Easter Essay: Only Wonder Knows
Being ‘religious’ doesn’t mean being pious and pure; it means being alive, aware, awake and alert, always with an eye towards the horizon and the mission of moving towards the Mystery beyond.
I do not make myself.
Back in the early summer of 2013, shortly after coming back to Ireland from Rome, where I had addressed a crowd of 200,000 people in St Peter’s Square alongside the recently elected Cardinal Borgoglio, ostensibly as pope, though by his own description as ‘Bishop of Rome’, I went on Miriam O’Callaghan’s morning radio show on RTÉ Radio One to talk about the experience. I should add here that, at the time, I had no way of foreseeing the level of destruction that Bergoglio would wreak on the Church and the world from the Chair of Peter. I had been greatly saddened by the apparent abdication of Pope Benedict XVI, but at the time reasonably convinced that this had occurred solely due to his advancing age and deteriorating health. I was therefore as enthused about my trip to Rome as you might expect me to be, as a returned Prodigal who had come to see that the Church, for all its human faults, was the voice of God in the world and the greatest existing repository of human experience and self-understanding through the ages.
I had written about my visit to Rome in the Irish Mail on Sunday, but had already turned down several invitations to discuss it in public because I feared the deadly reductionism that infects Irish media in anything to do with religion. Rather stupidly, I felt a bit safer with O’Callaghan, because I had previously found her friendly, warm, funny and a little more penetrative than the average Irish radio or TV interviewer. This, to emphasise again something that is no longer true, was at a time when the Irish media could be trusted to provide a moderately truthful account of human doings and perspectives — indeed, I now realise that we were into the final months of that fleeting era.
I was telling O'Callaghan about what I’d been speaking about in Rome — addiction and the way there is something we need to focus on about the transcendent that offers hope of redemption from such slavery. I also recounted to her about afterwards staying in the same guesthouse as the new pope, meeting him at breakfast next morning, slyly contriving to give him one of my books. I was trying, as I always did when speaking on religion-related topics, to convey a sensibility rooted in spontaneity and gaiety rather than the usual tone of solemnity that pervades — and almost invariably strangles — such discussions. I wasn’t putting anything on: That’s the way I had come to regard anything about myself that might be called ‘religious’. Despite my reputation — spread by people for whom describing things truthfully is not a priority — I have never been a Holy Joe. Nevertheless, I was mindful of the need not to trivialise the matters I was talking about. I spoke mainly about what had become my chief ‘religious’ obsession: the structural need that is in the human person to move towards something greater, though invisible in clear sight, something beyond what is knowable by everyday means. Things were going well until, as though finally exasperated with my refusal to fall into the usual prating, O’Callaghan blurted out (I can’t recall the precise moment or context): ‘But you’re very religious, aren’t you?’
The sentence caused me to become instantly discombobulated. My immediate thought was: She hasn’t a clue what I’m talking about.
It’s not that I could argue with her question. We were there, after all, discussing what was in essence a religious occasion. From my presence in Rome, speaking alongside the sitting pope, it might seem to follow that I was indeed a ‘religious’ type of person. The answer, in a certain sense, could only be ‘Yes’. It’s just that I knew that her sense and mine of the meaning of the word ‘religious’ were certain to be profoundly incompatible. And I worried even more that the likely impact of the word on the public consciousness would be fundamentally reductive of what I had been trying to communicate. In that sense, the most useful answer to give her would have been something like: ‘No, I’m not in the least bit religious in the sense you intend.’
The distinction has to do with the meanings that, culturally speaking, the explosive concept ‘religion’ had acquired — in Ireland at least as much as anywhere else, and probably more so. The problem related to the fact that the word ‘religious’ had become synonymous with a narrow band of the social-policy manifestations of an increasingly beleaguered Catholicism, which was by this stage almost totally discredited, unfashionable and to a high degree institutionally indefensible. This is the meaning of the evasive ‘I’m spiritual rather than religious’ response, typically used as a shield by those who wish to avoid contamination in a culture increasingly hostile to what is, in a transparent and fruitless attempt to suggest a distinction, referred to as ‘organised religion’.
Recently, in his book Faith, Hope and Carnage, the great rock/folk singer and latter-day shaman, Nick Cave, said that he considered himself ‘religious, not spiritual’. I wondered if he had been reading my mind or my mail. Only the other day, asked about this remark in a public interview with Freddie Sayers of Unherd, he replied: ‘I think I was just trying to wind people up!’
Exactly: Wind people up so they cut through their own clutter of attitudinal detritus and pass the rooms marked ‘Morality’ and ‘Anthropology’ and enter the room marked ‘Fundamentals’.
