Lines for the Afflicted
47 - Impossible Words

IV - Days and Hours

51 - The Choice
52 - The Green Man
55 - The Seeker
56 - On Emptiness
57 - To the Hidden God
58 - The Hours
59 - The Silence
60 - The Visionaries of Non-Violence
61 - Wound
62 - The Failed Canticle
63 - On Hayling Island
64 - Legacy
65 - Cézanne
66 - Day to Day
67 - Finishing a Poem
68 - Days and Hours
69 - Rilke’s Imperative
70 - The Animals’ Messiah
71 - Diogenes of Dublin
72 - The Theatre of Joy
73 - Canticle in Praise of Punctuation

V - Into the Light

79 - Hope Against Hope
80 - Words for Siún
81 - The Awakening
82 - To a Friend Dying
83 - Seeing the Waterfall
84 - Address to the Lions
86 - At the Edge
87 - Night Song
88 - Five Disguises of the Soul
92 - Green Music
93 - The Lost Time
95 - Call
96 - Paradise
98 - Words

Afterword

THE FIRST POEM from "LIGHT AT THE TORN HORIZON"

A Reading

It opens like a river
in full spate, or like a window
with a gust of wind.
And it’s as if an archangel
had entered the room. And everybody 
has to stop what they’re doing.
And the air is a river of words.
And all of a sudden you see
– and with a start –
that an archangel has entered,
and your heart is in your mouth.
And you feel you are drowning
in a river of divine words, and hear 
yourself saying, over and over, 
‘How can this be?’

ABOUT the BOOK

Vatican II called the Bible “the support and energy of the Church,” “the pure and everlasting source of spiritual life,” and “the food of the soul.” Yet, for many Catholics, their engagement with Scripture is often limited to what they hear at Mass—and the dull, safe, predictable homilies that obscure rather than break open up the Word of God. 

In Food for the Soul, the first book in a riveting three-part series, celebrated philosopher Peter Kreeft invites the faithful—clergy and laity alike—to a heart-to-heart relationship with Christ the Word through the Word of the Scriptures. Moving through the First Reading, Second Reading, and Gospel Readings for each Sunday and other major liturgical celebrations throughout the three-year lectionary cycle, Kreeft brings the Mass readings to life with his trademark blend of gentle wit and unyielding wisdom, challenging readers to plant their souls in the rich soil of Scripture and sharpen their minds with the Sword of the Spirit.

Whether you are a layperson looking for additional insight on the readings at Mass, or a priest or deacon looking for inspiration for a homily, Food for the Soul is a gift to the whole Church from one of today’s greatest Christian writers.

TABLE of CONTENTS

Introduction

Advent

Christmas Time

Lent

Holy Week

Easter Time

Ordinary Time
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