The Habit of Thinking

The Habit of Thinking

When my mother wanted a new baby my father drove her to the Regional Hospital in Galway. There, in the little oratory, she prayed, and God, hearing her prayer, dropped down his Golden Chute, popped in a baby and down the chute the baby flew, fat and happy and gurgling, into my mother’s waiting arms.

I don’t know if anyone ever told me this, or if I imagined it, but that is my earliest awareness of an entity called God. He was more than the word ‘God’ that I heard at Mass or in school or during our nightly recitation of the Rosary. The image of Him dispatching babies to eager, loving parents made clear to me that this was a kind, benevolent god who answered our prayers and granted our requests. Nothing about this god was forbidding or judgmental or punitive.

During the summer holidays when I was very young, I used to walk to 10 o’clock Mass on weekday mornings with my grandmother who lived with us until her death when I was seventeen. She was a thoughtful woman, prayerful but not pious. As we walked along the road to the church, I sensed that she was thinking of God, and that her quiet presence, her tranquillity, was because of this thinking. I walked silently by her side, more present and alert to the butterflies and the birdsong and the hidden life in the hedgerow than normal, because my grandmother’s state had transmitted itself to me.

Before I grew up and wised up to the suffering and desolation of the world, I was a god-minded child. I loved prayers and Bible stories, parables, the lilt and tilt and rhythm of the Beatitudes. I was drawn more to the miracles in the gospels than to the magic of fairy tales. Jesus’s feats—raising Lazarus from the dead, feeding the multitudes—were more real and credible than frogs turning into princes, because Jesus had been real, he had existed. Sitting alone in the church sometimes, listening to the little creaks and sighs in the wooden rafters and pews, I felt the way I sometimes felt on the country road with my grandmother or when I stood in a field or under trees at sunset: aware there was something there to be perceived, and I was close to it, and if I was silent and concentrated hard enough I might reach it. I was susceptible to the numinous, I suppose. I was, too, sometimes floored by the terrible: the Good Friday gospel where Jesus was stripped naked, spat at and mocked by the soldiers before his crucifixion, or when Judas returned the thirty pieces of silver and then ‘went away and hanged himself.’ By the age of eleven or twelve I was seeking out books on the lives of saints, drawn to the visionaries and mystics who experienced road-to-Damascus type conversions. The idea of a vocation—giving oneself over to one thing, to the divine—was attractive. Looking back, now, I was perhaps already feeling the pull or yearning for the meaning behind our existence, and religion was there, the first and most obvious port of call to try to get access to that meaning.

Anthony Cronin, the critic, said that Joyce grew up in an Ireland where Catholicism was ‘a fact, like climate’. This was, to some extent, still the case during my childhood in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, but the climate was more temperate and the practice more laissez-faire. Fear of the wrath of God or of hellfire and damnation was never part of my religious experience, as it had been in my parents’ youth, when, at Confessions, the priest would ask my mother if she’d been ‘keeping company’, a euphemism for having a boyfriend, but one which carried the whiff of sin. As a family, we were positively disposed to religion and the Catholic church. I had an uncle who was a priest and two aunts who were nuns, beloved family members. They were all teachers and it was our educational progress more than our spiritual development they were concerned with. My priest-uncle’s name was Patrick but we called him ‘Uncle’ and, because he taught in our local secondary school and lived only a few miles away, his presence in our childhood was constant. He raised the bar for us culturally and intellectually, and was so involved in our lives and so concerned for our futures that it was like having a third parent. His influence was practical —he bought us books, encyclopaedia, classical music records; he took us on trips—but because he was progressive and forward-thinking, he was also, in many ways, my soul guide, my psychopomp.

All of which is to say that I came through my childhood and youth with a fairly benign view of religion and God and unscathed by the repressive hold the Catholic Church exerted over so many of its followers. Now, whenever I read novels or memoirs by writers who grew up in religious homes, I realise that that I enjoyed what might be called a Catholic-lite upbringing. The experiences of American writers like Patricia Lockwood, the daughter of a Catholic priest, and the Canadian Miriam Toews, who grew up in a Mennonite community were far removed from mine. Their daily lives seemed to have been suffused with fervent prayer and Bible classes and the presence of the Holy Spirit. Catherine Lacey, who grew up in a fundamental Christian home in the American South where the Bible was understood in a literal sense, said that Jesus was her first boyfriend.