I have for a long time insisted on using the word ‘religious’ because ‘spiritual’ had for me come to signify every kind of bullshit imaginable, from crystals to aromatherapy, rendering all manner of hocus-pocus culturally preferable to the set of proposals that has enabled Western civilisation to grow and function into some semblance of order and reason over the past couple millennia — an arrangement now heading hard for the cliff-edge. I wanted, above all, to avoid the fashionable notion that what we speak of here is something soft and airy-fairy, a kind of blurry optional add-on to human existence.
Although once — as a teenager in different times — I had a brief ambition to become a priest, I put such notions behind me before leaving my teens. Soon after, in the mid-1970s, I abandoned also any interest in Catholicism or other forms of religion, mostly due to objections not far removed from those expressed in the hostile noises asserted by many of my countrymen today. For nearly 20 years, I moved with my back turned on all that kind of thing, and returned to it — like the Prodigal Son — only by virtue of being in a condition of existential and spiritual collapse, having come to the realisation that the space headed ‘religion’ seemed to encompass a lot of things I found myself unable to function without.
As a child I had had a deep, passionate relationship with Christ. But as a teenager became attracted by the world and its seductions, the promise of a new kind of freedom. This sense became especially dramatic in Ireland during the 1970s because our country was transforming itself from a fairly grey and quiescent place to a more effervescent kind of culture in which pop music and youth culture were about to become dominant. In that heady moment, because Christ and freedom seemed to be incompatible, it seemed there was a choice to be made. I’m at a loss to begin explaining how I came to see things like this, but it was certainly the impression I gleaned from the culture of the time. I had grown up with a rather contradictory sense of Jesus: On the one hand he was gentle and kind, almost like a big brother; on the other his adherents appeared to use him as an instrument of moral policing. From their mouths he became a bit scary, as though the gentleness was a front for a fanatical moralism.
I was attracted by the idea of the new freedom. I liked rock ‘n’ roll and read all the music papers every week. Something about the music promised me something I hadn’t come across before, and I wanted to find it and experience it. I didn’t want to have to choose between Elvis and Jesus, possibly because I knew in my bones that, if forced to do so, I would choose Elvis.
It wasn’t that I felt any resentment towards Jesus. We had been together for a long time — the full extent of my childhood. He had been there before me in every room I walked into. He was my friend, although I knew that this friendship was somewhat unusual by virtue of Him also being God. I felt I owed Him a lot, yet here I was being enticed by these new freedoms into heading off on what I anticipated would be a completely new direction. I knew beyond question that I couldn’t have both Elvis and Jesus.
I didn’t want to hurt His feelings; so, in the end, I just slipped away in the night, and off I went on my new voyage of freedom, telling myself that, anyway, He wouldn’t want to be involved in the kinds of adventures I planned for myself.
I find that whenever I describe things in this way in certain categories of ‘religious’ company, people are either scandalised or amused, but either way expect me in the next breath to start ranting about repentance, about how I saw the light and came to reject my evil concupiscence. The thing is: I haven’t repented. I didn’t ‘abandon my wicked ways’, at least not exactly. What happened was rather different, but far more interesting.
I wrote about this in some detail in my 2007 book, Lapsed Agnostic, but here’s the short version. I developed a problem with alcohol — essentially amounting to a misunderstanding of my driving desire. Over time, this experience brought me to I discover some fundamental things about myself. What happens with alcohol — or, I’d imagine, any other kind of addictive drug — is that you decide that the substance in question — in my case this coloured liquid in a glass — is the answer to all your questions, all your hoping. It offers a promise of fulfilment that really amounts to an avoidance of the true nature of experience, a short cut to Paradise. And unfortunately this particular answer to the great questions of existence is even more lethal than most of the other wrong ones, because ethyl alcohol is actually a poison. First it begins to kill the spirit in you; then it attacks your body and mind. It hollows out your life-force and presents itself as a substitute. This is what happened to me.
About a decade ago, I had a false alarm to do with my heart, and the doctors suggested I needed to have an angiogram to see what kind of shape my cardiovascular system was in. The way this works is that they pump blue dye through your veins, so that you can see, on a screen in front of you, the condition of your blood vessels in the regions of your heart, a map of your arteries, which tells you — or your heart specialist, who tells you — how healthy or otherwise your tick-tock system may be. It struck me afterwards that alcohol, over time, provided me with a similar kind of map of my spirit, or what I sometimes refer to as ‘my infinite self’. As though the dark brown liquid I had been drinking was showing up on some screen in my imagination, my experience of alcohol abuse enabled me to see that I had misunderstood my structure and nature as a human being. I came to see that this structure was defined by an infinite desire for something great, and that I had mistaken this brown liquid for the answer. This in turn alerted me to the fact that I had indeed a structure, and that this structure was defined by certain immutable characteristics: that I was a creature of something/someone/Someone else, at least to the extent that my sense of ownership over myself and my being was delusional by virtue of being pathetically partial; that I remained dependent on forces beyond myself; that I had not made myself; that I was not making myself; that I was mortal in a certain sense, but infinite in another; that I had this infinite desire for something I could not put a name on.
