Believing Unbeliever

Like Albert Einstein, I am a believing unbeliever. I can make the journey in some kind of faith, never quite convinced of a God-filled eternity or place of spiritual rest. So I never pray ‘for’ something, I don’t ‘ask’, because I don’t actually believe that there is any ‘force’ that can supply what humans are perfectly capable of doing for themselves if they are prepared to sit out a crisis and wait in a spirit of intelligence before they take action.

Yet at an afternoon party on New Year’s Day, an actor I hadn’t met before enquired in the course of conversation about whether or not I prayed. I paused before responding, then admitted that yes, I pray. I qualified this by adding that it was something very matter-of-fact and private within my day to day routine, which could occur when I’m out in a natural setting, when something stirs me or makes me occasionally feel connected to the transcendent. Equally, it might not occur at all for weeks at a stretch. I don’t often go to church, but if at a Catholic Mass, I mostly don’t follow the liturgy of the sacrament but use that setting to create an inner silence through prayers learned long ago but also prayers invented on the spot, in vernacular mind-speech. This can come in the form of my own repetitions of prayers such as the traditional ‘Hail Mary’, or the ‘Our Father’, which I particularly like to see in Old English:

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum,
si þin nama gehalgod.
to becume þin rice,
gewurþe ðin willa,
on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.
urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg,
and forgyf us ure gyltas,
swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum.
and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge,
ac alys us of yfele soþlice.

This utterly precise, ancient prayer moves me because, having come through waves of invasion, settlement, compromise and resistance, it has survived so many centuries and still has meaning for millions despite its historic timeframe.

Like most Irish children reared as Christian but Catholic, religion and faith played a dominant role in my childhood outside the home. It was indoctrination, the intention of which was to create another army of young people who would bind themselves to the received wisdoms of the Church. Religion was equated with ritual for me, some of which I enjoyed on certain feast days of course, but much of it defined by rote learning of Catechism questions too difficult for an eight-year old to memorise or understand. When I read back on my teenage diaries I see that I was quite religious in comparison to how I am today, or in comparison to how most younger people live. I did the practice, and when I became seriously ill as a teenager and was hospitalised for four months in Dublin, instinctively thought about such things as ‘offering it up’ for others, a notion which illustrates earlier religious reinforcement of the idea of sacrifice for others. I no longer offer things up in private for others (!) but sometimes instead take practical action of various kinds in an attempt to atone for something I know is negative or which diminishes people. Nobody is aware of this. I do not speak of it, not even to those closest to me, because it is private and for all its tolerances the world is usually intolerant of other views. The practical actions can be anything as random as making sure I have a ‘float’ of coins in my pocket for people living on the street. I don’t care if they are addicts, I’ll never tell them what to do with it. I try to give them control and really give without preaching. I try also to remember (not always succeeding!) that none of us knows the shoes others walk in, despite appearances tell us. This applies to people from every walk of society. We simply don’t know.

Evil and Satan loomed large in my school religious classes, and in the vividly illustrated religious pamphlets my pious and decent great uncle Simon accumulated in his home. Thoughts of such things were present throughout childhood, in playing with my friends and cousins. I was fortunate to be raised in a family which was not strongly religious, which did not cede much to the finer details of Catholic religious practice beyond weekly Mass. Yet the outside learnings from school made their mark.

Another slant on this is a belief in the presence of active evil, not in the form of demons, but as presenting itself when people are passive, inactive in the face of injustice, and do not speak out. I’m very much in tune with the Pastor Martin Niemöller poem ‘First They Came’. I can frame the question of evil or good within the following statements:

- Silence allows evil to flourish.

- Active good is the opposite of that cowardly silence and therefore a positive aspiration for any human to concern themselves with, which millions of course do.

- I do not believe in guilt, because I distinguish it from remorse, which is something quite different and psychologically healthy for people to experience if they are aware of having caused pain or harm to others.

- Remorse opens a way for reparation, healing, and even redemption.

We will always be anxious, neurotic creatures, open to being inspired or destroyed by our world. Perhaps prayer attaches itself as an inspiration for me as well as becoming my form of psychoanalysis. It finds a place in some of my fiction and poetry, without my actually using the word itself. A tendency to attend to the numinous has always whispered within my consciousness, resulting in fiction which explores unusual phenomena such as Doppelgänger Syndrome and levitation[1] and more recently a case of poltergeist haunting,[2] as well as an essay published in The Irish Times called ‘Gothic Resists’[3] A recent short story called ‘The Stolen Man’[4] shows a contemporary middle-aged male, having returned to university after his wife deserts him for a female partner, drawn into a liminal world which holds traces of joyous, fairy-led dance. Why? In the shaping of his grief and his loss, I found no rational explanation which might restore and honour the character’s own maleness, without introducing an intervention which worked completely against the grain of the smooth running of the everyday.