In the whole scheme of scientific reality, we humans—perched on a tiny planet that orbits a sun—are insignificant. With its own immutable laws, its trillions of stars and planets, its vast energy and stellar fusion, the universe does not need us in order to continue to exist. Science tells us this, it tells us the how—how the universe was created and how it functions—but it does not tell us the why. Why did it all begin? For what purpose does it—and mankind—exist? What is the meaning of existence? Science is not concerned with metaphysics except insofar as our species will satisfy the second law of thermodynamics and its central concept, entropy, which states that every system proceeds to disorder and dissolution. And because the rate of entropy always increases over time, the universe will, eventually, succumb. The void left by the unanswered metaphysical questions around why we exist means that much of humanity tends towards a religious explanation: that a higher power—such as the God of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition—is behind the creation of the universe, and that the ultimate goal is our salvation in an afterlife.

By early adulthood I recognised the negative impact of organised religions—with their dogmas, made-made rules and hierarchies, and the certainty that only their particular God and their exclusive path led to salvation—and I had little time for any religious system. The knowledge that it was—and still is—the European Christian empires with their colonial and settler-colonial lusts that committed genocides of indigenous peoples, that massacred, enslaved and subjugated, raped and pillaged, stole land and resources, erased cultures, languages and traditions compounded my disillusionment. Wherever the boot of white European colonialists—and their imperial offspring, the United States of America—have gone, often in the guise of bringing God and civilisation to the savages, their racist, criminal enterprises have created carnage and unleashed unimaginable cruelty.

By the time the catalogue of sexual abuse crimes of the Catholic Church were revealed, I had abandoned regular Catholic practice. I had started to write, and the writing life began to satisfy some deep need in me, and deliver, however briefly, occasional sublime moments like those I’d experienced alone in the church or in nature as a child, and something too of the rapturous, dizzying feelings I’d felt in teenage years reading the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Donne and Emily Dickinson, and later Rilke. In rare moments of writing, the sense that I was getting close to something—putting my finger on a higher note—felt religious in its intensity. In an autobiographical story ‘Ocean 1212-W’, Sylvia Plath described her experience of listening to her mother reading Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘The Forsaken Merman’ aloud as a child. She got gooseflesh on her skin and did not know why. ‘I was not cold,’ she wrote. ‘Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. A spark flew off Arnold and shook me like a chill. I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into a new way of being happy.’ Very late one night, about fifteen years ago, I stood before my bathroom mirror at bedtime. I was living alone then and I’d been working on a story for weeks, months maybe, and was so completely immersed in the writing and in the life of the story that days would pass without my speaking to anyone or leaving the house. That night I was on a high—I knew the end of the story was approaching. As I looked in the mirror brushing my teeth, it came to me: This is a vocation. This complete surrender to one thing, writing, is a vocation.

In my twenties, I discovered Carl Jung, and it’s fair to say that I became a follower of Jung in much the same way as a believer might say he or she is a follower of Christ. Not that Jung would have wanted to be compared with the Messiah or any deity, but his all-encompassing approach to the psyche and his writings on the Unconscious became, in many ways, my religion, and made more sense to me than any theological or philosophical work I’d read. The path to individuation in the Jungian sense is the journey of the psyche, the journey of the soul or the self to wholeness, and is simply another term for becoming more conscious. The pursuit of consciousness is, for me, the pursuit of meaning. This pursuit of consciousness is why I write; it is part of my literary vocation: I write to become conscious. What I had sought in religion in childhood—those moments of perception, the longing for meaning—I now seek in the everyday strivings—reading, writing, thinking—to become more conscious. It is, of course, a lifetime’s work, and maybe a death time’s work too if the soul or the psyche continues to exist in some metaphysical sense. And everything feeds into that journey, and there are no accidents. Everything—life in extremis and the death struggle—has meaning, and nothing is ever wasted.