So, the obvious question, which I believe I could never have asked without acquiring this ‘map’ of my spiritual/infinite being, was: What is this desire for? When I hit this crisis in my life, I was fortunate to meet some people who had been on a similar journey, and who told me there was an answer to this question, which they proffered with the name ‘God’, which I thought the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. Initially, I heard what they meant as: ‘You’ve had your fun, and now it’s time pay the price; now you must repent whether you like it or not! Now you have to pray and pay!’ My first-thought response to this proposal was: ‘I have spent 20 years running away from this stuff — you’ve got to be joking!’
But the most striking thing about these apparant killjoys was that they were actually fun to be with. They weren’t anything like the kind of people I generally associated with an intense interest in God. They were irreverent, funny, liberally employed four-letter words and seemed to see religion in a different way to anyone I had ever before encountered. For them it was a practical idea, which they were holding to for the sake of their sanity. Mostly in middle age or beyond it, they were people who seemed to have a renewed zest for life, conveying a sense that they had obtained a second chance to understand what life was about and were not going to let that consciousness slip away again. They said to me unsettlingly heavy things like: ‘You’re structurally built into this time and space from which God cannot be eradicated. God is a central part of your being and your existence.’
That very word — ‘God’ — was at that point hugely problematic. I could hear it only as an indicator of a brooding, judgmental being whom I had done much to displease, and with Whom there ws no way back for me. At first, everything these people said caused a short-circuit in my mind. But despite myself, I stayed hanging around, listening carefully if apparantly casually. ‘To test this hypothesis,’ one of them might ruminate, ‘If God has made you, then he has made you for himself, in a relationship with himself. And if this is so, then to deny it will inevitably cause you pain.’ Then, with no little irony, they would ask: ‘Have you suffered pain?’ Since I could not deny it, I began to follow more attentively, and gradually came to see them — and eventually myself — in a different way.
Back then, I was too weary and confused to articulate any of this, but in time I began formulating a picture of the journey and what it meant. I believe that, almost from the beginning, I began to see myself a little like the way I had seen myself as a little boy, looking at reality and my life in it with a child’s eyes, responding to it with my child’s responses: wonder, questions, pleading, thanking — speaking to God, as though I believed He was really accompanying me, travelling with me.
I soon noticed that my life became better. I didn’t need to drink anymore. I was no longer afraid. And this was the beginning of a reappraisal of my own reality. Watching the results in my life, inventorying what happened and comparing my emerging self with the one I had recently left behind, I could not but admit that something was beginning to happen, some new order was descending on my existence that had been gone from it for many years. And taking note of this, I realised that there was a pattern to be observed across the entire narrative of my life that I’d completely missed. My new friends taught me that there is a way of looking at reality in which you can ‘prove’ things in a way that is not mathematical, or what might be called scientific — a way that is purely empirical, experiential, observational. Sometimes, things occur in ways that you are forced to pay attention to — to their effects and consequences, to some unaccontable correlation to what you might otherwise take for spontansous or organic changes in your life. Innormal circumstance, if this happens and the results are unwelcome, you may think of it as ‘bad luck’. If it happens and the results are good, you can just as easily think of it as ‘good luck’. But, when you’ve come through a long run of misunderstanind your human structure and have accepted the gauntlet of a ‘second chance’ — and then, suddenly, without any ‘logical’ explanation, things start changing for the better, it may be prudent to pay more attention to what you have been doing differently.
After a short time of implementing this new way of thinking, I had to admit that everything was indeed getting appreciably better. I began, for the first time since my teenage years, to think of myself not as some random entity stumbling around the world trying to get a grip on something solid, but a structured, subjective being with a purpose, direction and destination that I merely needed to discover in order to be free of all the misunderstandings that had brought me to my knees. If these guys were right — if I really was a once-off miracle of creation, whose life had a meaning and a destination — I had a responsibility to myself to check out everything they said. Maybe I should think about not wasting my life or wishing it away? What they told me seemed implausible, but the results of my initial blind but reasonably faithful adherence to their suggestions could not be argued with. The results were good, but — more than that — the results were new facts in my life that I needed to pay attention to. Experience was presenting me with new evidence, even if this surpassed my understanding, rationality or past experience.
I discovered this paradox of my desire: Even though it is attracted to things, nothing of what appears to attract me ever satisfies this desire for very long. Once I started paying attention to this, I noticed, sometimes quite rapidly, the way my desiring sought to move beyond the things it drew me towards in the first instance. I noticed I was always dissatisfied with things, always moving towards the next sensation or occasion of excitement, always looking over the shoulder of the person I was talking to. I began to ask myself: What if this is something other than a character flaw? What if it is the way I am actually made?
For a long time I had imagined that alcohol was the missing part of myself, the final piece of the mechanism that made everything about me work as it was intended to. But then this poison began to eat away at me and I allowed myself to become convinced I had to move on in my searching. Now, sublimating this desiring, I found myself with a new impulse and energy.
