Faith, Spirituality and Art

I am living in bad faith. Western civilisation is decaying. Homo sapiens is self-destructing. The planet is burning and, all the while, I stand idly by. It is the malaise of modernity. I could choose to live a holistic, ecologically sustainable life; but I don’t. I could give up getting and spending; but I don’t. I am distracted and dazzled by the market and the endless desires it stirs in me. I want to be at one with nature and the cosmos, but I do little or nothing about it. I admire and appreciate the wonder of the world and the beauty of other species. I am in their presence, but I feel I don’t belong. I have a sense of being set apart and different. Following centuries of religious propaganda, I have been deluded into thinking that humans are special, that we are God’s chosen species. And yet we are the ones destroying the planet.

How have I come to be this way? I could blame ‘the faith’ that my mother passed on to me. The faith that she held onto for dear life and pleaded with me never to lose. It was an unquestioning way of being that was refined and promulgated by the Catholic Church. It was simple. The Church had a direct line to God. It knew ‘Him’. She wanted me to believe that if I followed the teachings of the Church, I would be with God when I died and attain eternal salvation.

But it would be wrong to blame my mother. Like many other Irish people, she was colonised by the Catholic Church. It was a very different form of colonisation than that exercised by the English state. The state took our land, our freedom and our rights. The Church took our minds, bodies and souls. We were enticed into churches, into Catholic time and space, into a Catholic way of being. The intended consequence was that we became divorced from nature and the spirits that reigned within it.

Humans have been religious for tens and thousands of years. For most of history, there were no monolithic, institutionalised forms of religion. There was, instead, a myriad of ways of connecting with the cosmos. There were all sorts of spirits and gods, beliefs and rituals, and sacred times and places. It was only in the last two or three thousand years, that all the different ways of being religious were replaced by cadres of experts with their liturgies, doctrines and theologies promulgated in churches, mosques and synagogues.

And so instead of worshipping nature and venerating mountains, lakes and islands, humans began to worship an external, transcendental father figure who stood beyond the cosmos, beyond time and space, who ruled over, and intervened in, daily life.

There is a lot to be said for the simple faith. Believe in the one true God, and that Jesus is the son of God, and all will be well. The enormous infrastructure of the Church, all its theology and canon law, all the power of popes, bishops and priests, rests like a boulder on top of this small pebble of belief. Take away the pebble – the notion of God becoming man – and all that is solid about the boulder falls to pieces.

The problem with the simple faith was that there was little room for questioning. Everyone had to believe. All for one and one for all. The faith became like a hard eggshell. There was no room for debate. Doubts were kept private and personal. Those who questioned were seen as troublemakers and contaminators. They had to be sidelined, incarcerated and eliminated from good Catholic society. But the eggshell had no yolk of firm belief to sustain it. It was maintained by rituals, a performative system of belief. Everyone convincing each other that they were believers.

It was the state, the market and the media, with their alternative conceptions of the good life, that led to the first cracks in the eggshell. People became exposed to new ideas. Then came the sex abuse scandals and soon the shell of the simple faith started to crack open.

There is a dilemma. The demise of the Church means that there is no longer a strong oppositional force to the media and the market. The culture of self-denial propagated by the Church meant that people lived more ecologically sustainable lives. Passions, desires and self-interest were repressed. It was as if Irish Catholics were living in a large monastery. Now it is as if they are living in a large shopping centre.

The big question, then, is what can be done to persuade, not just us Irish but people everywhere, to stop consuming themselves to death. What role, if any, can religion play in creating an ecologically sustainable form of life? This, in turn, raises the question of what it means to be religious. Can people be religious without hierarchical, patriarchal institutions and the notion of a personal, transcendental God? I think the answer is yes and lies somewhere in the resurgence of worshipping nature which happens in paganism, Daoism, Buddhism and stoicism.

The small, but more immediate existential question, is what I can do to transcend the material conditions of my existence, to get out of the rut of consumer capitalism that has corrupted my soul?

I think I have lost a sense of the whole, call it nature, the cosmos or even God. I have some notions, maybe even beliefs, about the nature of cosmic being and how I am part of it all, but there is nothing like a coherent system of belief, let alone a theology. I have rituals that are sacred, that give me an intuitive understanding of the nature of my being. But they are patchy and irregular and do not extend beyond personal rituals. I am not part of any religious group or community. I am a lone religious wolf.

