Dancing to my Death with the Love Called Cancer
DANIEL O’LEARY
(Columba Books, 232 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • Tel 020 7799 4064

When the well-known priest, writer and retreat-giver Daniel O’Leary died in January this year, his diary was still full of engagements “criss-crossed out” by the cancer diagnosis he had received in June. This had felled him in his tracks. “Every week I look at my diary to mull over where I should be in my itinerary,” he tells his readers, “each week I miss those beautiful places and trusting people who gather ... for meditation, spiritual input, silence, intense sharing and ‘inner work’.” People thronged. It was, he tells us, a “heady” ministry.

His very first words are addressed to them, his followers, who came in their thousands and are missing him. He writes with ease, as if in a letter to friends. His anguish is acute: his decades-long ministry, shared with them and aimed always at revealing the “beautiful mystery” of the God of his heart, was far too shallow, “mental rather than visceral”. It was never actually wrong; just not “shaped or uttered from a place of suffering and sacrifice”. Now he is in an abyss, and has begun to realise how limited his understanding was.