This, it seems, is how we are made: Driven by the combustion of our desiring, we leverage the intuited objects of these desires to push onwards towards the horizon in search of the ultimate meaning, the ‘hope beyond hope’ — impelled all the time by something we are barely aware is driving us. But, because the bunker of man’s hubristic construction seduces us into thinking that we are otherwise constructed, we are easily persuaded to follow a different logic, to chase our tails, or someone else’s tail, and imagine that this is all there is to it. The ‘secret’ is that this tail-chasing occurs as a kind of camouflage of what happens underneath.
When, after much trial and error and grief, I figured it out, I gradually eliminated the utterly self-destructive elements of my pursuance of the call of everyday desire, but for the most part remained subject to the same process of propulsion — except that I became more and more aware of what was really happening. This is as close as I can go to a definition of the religious impulse at work within me. Comprehending this requires a change of consciousness, a rewiring of the mind so that I maintain a constant wide-lens view of my own thoughts and actions. What I seek is not happiness, but self-contentment, and I know that this comes at a high price: I have to do what is right, say only what is true and treat others as I would like them to treat me. This is how I came to see that the moral programme we sometimes mistake for the ‘thing itself’ of religion is actually a part of the method for achieving true peace and contentment.
Now I realise that, for all my blundering and confusion in the early stages of ‘recovery’ (I don’t much like the word, because it is a little presumptuous, but there is no better alternative in English), my life was not the litany of errors and missteps it seemed at the time. What I took for disorder was simply the effects and consequences of my desires playing themselves out in my life, as though I was subject to an intense workshop in the actualy nature of reality. Even in the earliest days, I was moving forward, even though I had little or no awareness of this. I was aware that I was not in charge of what was happening, but simply following a protocol that I but barely understood, which was doing the heavy lifting with minimal help from me. As I became more aware, the only thing that really changed was that I learned when to let go of my desires and focus instead on the momentum they gave me. Being ‘religious’ doesn’t mean being pious and pure; it means being alive, aware, awake and alert, always with an eye towards the horizon and the mission of moving towards it. Later, I came to see that, from a certain perspective, all my previous mistakes and errors had been part of the voyage of self-discovery. Without my ‘sins’, I would not have been able to understand anything. Without my mistakes there would have been no journey. Religion is not first and foremost a moral programme: It is not about denying my nature but trying to understand how to manage it to achieve the balance to keep on walking towards my intuited destination.
By paying attention to all this, I became, after many years of being fatigued by reality, reconnected with my innate capacity to be amazed by my own existence. This process implies some kind of comparison, a shift from seeing the world I live in as something predictable and so-what?, and yet, in another sense, random. I don’t exactly know what it is I have come to compare this existence with — some other, forgotten existence, some pre-programmed understanding of what is possible, even a sense or ‘memory’ of the state of non-existence? — I don’t know. Whatever it is, I have acquired the mysterious capacity to have a kind of childlike sense of wonder enter into me at the most unexpected moments, sweeping me away with its power and intensity. In these moments, I am flooded with a consciousness of the simultaneous implausibility and ridiculous realness of reality, while somehow remaining aware that there are other, lesser possibilities if I wish to avail of them — as real as if they are happening in parallel — potential existences I might be enduring that have no beauty or colour or warmth or excitement, except what I can provoke in an artificial fashion — and this miraculous ‘bifurcation of knowing’ renders immanent ‘what is’ with an actuality that is all but overwhelming of my total consciousness. This is the secret I have discovered that allows me to remain in the moment, and know that it is the sole moment I am supposed to be in: Only wonder knows, only astonishment is truly comprehending of reality.
More than ever, the human race in modern societies lives in prefabricated edifices and landscaped spaces, where everything is arranged by architects and planners and ideologues, and designed to steal from us our innate sense of transcendence. This is what Pope Benedict meant about the ‘bunker’ man has built himself to live in, shutting out the Mystery that he is unable to conquer or control. It is not easy to see this construct, never mind see out of it. But sometimes it just takes a vista, a grance, a sentence, even a word, to have the bunker fall down in front of us.
I have come to see that, beyond the institutional/‘organised' meanings, ‘religion’ can be talked about in two discrete ways that too often become unhelpfully conflated: in terms of its cultural function and as a personal language of transcendence. There is a great distance between personal faith and the social function of religion. The first category is a deeply particular matter, a kind of radiance, enabing a multiplicity of expression-forms to emanate from her or his presence: in grace, laughter, speech, affection. It is rare to hear this spoken of publicly in anything much above cliché. The second category is an entirely different matter: what religion achieves — or does not — in the creation of a cultural vernacular that enables a community/society to speak in shorthand about the greatest questions confronting the human species. The two categories are, of course, connected, but not in the way that is usually assumed. Opponents of organised religion treat the second category as though it were simply the accumulation of all the factors implicated in the first. But it is, in one sense, much more than that, and in another much less. The purpose of the collectivised religious consciousness is to inform a society profoundly about what its purpose is, what its values should be if it is to maintain its human quotient on the path to contentment, what life is for and not for, what the word ‘future’ means — all elements of a fundamentally essential mythological understanding without which a society or civilisation cannot function for long.
