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Belief Presenter: Joan Bakewell In this edition of Belief I shall be examining the world view of someone who brings together many strands of thinking. John O'Donohue is an Irish poet, and an inheritor or the ancient Celtic traditions. He's also a former parish priest, deeply knit into the theology of the Catholic Church. More than that, he is a scholar and philosopher, who learned German in order to study at Tübingen University where he published his research on Hegel. John O'Donohue first came to wide public attention in 1999, with the publication of 'Anam Cara' - Gaelic for 'Soul Friend', which went onto the Irish best seller list and stayed there for over a year. The book that partners it 'Eternal Echoes', came a year later. A volume of poetry 'Conamara Blues' was published in 2000. Then in 2003, his book 'Divine Beauty' was published, an exposition of the concept of beauty as an aspect of the divine. In both his poetry and prose, he seeks to explore the way the Celtic imagination can bring insight and comfort into the world of pain and yearning that he believes confronts us today. Q John O'Donohue you're here in London, but you've come from a remote part of Connemara, where you began. A stark landscape, bad weather - bad we would say - but you enjoy it all, and yet your writing has made you a, a best seller and celebrated I'm sure in the literary circles of Dublin. Is this a duality for you? A No it's not actually. I find that THE place where my spirit is at home is in the West of Ireland landscape. That's where I was born, in the kind, feminine limestone of County Clare, which is the Burren with all its beautiful, mystical shaping. And in the last several years I've lived in Connemara, and I love the bleakness of Connemara. I find that it's a place of undoing, that it unravels a lot of the faults, kind of knittings that one brings across one's perceptions and one's mind. And it's almost a place of bleak epiphany, where many things kind of come to light and come to transparence. So the landscape is a kind of hard, ascetic and beautiful companion, and I find that when I'm there and when my mind settles down, and I'm at home, that there's a lot of visitations to the white page each morning. Q Now you're born in the Burren, which is a particularly craggy and distinctive landscape. And before you were perhaps subsumed into your writing entirely, you were politically active there. You were saving it from the government, you ran a campaign to keep it pure and beautiful. A That's right. In 1990 I returned from Germany after pursuing doctoral work, and I was a priest then in this parish in the northern part of the Burren. And the government had a plan, which they'd just unveiled then to build a huge tourist centre in one of the most virgin and beautiful areas of the Burren under a mountain called Mullaghmore, which is, it's almost like a beautiful series of round shapes which have collapsed in the middle, and have these amazing curvatures. And there's no infrastructure in there. So a group of us formed together, and called ourselves The Burren Action Group and for 10 years we fought the government. And it was a hugely demanding campaign, and eventually we took them to the High Court and proved that they didn't have the power to build it. They took us to the Supreme Court a few days after, and we won there as well. The result of that was that we brought the government in under the planning laws, to which every citizen has to adhere. We got the site restored exactly as it was, and it raised the consciousness of the environment in Ireland. Q Now your love of this landscape and your wish to keep it virgin has more import than that. It shows that you're y'know, a man of this world, and you can handle government campaigns. But also you talk about landscape as the 'first born of creation'. You talk about it as 'the primal living womb'. Now landscape is inert. Isn't it the impact of landscape on people? A I don't believe that at all. I think there's a choice there, Joan. I think it makes a huge difference when you come out of your home in the morning, whether you believe on the one hand you're stepping into inert space, which is endless, or whether you're stepping into something that is animate and alive. And I really believe that landscape is alive. I think that one of the amazing things about humans is the way that we have usurped the notion of consciousness in almost an imperialistic way for ourselves. We've cut out the whole animal kingdom and we've also cut out landscape. Now they're not conscious in the way that we're conscious. Landscape, no human mind, even the greatest ascetic, could endure the silence and stillness that landscape endures, and the silence that animals endure. And we were the last arrivals, the human-come-lately - a few minutes to midnight, if you take the whole thing as just one day. And yet we have claimed everything in our name and reduced it, and I think that is something that has had disastrous consequences, and we're making our planet unliveable, and we're doing huge damage. And I think that the other point is that landscape is the first scripture. It is THE wisest text, because we're