Solitude, boredom, pale days are, if you are a writer, like rich soil and daily sunshine if you are a flower. One night in the autumn of 2009, alone in the house on a remote part of the Wexford coast with nothing else to do, I took down a book I had owned for years – EV Rieu’s translation of the Four Gospels – and, having read St John’s Gospel, I began to read the introduction. I realised that almost everyone else I knew were at parties or having dinners, were at concerts or plays, or were taking drugs or getting quietly and wonderfully drunk. I was, on the other hand, in rural Ireland reading about St John.
A single sentence in that introduction jumped out at me. It suggested that, before he wrote his Gospel, St John may have read Aeschylus. In reading his Gospel, I had noticed that he, rather than Mathew, Mark and Luke, had placed Mary, the grieving mother, at the foot of the cross. I had wondered about it – why he would have done this and what difference it made to the spread of Christianity and indeed to Catholic worship.