In this sense, it is nonsensical to try to deal with such questions in the same breath as matters of personal faith, although there is, of course, a roundabout necessary connection. In the social context, the outlook opened up by questions of the faith of any individual may be interesting by way of making comparisons but, on their own, such explorations treat the question of religion as something privatised and idiosyncratic. If that was all it was, very few of us would have come into contact with religious ideas in the first place. At the communal level of culture, religion is the carrier of codes in respect of managing and verbalising the ultimate desires of human beings, their sense of origin, their natures in the present, their potential for the future, the hypothetical possibility of some destination in what they understand as infinity or eternity, and the nature and meaning of the universe and the part played in this by human beings. Fundamentally, at this level, religion is a matter of nourishing the collective imagination. ‘God’ is a code that enables us to condense these ideas into manageable capsules of meaning. ‘God’ must be a question — ‘God? — before it can become an ‘answer’. That this is one of the oldest understandings of the human imagination does not render it superfluous now.
Put simply, religion is man’s way of grappling with the greatest, unanswerable questions. That ‘unanswerable’ aspect may appear to negate the exercise from the beginning, but this is just one of the many paradoxes oscillating around this topic: It is the unknown dimension of the answers that renders the questions so vital. There is a difference between ‘unknown’ and ‘unknowable’: The first is a challenge to pursue the question; the second closes it down and invites its suppression. Many of the things we place out of our sight as ‘unknowable’ are vital but mysterious elements of our own functioning; by refusing to look at them, we cripple ourselves.
In almost everything I have said or written on the subject, I have sought to take the definition of religion beyond ideas that limit the discussion to the presumption that the topic relates merely to sets of inherited ‘beliefs’ defining tribal identity or tabulating a moral programme. Far more important than any of this, I believe, are questions of hope, meaning, human empathy, existential sure-footedness, et cetera, and the possibility of achieving a deep, wordless understanding of what existence may entail. But floating this topic has become an increasingly vain exercise in latter-day Irish culture, and especially its media-related contexts, where the word ‘religious’ has become a synonym for ‘pious’, ‘sanctimonious’, ‘moralistic’, ‘joy-denying’, ‘po-faced’ and so forth. In almost every discussion on the topic there is a subtext of — at best — polite condescension towards anyone professing any kind of faith.
What many of those who repudiate ‘religion’ are actually reacting against, of course, is the obscurantism associated with some religious organisations which seek to blinker their followers against knowledge for fear that it will unseat their prevailing understandings. I don’t believe this is religion in any meaningful sense, but usually an instument of social control, as well as a form of refuge for those who are so frightened by reality that they need to pin it down and box it, reducing what should be open and unconfined to yet another crippling ideology. For me, the key distinction resides in the meaning of the word ‘obedience’: Whereas my sense of religion is as a tool of adherence to the total nature of reality, the conventional idea of it emphasises something like an obedience to an arbitrary, capricious Being, or — worse — to His ‘representatives' on Earth.
Unexpectedly, I sometimes experience a strange but silent empathy with the anti-religion mentality, especially when I am asked to speak in some kind of ‘religious’ context, like a church or even a parish hall, or to a group of religious, or even on the steps of St Peter’s basilica. I feel like a fraud. I feel that, on the basis of the totality of my history, I should not be here — that it is inevitable that people will misunderstand my presence and every word I utter. Something about the way I have been conditioned to feel about such matters make it impossible to avoid the notion that it is first of all a demonstration of virtue, which somethign in me rebels against. No amont of reasoning can totally expunge this idea, and indeed the culture I encounter tends invariably to consolidate it. This often leads me to walk away from religious events or occasions with a sense of weariness, of fatique, so that I sometimes find myself wondering if the ritual is worth the candle. There are so many contradictions, all of which are as clear to me as to anyone else, that I am often unsure why it is that I feel compelled to grapple with them.
The misunderstandings of religion I encounter in culture come from two opposing directions: from, on the one hand, the skeptics who will refuse to hear anything differently to the way they always have, and, on the other, from the believers who imagine they know already everything capable of being said, and hear only this no matter where you try to take them. I often feel that no capacity I have for articulation is adequate to overturning either or both of these two kinds of obdurate certitude, and so have for some time now had this feeling that it is impossible to avoid being misunderstood by both the ‘religious’ and the ‘irreligious’ alike. There are those who would regard this as an honourable condition, but I’m not so sure it doesn’t just lead to two different kinds of alienation, existing simultaneously without any possibility of synthesis.