not alien to it. We are the children of the earth, and the earth is in our bodies - so the rhythm that's outside is inside. Q But in what sense would you say that landscape is living? Was it living and present before mankind? A I think it was finding and deepening and developing its own textures, and its own system of inner echoes. And it has a sense of home in it that predates us. I mean I know fields up the mountains where we have cattle at home - my brother has cattle - and where I go, when I go home I'd herd the cattle for him. And you'd arrive up there to these fields, where nobody walks, except for once a week my brother and neighbours and that. And you would have a sense that this place has a sureness in its own identity, a belonging, and some kind of primal spirit. Q Is this pantheism? A No, I don't think it's pantheism - it's the old distinction between pantheism and panentheism that, I believe that, that the biggest theological question is - is there anything outside God? If you say there is, then you're not talking about God. So it's some primal level, everything must subsist within divinity. And I think that the actual truth is that we are so intimately skin, breath close to the depths of the mystery that if we were more conscious of it, maybe we would feel suffocated by it. Q You live in this wonderful landscape, and you've chosen to live alone there on a mountainside, surrounded by often quite wild weather. What can you say to us who live in cities? A Well I think that in cities that there is still a connection with the earth. I have one poem here which is in response to part of a symphony, written by a friend of mine, Dominic Crawford Collins that'll be premiered here soon. And it's about that thing about a street, and it's exactly the point of your question. And it's called 'Overheard'. 'How one word long thought, never uttered here, Q Well that is a particular insight into ghost and whisper. But what about the cacophony of life that gets in the way? A There is that cacophony there, and it's there in nature, even in the midst of bleak landscape as well. You have storm, rain, you have huge fog and mist in the West of Ireland, which is the ultimate invitation to melancholia. You've all of that negativity there. I'm not arguing for landscape as just a benign presence which is the source of relentless epiphany. I'm arguing for it as a primal companion that has all the dexterity and multiplicity of a huge kind of presence. I remember in California some years ago, hearing the physicist Brian Swimm say that we are of one of the first generations that have managed to successfully forget that we live in a universe. And I think that that is true actually - it's a strange thing to say. I think smog at night in the city blocks out the sky and you don't know that you are in the midst of an incredible infinity. Q Let's talk about your background. Father and uncle farmers, father a stonemason. You grew up knowing the stones in the fields round about. Your mother you speak of as the shelter of your life. Was this a devout family? A It was, it was a devout family. It was open, it was a truthful kind of family. My father was an incredibly independent person, an affable man, but a man who as he often said, He didn't owe anything to anybody - so he was clear and independent and free. And was great fun, but was also in some beautiful way haunted by the eternal, constantly. When we were working off… Q Did he speak of it? A Yeah. Very frequently. Not in a way to make us be haunted by it but of course that is the effect in fact. But he was a very prayerful man. I'd say - and I was in religion for years as a priest - he was the holiest man I ever met, priests included. He had, he got there, he was inside, he was talking from within it. And often when we'd, if he was working in a field alone in the mountain, open gardens we had, if you brought him up tea or that, you'd often hear him praying before you'd see him. So he was, he was really in the presence, and he had this sense as well, which I suppose kind of came over to me, of the transience of things. He used to often say 'Life is like a mist on the hillside. It's there for a while, then it goes and you'll barely know if it was there at all.' So there was this constant focus in a very gentle way, on the fact that we were merely strangers and visitors here. Q You went away to boarding school at the age of 12 and then you went to Maynooth, the celebrated seminary in Ireland. Now when did you decide to go into the priesthood? A While I was in secondary school, before I went to Maynooth, I was, I suppose really touched by this idea of transience, and I wanted to do something that would make things eternal in some way. And the two things I thought about were medicine, and priesthood. And I finally realised that if I didn't have a go at priesthood it would always kind of follow me. So I did, and I went into priesthood and studied for the priesthood with a Beckettian clarity about the Church and religious systems. And I must say while I was in there I was never disillusioned really. I knew before I went in what was there, and I had er an amazing voyage at Maynooth. Maynooth is one of the most amazing centres of learning