And so, even though there is much about the Catholic Church that I abhor, I have never ceased to be grateful for having had a Catholic upbringing. It is not just that the sacraments of Communion and Confirmation serve as valuable rites of passage for children but that the wealth of scripture, religious ritual and practice I was exposed to for the first eighteen years of my life became part of my human material, and helped lay down my cultural and intellectual foundations. The rhythm of prayer, the wellspring of biblical language and stories, the hymns and sung antiphons I absorbed at an early age—all of these acted as a natural bridge to an appreciation of literature and art and music as I got older. As a writer this material must also contribute to how I write and what I write, it must lend a certain acoustic, a certain colour and climate, to my work. And because religious, artistic and literary works are so closely entwined and all things divine have served as inspiration, it also means that I had instant access to a trove of religious and literary references and images, to metaphor and allusion and to a language that travels, is immediately recognisable, and needs no explanation. Calvary. Gethsemane. Lot’s wife and the burning bush and Sodom and Gomorrah. I would have liked to have had a Classical education and learned Latin, like my aunts and uncles—this would have afforded me a deeper knowledge of and a wider connection with the literary and religious domains. Notwithstanding this deficit, I can still remember the quiver of excitement I felt whenever I came upon the—very abundant —religious references in Joyce’s work. How familiar and nostalgic the Benediction prayers ‘sounded’ on the page as they wafted out of the Star of the Sea Church to Gerty McDowell’s ears on Sandymount Strand, and how naturally I hummed the notes of Tantum Ergo, remembered from my teenage years in the church choir.

I think that without these ‘Catholic’ riches my life and even my imagination would be somewhat impoverished. That is not to say that those without a religious upbringing suffer some kind of lack, but rather that something in my sensibility or my psyche was compatible with the religious condition, and the early urge towards the divine was the precursor to the path towards consciousness.

After my divorce in my mid-thirties and out of the blue, I fell in love with a Muslim man and, for a few years, I fell in love with Islam too. Omar’s practice had partly lapsed, but he still fasted Ramadan every year, and his Islamic upbringing and beliefs revealed themselves in his everyday life and example. Living with him I witnessed the beauty of Islam in practice—kindness and courtesy, respect, tolerance. And patience, which he considered the greatest virtue of all. All the misconceptions I had absorbed about cultural Islam were turned on their heads, and I was so curious that I embarked on a comprehensive study of Islam. Being one of the Abrahamic faiths, there was much that was familiar from my own Catholic upbringing—the same God, the same prophets, the same basic tenets—Love thy neighbour, Do unto others. I grew to admire the sincerity of the Muslims I can into contact with, the beauty and clarity and simplicity of the teachings of the prophet Mohammad and the wisdom of the writings of Islamic scholars like Al Ghazali. I was hungry for this new kind of knowledge and meaning. I learned to pray and, for a couple of years, I fasted the month of Ramadan with Omar. After a long day without a sip of water or a morsel of food, the moment the fast is broken and a delicious moist Medjool date touches the tongue and a cool glass of water is lifted to the lips, the feeling of gratitude and joy and uplift and the sense of goodwill and benevolence for all of mankind is unlike anything I’ve ever known in my life.

And so, for a while, the search for meaning and vocational commitment reverted to religion and alighted on Islam. It brought meaningful experience and ritual at a time in my life when ritual was necessary. Gradually, I grew more questioning and disillusioned with what I regarded as excessively restrictive interpretations of the teachings of Islam and the halal rules, rules that began to impinge upon my sense of freedom and autonomy. I had, for example, difficulty accepting that non-Muslims and those who never knew Islam —like my father who was terminally ill with cancer at that time—would not be saved, could not be admitted into Heaven on Judgment Day. Or that non-Muslims and Muslims who had sinned would experience great suffering and torment in the grave as they awaited the last day. The relationship with Omar too started to falter at this time, and then ended. I have never regretted my encounter with Islam. I view it as having been spiritually and intellectually enriching, part of my own individuation process, another rite of passage of consciousness.

These days, in a world when all pretences at justice and mercy are dispensed with, when international law is being incinerated; when the genocide of a voiceless, defenceless people in Gaza is militarily and morally supported by most of the nations in the West—the self-declared upholders of democracy and world order; when those self-declared upholders of the world order have submarines cruising our oceans fitted with nuclear missiles which can, singly, wipe out not one country, but a whole continent; and when those with voices and the power to influence remain silent in a genocide— it’s all I can do to stay conscious and bear witness. I try to write, but am paralysed. How on earth can I go into a room and make up stories when all that consumes me is the slaughter of the innocent, the destruction of everything that makes life possible, the absence of mercy for the weak? And even if I wrote essays or polemics on the genocide in Gaza or the atrocities around the globe—the holocausts, the famines, the depravities, the rape of the planet—what good will it do? The human rights lawyers and historians, the academics and activists—far more expert in this field than I am—who write and speak out are largely ignored, or silenced or incarcerated.