I find it hard to describe the feeling — almost a physical sensation of dizziness — that overcomes me when confronted with one or more people who I imagine are sitting there thinking me ‘religious’ in all the ways I have come to repudiate and run away from as misunderstandings or mistakes. I want to start by saying ‘I am not religious, not in the way you think. Everything you “know” about me is wrong!’
Occasionally, I suffer a spasm of regret in which I briefly repudiate to myself everything I’ve ever said or written on this subject and want to start all over again from a different place, with different words that nobody has ever associated with these questions before. I feel drawn into this area almost against my will. I’d prefer to be engaged in something more hip, more cool, the way I used to be when I was an uncomplicated rock ‘n’ roll scribe working with Hot Press, the world’s most fortnightly rock paper. But something — I don’t mean anything ‘supernatural’, just something unresolved in myself — nudges me to keep coming back to the fundamental matters raised under the heading of ‘religion’.
Very often when I re-immerse myself in the subject via some religious context, encountering once again people of an expressly ‘religious’ disposition, I almost invariably find myself becoming conscious of the limits — even the absurdity — of commonplace understandings of religion in a culture that, by a series of what are little more than tricks, actually renders its very basis implausible. Disbelievign is so much easier than believing. But often, too, in the people I encounter in such contexts, I experience the most disarming humanity, openness and tenderness towards my own confusion. Frequently, in clumsily beginning to articulate to them the kind of disordered ruminations hinted at above, I find them moving ahead of me, or smiling away my stream of contradictory and partly-formed intuitions, in the manner of people who have already had all of these thoughts for themselves. At such moments, I begin to think that doubt is the greater part of believing, and that that is not such a bad thing. And, really, all this is so far beyond words that ‘explaining’ it is a fool’s errand.
My net sense has for some time now been that, underneath the surface meanings and confusions of all words, everyone is ‘religious’, whether they know it or not, or consciously desire this condition for themselves, because religion is no more or less than the language of the total relationship with reality, something that simply being alive makes it impossible to avoid. I place this in contradistinction to ideological views of reality — partial, off-the-peg understandings of things that arrive at concepts and meanings that appear consistent, and allow the believer to move about within that version of reality in a fairly easy and predictive way, but which are nevertheless limited in that they deliberately elide many factors that are actually inseparable from the exercise of living and breathing. An ideological understanding allows the human being to achieve coherence of a sort, but it simultaneously closes down the relationship with infinite, absolute reality, and so is a disposition that emerges almost inevitably from an acceptance of the bunker, itself a form of retreat from total reality. ’Religion’, on the other hand — when properly conceived of — requires me to open up completely, to invite everything in, including that which is mysterious and positivistically unknowable, enabling me to observe myself in eternal time and infinite space. And this, I have found, is also the best way of maximising my contentment in the here-and-now.
Just being alive renders me ‘religious’, because I know I didn’t make myself, and I don’t know who or Who or what did. No — and here, already, we have an imprecision — I need to go further: I don’t make myself. Unless I am a machine, which I am at least certain I am not, something generates me still, every moment of my life, and I would like to be able to nurture in myself some understanding of what that ‘something’ (or ‘Something’) might be, or at least an awareness that there is something vital to my life which I am unable to locate. And sorry but no, I’ve decided that Charles Darwin isn’t the answer: He doesn’t make me either.
Experience tells me that, moment to moment, I must deal with things — like death and time and infinity — of which I have only the most limited understandings. Instead of trying to redefine these concepts to squeeze them into an artificially-constructed theory of reality, I find it better to live with them as they are, hoping to understand more, but accepting that the actual functioning knowledge of such things exists in the wordless part of myself. Religion allows me to do this by means of a set of contingent understandings that provide me with a freedom I know I would otherwise be without. The issue at the heart of my sense of religion could therefore be boiled down to the question: How do I handle those parts of myself I cannot speak of? Do I fight my ‘unknowingness’ by discounting everything that eludes my capacity for formulation, or do I persist in my searching with a sense that I remain defined by the mystery (or ‘Mystery’) and not by my capacity or potential to unscramble it?
In the bunker, there’s one aspect of our self-suppression that remains untenable in the long run: Man may shut the mystery of the universe outside, but he brings the mystery inside within his own being. ‘Man is a mystery’, say Fyodor Dostoyevsky. ‘It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.’ This is why the bunker has found it necessary to suppress the ‘I’ of the human being: because the ‘I’ is what contains the consciousness of the mystery — or Mystery.
I believe now that I must pay attention to everything in my life and ask why it is as it is. What does it mean? What is reality like, really? What is everything ‘like’? (That comparison again!) What does my experience mean? And, then, the experience of others: Is this other person like me? In what ways? How can I know?