in Europe. Has a huge tradition, and I met some scholars there like Professor Jerry Watts and Professor Tom Marsh, Professor Fein and Professor Pat Hannan, who were just world figures really, and opened the treasuries of wisdom and learning. And it was one of the most amazing things - it paralleled something actually in my childhood. I remember at the age of about 7 one day, going up for the cows, and discovering air and distance, and that I was a separate object in the landscape. And similarly when I was about 21, my mind woke up in university and suddenly I began to see that thought and perception are the lenses through which we see everything. And the huge privilege, and the awful frightening responsibility of trying to think creatively and critically. Q Now that hasn't always been the legacy of the Catholic Church, to think creatively and critically. It's very often happy for you to conform and not question. So did you come into conflict, or did you find these challenging intellects you were among stimulated you? A I found them very stimulating, and they really stimulated me. And personally I always, maybe it was because I was kind of, had a certain dexterity with concepts, and that made a natural space for me within a fairly closed system, that if you life I was on a borderline, where I was left alone. But I found a hospitality for the things that I was opening up and that, I suppose when I, when I eventually left the priesthood then, after about 19 years, and I was looking back on my priestly time, it was almost like in a way a time of deconstruction, that for an awful lot of people that I ministered intimately to in parishes and that, what I was trying to do in a way was to refine their fingers. This sounds strange, 'cos it's almost like a musical instrument. So that they could undo so much of the false netting that was crippling their own spirits. Q Well what is this false netting? I mean are you talking about the doctrines of the Church? A No I'm not talking about the doctrines of the Church which I've great respect for actually. I always thought there was millions of pounds to be made from the invention of a small, little machine called an Orthodoxiometer that would go off in the places where there were no orthodoxy, and I tell you it'd go off in some very unexpected places (laughs). Q No but did you, did you accept the doctrines? A I do. Q …the orthodox oc…er y'know the, the Incarnation… A I did…the doctrines yes. Q …Resurrection, and so on? A That's right - I accepted them clearly. No, what I'm talking about was the things I think the Catholic Church are really wonderful at - sacramental structure, the mystical tradition, the prayer tradition, the intellectual tradition, which can hold their own with the best in any religious system, where I think and where my preaching always kind of tried to make an opening for people was, I think they're not trustable in the area of Eros at all. I think that an awful lot of the argument for hierarchy is bogus and I also think that there's a pathological fear of the feminine in there. So I tried to always kind of open these things. And I think a lot of the notions of sin, particularly in relation to sexuality put huge burdens on people that should never have been put on them. For instance… Q Did it put a burden on you? A Somehow or another it didn't. I kinda never believed it. Of course, when I was an adolescent I believed it, but then later on, I was able to get the burden off my shoulder in some way. Q Without guilt? A Yeah. I was, really. Because I, I never, maybe it was being a peasant like, and a farmer, coming into that world of theological laboratories and everything, that I trusted the native scent of my own experience more than their prescriptive ideas about what should be, 'cos I knew my body. Q And what about the feminine in yourself as you were growing up through adolescence and within the Church still? Did you find space for that? A I think I have. Of course the Jungian psychologists say that the centre
of masculine creativity is actually the anima, and I really believe that
when you do begin to awaken to creativity, that the feminine comes alive
in you in a very, very special way. For instance there was a poem that
I wrote where I think that is particularly luckily maybe achieved - and
that's the 'Nativity' poem, which is er one of the 15 sonnets in the 'Conamara
Blues' book and it's of course a sonnet about birth and about creativity,
