Barbara Mahany
Barbara Mahany is an author and freelance journalist in Chicago, who writes these days about stumbling on the sacred amid the cacophony of the modern-day domestic melee. She was a reporter and feature writer at the Chicago Tribune for nearly 30 years, and before that a pediatric oncology nurse at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago. Her first book, Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door, has been called “a field guide into the depths of your holiest hours;” Publishers Weekly named it one of their Top 10 religion books for Fall 2014. She has since written three other books, including her latest, THE STILLNESS OF WINTER: Sacred Blessings of the Season (October 2020), a compendium of mediations, essays, recipes, and prayers rooted in the depths of winter’s months, from Abingdon Press.
Twitter: @BarbaraMahany
Instagram: @barbara.ann.mahany
What period of history do you wish you knew more about?
I actually wish I knew more about the entire sweep of history, all across the globe. I can’t think of a period of time when a close and critical examination of human and societal forces and motives wouldn’t serve to illuminate universal truths and sharpen our own decision-making into the future. As a journalist who believed the idea that, each day in the newsroom, we were writing the first draft of history in the front-page news, and as someone who understands how critical it is to accurately probe the varied and often conflicting forces that propel the day’s news, as well as how imperative it is that we fearlessly ask incisive questions, I’m convinced that the clearest lens of history is among the treasures we pass from generation to generation. The more deeply we truly understand the past — be it on the global scale, or a more intimate personal scale — the more sure-footed our pathfinding forward.
Not all books are for all readers… when you start a book and you just don’t like it, how long do you read until you bail?
For the last eight years, I was reviewing “books for the soul” for the Chicago Tribune, and it was my job to sift through stacks and stacks of titles, to find ones that would deeply resonate with readers and were worthy of their investment of time (and money). That meant I probably started and put down more books than the number of books I read to the end. It doesn’t take too many pages to catch on to the eloquence and insights of a particular author. If I was having trouble sinking into a book, I wouldn’t call it quits without leaping ahead a few chapters, trying again to see if I found more clarity, or particularly beautiful and compelling passages. I try to read eclectically, and if the writing is beautiful and intelligent, I will read just about anything clear to the end.
Is there another profession you would like to try?
Well, I used to be a pediatric oncology nurse, but after I became a staff writer at the Chicago Tribune, I let my license expire during a particularly hectic few years when I lost track of my license’s expiration date. I’ve often wished I could go back to the front lines of nursing, where a nurse’s focus is on the health and wellness of the whole person — physically, emotionally, spiritually. As a nurse caring for young kids with cancer, the whole family became my focus. I cared as much about the sibling left at home, as I did about the mom who stayed up all night worrying, and the dad holding two jobs to keep the family together. The intimacy and intense human connection of nursing is something I will forever be drawn to.
What do you worry about?
These days I worry a lot about the divisiveness of the world, how we seem to have lost our sense that we are all, all of us, in this together for however short our stint on this planet in this lifetime. I worry that gentle human kindness — and necessary humility — is lost in a social-media-frenzied world. I worry that we’re not practicing ardently enough the greatest command, one at the heart of all world religions, to “love as you would be loved.” And until my dying day, I think my number one worries will always be whatever is worrying my very own two boys, the ones I birthed, and maybe even more so as they both grow and go off into the world, forging their own life-giving ways.
What brings you great joy?
Unexpected and unsolicited kindness. The power of a beautifully wrought sentence. Laughing till your belly aches. The way the slant of amber light falls on the garden at dusk. The quiet of a summer’s night. Sitting on a log deep in the woods, listening for the hoot of the owl in the distance. The sound of my children’s voice on the phone.