If it were possible to measure and then compare the scale of suffering in all humans and living creatures across the planet to that of happiness or contentment or simply safety and stability, my bet is that the ratio of suffering to happiness/contentment/safety/stability would be far greater. So now, often, sitting at my desk, I think: roll on the sixth extinction. Roll on the second law of thermodynamics. Let us burn. No, let us be wiped out in one fell swoop, because then, then, it would be the end of all suffering. For it is man who is the sole architect and engineer of these holocausts, these genocides, this devastation; it is man who knowingly, deliberately, inflicts torture and death on his fellow man, on other species and on the planet. Man, alone, is the enforcer of the endless misery.

So why the reluctance to contemplate or discuss—even in the abstract, philosophical way—the end of humanity when it would mean the end of suffering? Because the instinct to live—the life drive— is the most powerful and overrides all others. Albert Camus, in his book The Myth of Sisyphus, wrote that the body shrinks from annihilation. ‘We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking,’ he wrote. ‘In that race… the body maintains its irreparable lead.’ I think a time is coming when more and more people are craving a deeper dialogue, a deeper habit of thinking. Besides, don’t we realise that the natural process of entropy will eventually win out, and we will die off anyway? Or do we think that we will escape the fate of all living systems? Do we think that man, above all creation, is so special, so superior that he will defy even the rules of physics? There’s a field in philosophy called Pan-psychism that posits the idea that consciousness might be a fundamental property of the universe, like space-time or energy. And that it might be universal: that everything, animate and inanimate, has some degree of consciousness. So, it’s not just humans and apes and dogs that are conscious but also sea creatures and microbes and even sub-atomic particles. That photons and microscopic organisms might have some primitive element of subjective feeling, some precursor to consciousness, a brief flickering of mind. So that, all over the planet—or even the universe—there are trillions of ‘minds’ generating subjective experiences.

If this were the case, and if, one day, it could be proven, would man humbly accept the interconnectedness and interdependence of all of existence, the tenderness and vulnerability of all systems? Would empathy rise and reach a tipping point that would trigger a massive shift in the collective, and a universal softening of hearts?

A few years after my encounter with Islam, my father died. After his funeral Mass, the cortege followed the hearse to the cemetery and, as his coffin was carried the final few yards to the open grave, a commotion started up in the adjoining field. Horses, six or seven, began to gallop wildly, and toss their manes and rear up and whinny. I was thrown, caught off guard by this disturbance. The mourners too were startled, and they turned their heads and then slowly, something dawned on them and smiles broke across their faces as they interpreted this commotion as the horses’ welcome for my farmer father, but I was not smiling. I was remembering that, in Islam, the soul which is taken from the body at the moment of death, returns and rejoins the body at the time of burial. Then the person begins the long wait in the grave until Judgment Day. If, as many believe, animals have faculties that see and perceive things we don’t see, were those horses spooked by something, a spirit, the approach of my father’s soul? For a few moments I was shaken, chilled to the bone. Was what I’d learned in Islam true? Was my father’s soul about to be re-united with his body? And was my father, my innocent father, about to endure the torment of the grave for all eternity because he had not died a Muslim? My heart was pounding, I could barely breathe. And then, slowly, the horses calmed and the priest started up the prayers, and I returned to the here and now, flooded by ordinary grief for the loss of my father.

I don’t believe in resurrection or Judgment Day in the traditional religious sense but, for many people, the idea of heaven or some kind of afterlife is spiritually sustaining, offering meaning and hope in a world of suffering. It has great metaphoric and symbolic value too and is imaginatively and creatively enriching—all those journeys and crossings, celestial spheres and circles of hell. The more I ponder and try to understand the meaning of existence, the more I write myself into a corner; the more profound my questions become, the flimsier and more problematic are any possible answers. Maybe there’s nothing when we die, or maybe we melt back and merge with some great universal consciousness. Seamus Heaney in his final interview before his death said that he found those archetypal journeys down into the Underworld in Homer and Virgil had great potency for him as he got older. He got some satisfaction, he said, from the idea of ‘an extension,’ ‘something on-going’, some kind of continuation or aftermath, rather than an afterlife in the religious sense.

When I think of Heaney or my father—or the essences of Heaney or my father—existing in some aftermath, a feeling of calm comes over me. I imagine a state of existence that is beyond time and space and physical form and suffering. A state of consciousness that is vast and boundless, beyond language, beyond mind, and far beyond our present, limited, human capacity to understand. And in these difficult times, this imagined state, this potential paradise, brings a modicum of hope, and even peace.

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