but it's also about the feminine, and I might read that now. The Nativity: Someone is coming ashore inside her, In a corner stall of pilgrim strangers, Outside each other now, she sees him first, Q I can't believe you've seen a child born, but you must have been near to birth. A I have never seen a child born. But before I wrote that poem I knew my deficiencies in trying to imagine it, and there's a friend of mine from Connemara, a lovely, wild Connemara woman, who'd had just given birth to a child about 4 months beforehand, and I talked to her for about an hour and a half and took 8 pages of notes and filled it in and then imagined myself into it. Q You were called to the priesthood, and you had a parish. After 19 years, you closed that book in your life. Why did you do that? A Because there were two reasons I suppose - it's an intimate question, y'know? And it took me a long time to make the decision. The best decision I ever made was to become a priest, and I think the second best decision was to resign from public priestly ministry. There were two reasons primarily. One was conflict with the bishop that I had, that he wanted to appoint me full time to a pastoral ministry, and I wanted time to write. I made him all kinds of compromise offers, but he accepted none - he wanted all or nothing. And the second reason was that gradually in terms of the system, the way it was, I was finding that I was having less and less in common, and found it difficult to represent a lot of the positions. Well I'd never represented a position I didn't believe in, but I finally said to myself 'My God, like I've given it so much of my life' and I was finding the system of it more a burden than a gift, I suppose. Q Let's talk about the development of the ideas within the Celtic tradition, because they have furnished and nourished your language, and it's your language which has created this new perception of the ideas of your poetry and your philosophy, and that has made you so popular and accessible to people. Where does this Celtic tradition come from? Was it something in your scholarly background? Was it in your father's prayers? Is it pagan, is it Christian? A I think it's all of these things. The distance which enabled me to view it as something which I'd like to bring to the surface was when I returned from Germany. And having been in Tübingen for 4 years and learning German, and working inside Hegel's world in the white monastery of Hegel's thought for these 4 years, when I returned to my own culture, I got another look at it as if from outside. I mean in the Hegelian world, and specially in idealistic philosophy and theology as practised in Tübingen, you couldn't make 2 moves, you could hardly put on the kettle without it being an implication and a (laughing) dialectical action! And then I remember coming back and to my home. And my first morning in home, there was a few neighbours in, and I was saying nothing and just overhearing, listening to the conversation. And there was a full hour of discussion went on in which not one analytic sentence fell - and yet so many things were discussed through anecdote and the oblique respectfulness and resonance of story. And I said to myself 'There's something in this tradition.' So what I tried to do, I mean I never pretended that this was a scholarly exposition in a systematic way, 'cos I don't think all the elements are there. But what I tried to do was to make explicit some of what I would consider the implicit, philosophical perception behind a lot of the Celtic intuitions. Q Talk about your definition of the soul. What do you believe the soul to be? A It's interesting that the Christians in one of the creeds, say 'We believe in the seen - seen and unseen.' And I think that one of the most exciting arenas is the area of the invisible. I don't consider the invisible empty. I think it's dense with refined presences, that are not coming up on the radar of our perception, our concepts. My understanding of 'soul' would be that it is the unseen, hidden dimension of the self, and that it is the place if you like, beneath or beside or above the mind and consciousness. To put it in imagistic terms and spatial terms I think it's the kind of field of presence or colour or light that suffuses the body and that holds the body, so that the body is actually in the soul. And then in Eckhartian terms - Meister Eckhart, whom I find wonderful on the soul, Meister Eckhart says that the soul has 2 faces. One faces towards the world, and the other faces towards the divine, where it receives as he says 'the kiss of God'. And one of the most radical and subversive things I ever read anywhere, I read in the Latin writings of Meister Eckhart, where he said that there is a place in the soul that neither time, nor flesh, nor no creative thing can touch. So I think that the exciting thing then is you've all these individuality humans dwelling in these bodies. These bodies they are. And then you have the world of the between, where in some strange way, without knowing it, we're all connected. And the script of that between-ness is not visible. Like when I was writing the book on beauty, I had at the end of each chapter a little page that I called 'The page of lost questions.' And I had to take them out in the end because they were breaking the run of the text. But they're from that in between world. Questions like the things that have never happened to you - how do they shape you? Is there some strange or walking home this evening, through the streets of Leningrad, a stranger you will never meet or know, but whose life has had an incredible influence on yours. These are the kinda questions from that domain, y'know? We don't know. Q You speak of life, the individual soul, em, the great presence, the two way facing. But what is the divine? A The divine is itself. The divine is that which is totally and utterly itself. It's the cradle of origin, the primal presence - and it's there everywhere and it's in all of us - like the most exciting thing about humans, which Christianity has kept from us, like it's amazing actually. I find it so ironic, that at the heart of Christianity, well of any of the religions, you have the centrality of the uniqueness of a poet/carpenter … without the idea of individuality and individuation. Incarnation would make no sense. Without the idea of imagination, we'd have no incarnation. If Jesus had, had no imagination, there'd be no Incarnation. We'd know nothing of the Trinity. And yet it's kept from us and deemed to be sinful. I think the idea of individuality is just absolutely fascinating, and that the deepest thing in individuality is actually the divine presence. To put it in colloquial terms and loosely, like we're kind of undercover gods and goddesses, hanging around in clay form. And sometimes we glimpse it, but mostly it's darkened from us. That's a lovely line of St Paul y'know, 'Now we see in a glass darkly, then we shall see face to face.' Q But there could go along with that a sort of spiritual pride, which elevates us into god creators. A That's right. Well I mean that was Feuerbach's position, who said that the word 'God' actually stands for the optimal characteristics of the human writ large. I think that it's the presence of the divine in us actually is what creates the huge poignancy in us. And so we're kind of threshold creatures, we're neither here nor there - we're in between, y'know? If you compare, and I've often done it when you'd be out working with animals and that, how at home in the earth the animals seem, and how our eyes are always drawn to the mountains and to the skies, but yet we don't fully belong there either. So humans are fascinating, precisely because of the eternal restlessness that's within them. And also, they're so poignant because of their vulnerability. And because they're so hurtable, even one which has achieved so much and looks very competent and sure and everything, that there's a naked place where everybody can be got to, and really hurt. And it's that vulnerability and also of course the other side of it then is our huge capacity for negativity and for destruction. Q You see you, in 'Anam Cara' you certainly did reach people. People spoke of it 'reaching and answering the yearnings' at the heart of people, alienated people today. I wondered how much you were answering your own questions as you wrote it, and what your own needs are, that need to be answered. A I suppose actually that's exactly what I was doing when you say it like that, is that in some way unknown to myself what I was bringing out on the table was my own intuitions and giving them time to unfold. I suppose one of the things that, that I really feel so drawn to, is the ol' divine. And I'm not holy like, d'you know what I mean, in the traditional way of piousness and all that explicit, hard edged superficial old banter of religion. I can't bear it, I think it's so crude and coarse and vulgar. Because I think the divine, the divine is like a huge smile that breaks somewhere in the sea within you, and gradually comes up again. It's an incredible, intimate thing. It's every bit as intimate as sexuality, and as human love, y'know? Things that move me as well as human suffering - I hate to see people in pain. I find that really, especially really good people. And good people often, it's an amazing thing to me - it's so disturbing - the really kind people who've never done any damage to anybody, sometimes get wracked asunder by the visitations of pain, disappointment, suffering, despair. And that's… Q Does that ever give you cause for doubt? A It does of course - absolutely. I go through Beckettian periods when there's absolutely nothing there. But of course 'nothing there' for me is, I don't look on absence as the invitation to close my account with God. That's the deepening thing - I've always found it. An old spiritual director taught me in my first year I went through an awful 6 months of bleakness when I was studying for the priesthood. And he said 'It's like when the seed is sown' and he said 'the ground is raked and it's sore, or the pruning, and something else comes through.' I've always believed that. And I often think actually, against myself I often see this when I'm going through darkness, is that a lot of suffering is just getting rid of dross in yourself. And sometimes lingering and hanging in in the darkness is often - I say this against myself - a failure of imagination, to imagine the door into the light. Q Is that the essence of Good Friday? A I think it is. I've always found something awfully disturbing about Good Friday. It never lets me alone - even if I had forgotten which day it was, I'd know the day it was, because I think that something happened there. Some kind of awful, raw quickening that always comes alive on that day. It was where of course, the ultimate cry of human longing ran headlong into the silence of God, and was left, the cry was left out there like a huge, red hook trying to reach up into the heavens, but nothing received it. It's a day of, of, it's being touched by the void - it's the abyss day. Q John O'Donohue, thank you. A Thank you Joan.
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