By DONALD DeMARCO
On the Edge of Infinity: A Biography of Michael D. O’Brien by Clemens Cavallin, Justin Press (Ottawa, ON: 2017), 412 pages.
Michael O’Brien is a success, though not exactly famous and certainly not a celebrity. This profile suits him fine since he regards any kind of fanfare as alien to his temperament. He does not mind being relatively unknown. His concern is that his art will make Truth and Love better known
He was born in 1948 in Canada’s national capital and is very much alive today. Why, then, a biography for a person who is not famous and is still alive?
The answer is twofold. O’Brien deserves to be better known and appreciated by Catholics in particular, and his life story, though incomplete, offers a powerful testimony that God is ever-present in our lives and though He makes things difficult for us, is, nonetheless, a guiding spirit.
Reading On the Edge of Infinity is like journeying through Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven and the Book of Job. The Hound of Heaven caught up with Michael when he was 21 at a time when he was a self-admitted atheist. He had dismissed the personal Christian God and replaced him with a vague cosmic force.
One night he was awakened from sleep by an intensely powerful and hostile spiritual presence that seemed impossible to resist. Feeling defenseless, he cried out, “God save me!” The prayer was effective. The evil presence withdrew, leaving Michael with a supernatural peace. At that moment he came to know that God was real and so was everything he had been taught by the Catholic Church.
This experience was followed by several more of a supernatural kind that left Michael with the enduring sense of God’s abiding presence. But this realization was accompanied by a seemingly unending series of difficulties, hardships, and setbacks. There was poverty, illness, a near-death experience, disappointment, rejection, and a broken-down jalopy that seemed to have a mind of its own.
The book’s epigraph, as epigraphs are supposed to do, captures an essential element of O’Brien’s life: Super muros tuos Hierusalem constitute custodies tota die et tota nocte perpetuo non tacebunt (“Upon your walls, O Jerusalem, I have set watchmen; all the day and all the night they shall never be silent” (Isaiah 62:6). Though he wrestled with the thought of being a watchman, there is no doubt that Michael O’Brien is a watchman reporting on the sorry state of the modern world.
Michael O’Brien is one of today’s foremost Catholic novelists. This may be a slight understatement. According to Peter Kreeft, “Michael O’Brien is, I believe, the greatest living Catholic novelist.” He is most assuredly one of the foremost religious painters in North America. He is also an accomplished essayist, editor, and speaker.
In addition, he is also a biographer, having written The Passion of William Kurelek, detailing the life and works of Canadian artist William Kurelek. He approached his task with accustomed humility and dependence on God: “Oh Lord, I beg you to let it happen. It is utterly impossible for me to make it happen.”
Michael O’Brien is a Christian artist. He has struggled to convince people that Christian orthodoxy is not religious fundamentalism. He has followed the advice of Jacques Maritain who remarked, “Do not make the absurd attempt to dissociate in yourself the artist and the Christian. They are one, if you are truly Christian and if your art is not isolated from your soul by some system of aesthetics.”
Michael D. O’Brien is truly a Christian artist and one who will, in time, be fully recognized as a pre-eminent novelist and superlative painter of religious themes.
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