The feeling of being at one with others and with nature is related to the attempt to recognise and accept that, in the scheme of things, I am insignificant. Instead of seeing myself at the centre of the universe, I try to see the universe at the centre of my being. God has no interest in me. There is a spiritual release in accepting that this existence, which seems so definite, is arbitrary. My emergence was miraculous, a tiny piece of sperm fertilising a tiny egg, was contingent on so many factors coming together. My mother, who was forty-three when I was born, admitted I was a mistake.

At the other end of cosmic being, if the big bang had happened a fraction of a second earlier or later, the earth would not exist. There is no explanation for all of this, just an acceptance of the weirdness, wonder and beauty of life and my being a part of it. It is something, despite all the advances of science, about which we have little or no definite knowledge. As it was from the beginning of the emergence of humans, as it is now, any understanding comes through intuition and imagination.

Transcendence

I have a sense, then, that I am part of some cosmic consciousness which is eternal. It is now as it has always been. The cosmos is always emerging. There is life within everything. There is light within darkness.

So how do I develop a sense of belonging to this consciousness? The most obvious answer is by withdrawing from the existing world order, call it the system or the machine, and living as much apart from the market and the media as possible. I need to be in and see the whole and not be obsessed by all that happens in a world I cannot control.

This radical withdrawal from the world was exemplified by the early Christian monks. They went to the ends of the earth, including Skellig Michael, in order not to be distracted by worldly desires. There have been many, such as the philosopher Michael Moriarity, who have tried to emulate their practice.

I have never had the will to withdraw so radically from the world. I am one of those inner-worldly mystics who try to connect with nature and the cosmos. I try to let go this sense of self that I have accumulated over the years and to dissolve into the eternal consciousness of the cosmos.

I rely on moments of self-emptying and self-illumination. I see these as spiritual because they are not oriented towards an interest in dominating, mastering and controlling. They are poetic and dreamlike. They can be fleeting, but their effect can be intense and long-lasting. What is wonderful is that these moments feel joyous, peaceful and loving.

I have methods for trying to induce these ecstatic states. I meditate, sitting or lying still and breathing slowly and regularly, trying to eliminate the thoughts that drift in and out. Most mornings, I walk a lane near my house. It is a lane that leads to a birch wood, a bog and a river. It is difficult to just be in the lane, to see myself as one of the many species who live there, to be caught in time in the beauty and majesty of life. It is difficult not to be overcome by extraneous thoughts of things to be done, said and written. It is difficult not to be a taskmaster, not to want to achieve, regulate and control.

Reason, logic and science have brought enormous benefits, but they have come to dominate what it is to be human. They produce a disconnected, imperious view of being that revolves around mastery and control. The disconnection with each other, with other species, with nature and the cosmos has brought this civilisation and, possibly, our species to the brink of extinction.

Letting go this insignificant self, to which I am very much attached, is not easy. I have done some therapy. I have dabbled with drugs, but most were too soft to achieve any effect. I am intrigued by the idea of taking ayahuasca, or some other powerful hallucinogenic. But I fear I have become too attached to my sense of self to be able to let go.

Feelings of ecstasy, of being at one with the world, also come from being with those I love. It is difficult to capture the intensity that comes with being attuned with others. There is a sense of effervescence, an appreciation of being alive and being together. I get this feeling of transcendence from being with young children, of entering their world of make-believe.

Art, music and dance have been other sources of transcendence as they have always been. I like to imagine what it must have been like when, over fifteen thousand years ago, people went into caves in Lascaux in France and created on the walls images of the world in which they lived. I imagine the images flickering through the flames of the fires they lit and people dancing to the sound of drums echoing around the cave.

Art is a reminder of the importance of transcendence, of challenging the way we see and understand ourselves and the world in which we live. It has nothing to do with progress, mastery and control. Something real but often ineffable emerges in the encounter between the creator and the receiver. It is a revelation.

I like to think of social life as a form of performance art. There is an art to loving, to creating meaning, to smiling, laughing and making people happy. We do it with children, but we find it difficult to do with each other. It is central to creating collective consciousness, of being aware of, and sensitive to, each other. The times and spaces in which we create this collective consciousness become sacred. The more we can live in those sacred moments, the more we can overcome our species alienation and stop living in bad faith.

I believe that the response to the climate emergency has to be religious. Science and technology will not solve our problems. But nor will dogmatic religions. We will have to find new ways of being religious, of celebrating the beauty and wonder of life, of balancing our intuitive and imaginative understanding of nature and the cosmos with reason, but all the time being aware of the need to be understanding, humble and compassionate.

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