This is for me the meaning of the phrase ‘Faith is knowledge’ — which I choose to interpret as ‘religion is the gateway to infinite knowledge’, even though I may never in this life go more than a yard or two beyond it. In a sense, I believe, faith is not a very helpful word, because it suggests something that involves a leap beyond the real, as though to ‘have faith’ we need to convince ourselves of something implausible, to get on our knees and grind our teeth until the impossible seems true. On the contrary, ‘faith’ is concerned with that which is most real, offering an alternative path to explore the deep human curiosity about the universe.
My experience becomes most plausible in the context of that untouchable, unfocused comparison that accompanies me always. This comparison is what enables me to know what beauty is, what good is, what a value might signify. If I dismiss this presence of a persistent state of comparison, my only benchmark is the bunker, which insists that all these questions that preoccupy me are simply inculcated, arbitrary, idle thoughts rather than characteristic questions of a consciousness primed for meaning.
There is nothing implausible about my experience of comparison with some ideal of myself and some ‘nostalgic’ sense of a place more perfect than I can imagine. There is nothing implausible about the fact that, over the course of my life, I have suffered certain consequences which were clearly connected to certain behaviours of mine in which I deviated radically from harmony with reality, and suffered consequences. It was only when I began to see myself again as a subject of a meaningful reality, and to pay attention to my experiences, that I began to construct again a version of myself that at least had the capacity to compete with the bunker version of myself, the world, and myself in the world. And in this way I had become more and more aware of the bunker, even before Pope Benedict gave me a word for it.
And yet, I am not ‘above’ or ‘removed from’ the bunker. I do not repudiate it. It is my temporary home. I treat it with respect. I am grateful that I have become aware of it as a phenomenon in my existence, and as the second element of a dualism that I need to map within my spiritual navigation system. I need to live in the bunker and understand its language and logic — I just need to remember not to believe everything I’m told there, or to think that it is the whole of reality. I need to sift and sort things, to pay atrention when I am confronted by some bunker-situated force or phenomenon, and at the same time be able to access the greater part of myself to engage the necessary process of comparison. In this way I manage, most of the time, to reclaim, minute to minute, my existence and my subjectivity.
‘But you’re very religious, aren’t you?’ The question summons up a box, into which the subject is invited to enter and sequester himself. Its implications include that there is a place called the world and another, much smaller place, within that world, designed to contain those who in some odd way retreat from the world, in fear or revulsion, seeking refuge in a space that seeks to exclude certain aspects of human existence, in which the refugee renounces certain characteristics of everyday humanity, such as — what? . . . sin, sex, ribaldry, irreverence, four-letter words? — and that such concerns are essentially the point of this religious stuff. The question seeks to invert my understanding of what is more real, to imply that religion is the bunker and the bunker the sole meaningful reality.
‘But you’re very religious . . .’ The question, I immediately understood, pointed in the opposite direction to everything I have imagined myself to be saying.
‘But what does that mean?’ I stuttered. I forget what Miriam O’Callaghan stuttered back, but the interview seemed for all useful purposes to be over — with all hope of a true connection lost.
As it happens, I was soon to discover that I was possibly completely wrong in this downbeat initial reaction. That evening, I was driving to the West when I got a call from a journalist colleague with whom I’d long had a prickly professional relationship, even though at a personal level we got on very well. We just disagreed about virtually everything worth thinking about. Now he was speaking to me as though to someone he regarded as a friend. He said he’d heard me on the radio and had felt compelled to call me. He spent a while telling me (not for the first time) that he had no time for all that religion stuff. He didn’t believe anyone who told them they were certain there was a God. But, equally, he continued, he didn’t believe anyone who claimed definitively to be able to say there wasn’t. He didn’t know, and didn’t think anyone else did either. He had no time for the Catholic Church, because of the child-abuse outrages of recent years, and the way these had been mishandled or covered up. But, still, he had wanted to call me, because some of the things I’d said had meant something to him. His wife was very ill and the two of them had been listening to the interview and had, in different ways, found it comforting.
I was as buoyed up by what he was saying as by few moments in my professional life. I had pulled into the side of the road to take his call, and we spoke for perhaps twenty minutes. At the end, I wished my colleague well. I didn’t say I would pray for him and his wife — perhaps I should have, but I was fearful of sparking a short-circuit in our new connection. This is just one of the symptoms of the impossibility of communication in this fraught domain in the culture of modern Ireland.
A few weeks later, I made the mistake of thinking this remote encounter would make a difference when he and I were to be on the same TV programme to discuss the condition of religious consciousness in Ireland. He called me again and said he had been asked to fill in as presenter on a nightly TV show, and would like me to come on to put my point of view. He said that he admired the way I persisted in expressing my positions on these matters, despite the hostility of others, including himself.
This was new, I thought, perhaps the moment I had been waiting for. As the evening of the discussion approached, I looked forward to a more constructive discussion than usual, in which the needs of the human person might be given a place alongside the topic of clerical sex abuse and the many gripes of liberals with the moral teaching of the Catholic Church.
