Irish Voices on Faith, Spirituality and Art

Irish Voices on Faith, Spirituality and Art: Introduction
 

The project about Faith, spirituality and art found its origins in many talks with Irish authors. One of them, Lisa McInerney, stated, 'It’d be next to impossible to write an authentic contemporary Irish piece and not have some mention of religion in it. […] we have become extremely secular in a very short period of time, but it’s still there in the framework of life […] We have reached the age of the individual and the individual is god. Nationalism is a collective individualism – that’s an oxymoron, isn’t it? […] This is one of the big tasks that literature has to face up to at the moment. We have a capacity to dismantle some of this individualism.'[1]

So far thirty-three participants have accepted the invitation to contribute: twenty-two women and eleven men; twenty-two from the Republic and eleven from Northern Ireland; of all these five live in the diaspora. The format of the texts was entirely open: most authors wrote an essay, some sent poems, two a short story.

In their texts, most authors reflect on the Christian institutions, which they experience as being in the grip of masculine values (dogma, indoctrination, focus on power, generalisations, closure) while feminine values could transform that aspect of community by their focus on empathy, personal responsibility, a focus on the particular, a sense of humour and a drive to open perspectives. For the vast majority of participants the family was very enabling, translating the community’s religion into a positive awareness of something that transcends the egos here and now.

While we hear voices from different generations (the eldest born in the 1950s, the youngest in the 1990s), the vast majority has left the institution, but is thankful for the beautiful material, the rhythms and images they offered to nurture the soul. Often these form a firm basis for their exploration of thought systems that are characterised by generosity, sensuality and sincerity. The idea of an external God (and evil) is replaced by an unconscious layer in the self which is also beyond direct reach, but which can be glimpsed. As a person cannot simply know their self, the other is even further out of reach, which calls for respect and a sense of awe for an ever-present dimension that belongs to humanity yet escapes it. To several authors, writing is the way to touch on that unthought known that seems lodged in the self and can reverberate in some details of daily life. Sharpening their sensitivities, doing away with dualistic systems, these writers explore materiality in its immaterial vibes, they are open to the impact of a far past on their present, they are on the alert to receive the unexpected.

Hedwig Schwall 
Project Director & Editor