Wrong again. My colleague came straight out of the starting gate with the same vehemence as ever, lambasting Catholicism and everything to do with it. When I tried to shift ground to the question of human desire and its putative ultimate answer, he blocked me with demands that I discuss the chlild abuse topic. I said we had all talked that topic many times in the past, and needed to find another way into the reasons why these dreadful things had occurrred. We went at it hammer and tongs, as though our telephone conversation of a few weeks previously had never happened. After the programme, we walked together out to the car park. I asked him how his wife was — I gathered a little better. He again complimented me on always having a clear viewpoint and not being afraid to enunciate it. In the next breath, he repeated his position about religion: No one could say, one way or the other. We continued the debate in a halfhearted way, mostly reprising what we’d said on live television less than half an hour before. Then, in the middle of a rant about the failure of the church to take responsibility for its wrongs, my colleague stopped, put his hand in his pocket and took out a rosary beads. ‘You and I are on different pages,’ he said, holding up the beads, ‘but I’ve had these in my pocket for the past few weeks, and I cannot tell you why!’ There was nothing more to be said. We shook hands and parted.
This series of encounters alerted me to something I should have been aware of already: that when people speak in the public space of the bunker, they tend to say things they believe to be acceptable, incontrovertible, obvious and safe. They do not speak their hearts, or their hearts’ desires. Often, as a result of the defensiveness that can arise as a protection against the antagonisms of public debate in the bunker, it becomes easy to forget that the person opposite, fulminating against you, is also a human being, trapped in the same inarticulateness as yourself. Perhaps the things he is saying are simply the defence-mechanisms he has adopted in public to enable them to negotiate a bunker-space that is fundamentally intolerant of certain outlooks, and he lacks the courage or language to simply disregard this and speak the truth anyway.
Public debate in the bunker is public debate in the bunker. Its participants will invariably be people with particular ideological outlooks and positions. But, behind that, they will be people with lives and loves and hopes and desires. In a certain sense, what is said in such discussions — on either side — is of its very nature going to be untrue, because of the limits that are placed on what may be said — by culture, official ideology, convention and a myriad other factors. As someone who was a participant in bunker debates for many years — up until eight or so years ago — I wish I could say I always had the presence of mind to understand or remember this.
The certitude which is generally imputed to the condition of being ‘religious’ is a fallacy residing only in the lazy mentality of modern society. Similarly spurious is the notion that people self-describing as ‘religious’ are such by virtue of clinging to a belief system that may be accepted — perhaps, it is often implied, due to myopia or simple-mindedness — or rejected, either way on a completely free and subjective basis — in other words, a positive choice of just another element of self-representation and self-description in the bunker.
In truth, the religious impulse is simply curiosity in its total manifestation, directed at everything that is and might be.
Not to believe in God, or god, or ‘God’, or ‘god’ is actually impossible for me because there is no possibility of imagining my existence otherwise — without some hypothesis of origin that makes sense in the deepest part of myself. I would tentatively hazard that the same is true of every human being. Someone may say he does not believe in God, which is his right, but I do not believe such a person is saying what he imagines he is saying. All he is saying is that he does not want to believe in God, or — more usually — in some reduced concept of someone else’s God which he reacts against. Sometimes, when I was in the futile habit of putting myself in the way of public arguments about these matters, I would find myself telling declared atheists that we had something in common: ‘I don’t believe in the God you don’t believe in!’ Our very existence is itself evidence of the existence of a generating agency, and that it what we are ultimately talking about. The only way not to believe in the creatorless creator of reality — what most of us call ‘God’ — is to be wilfully unresponsive to reality, which is to say to be already dead.
‘God’ is a concept by which we may measure not just ‘our pain’ — as John Lennon posited — but everything. If we have fallen into the habit of thinking of this concept as a being, a person, then that’s possibly because it makes things easier. The Christian story does indeed make this easier, because it tells of God becoming man. This is helpful in some ways, but unhelpful in others. Sometimes, it is difficult to perceive where the ‘humaness’ of Jesus ends and His Godness enters in.
Virtually everything that is evil or ugly in the world we live in arises from the general inability to enter into these questions in a way that would render them as real as the human heart requires them to be. Every single breath of a human being bears witness to the existence of something other and greater than anything in the bunker made by man. I can build edifices of bricks or words, and create no consequential problems for as long as I comprehend the tentative and contingent nature of all such activity. I live in a created reality, which I do not make. I did not make myself, nor do I make myself. You do not make yourself either — hold the front page! More shockingly, we are being made — right now, in this very instant. The sole remaining question, then, is: By what or whom? Or — perhaps, if we are ready — by Whom? The craving of an answer to this question is the defining characteristic of the human imagination. Even if we never become satisfied that we have arrived at the correct answer, we need to live in a constant state of asking that question, because only in this demeanour of asking are we truly alive and truly free.