Some of my poetry also displays a leaning towards the supernatural, also the folkloric which involves both the changeling, the fairies, and the out-of-body. W.B. Yeats’s early poetry, absorbed at the age of twelve in primary school, has always left traces in my imagination that keep me returning to ideas about other levels of existence not infused with our human materiality.

Terms such as ‘grace’ and ‘redemption’ retain power for me, with ‘grace’ partnering ‘illumination’, thanks to the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, where her themes are also coloured by the presence of forgiveness and justice and how these might be achieved. There is a rage at the root of some of our experience which cannot be tempered by rational, cognitive explanation, nor CBT, nor any amount of analysis.

To this end I instinctively move in alternative directions within certain fictive situations. The idea of ‘forgiveness’ seems vital but it is one which most popular and artistic visual culture (television, film, soap drama) disregards as a matter of dramatic normality. With revenge largely to the fore in the dramas we create about our lives—for reasons to do with consumer appeal, profit, and the general twist in our notions of democracy that allows us to seek revenge almost as a ‘right’—the notion of forgiveness is diminished (and probably less entertaining).

In my enquiries as a writer and a person, perhaps at the root of my mind is a profound need to live towards the extraordinary, the ecstatic, the pagan. I partially align myself with the Christian calendar (Easter, Christmas), but also with the Celtic pagan one. The winter solstice period appeals to me enormously, with its deepening inner peace at year’s end, which I also experience around February 1^st or St Bridget’s Day, with Bridget part of the sorority that includes Minerva and other goddesses. The last day of April—May Eve, just before Bealtaine—holds its mysteries with an intersection between the life of the numinous and the outer world that celebrates workers everywhere on May Day. The summer fires of St John’s Night draw me to worship quietly, and the rich August days of the Feast of Lú remind me of my grandmother Molly, and her stories of picking blaeberries as a girl in County Tyrone. The veil between this world and the other world lifts gently at Samhain, and this is when I think of my late parents and all the antecedents I miss and who I loved.

Perhaps these structures speak to that part of the personality that simply cannot find a fulfilment or adequate ‘reply’ in any contemporary arena. Yet as science progresses and explores phenomena which don’t quite ‘fit’ contemporary rationality, there is an intersection between it and the arts, reflecting certain common aims and outcomes of benefit to humanity. We know through String Theory for example, how other universes may exist, be right ‘beside’ us, one quark to the left of our heads in a manner of speaking, that such universes hold life forms we have not yet encountered. How do we account for such ideas within our daily discourse about world violence, or with our discussion of the virtues of this or that coffee brand, with our sometimes pickle-brained approach to both the collective wellbeing and the narcissistic individualism? The paradox today, is that individualism does not, cannot really exist if everyone is inwardly intent on chanting the same self-satisfied mantra of I am an individual . . . I am an individual . . . I say this, therefore it must be true

I am rarely so definite about anything that I can say ‘this is the way’, or ‘this is how’. I speak solely of what allows me to explore my time in life in a manner which seems to nourish me. I don’t try to enlighten anyone or anything, because that’s not my role, but I see literature and the arts as a portal to the unconscious and a long, long avenue towards enlightenment. In a world in which so much categorical oratory crushes us from all sides, it seems important to retain a hold on making things up, on painting, dancing, on general invention out of—apparently—nothing. <That is my aim, to continue to invent according to my disposition, as an act of faith in what I call nothingness or somethingness, or even anythingness. There is no Either/Or so much as an abundance of possibility in a demotic world on the verge of breeding itself out of existence.> This seems all the more so as AI robotics develop full capability. I do not feel threatened by robotics. They may be the next step in the challenge for humans, full of possibility for either our enhancement or our extinction. I have faith that the work of visual artists, literary artists, and others will always be prescient enough to offer possibilities and occasional answers.

End.

[1] ‘The Elysium Testament’ by Mary O’Donnell. Trident Press, 1999.

[2] ‘Sweep the Cobwebs off the Sky’ by Mary O’Donnell. Epoque Press, 2026

[3] ‘Gothic Resists’. Essay. The Irish Times, March 2026 (date to be confirmed)

[4] From ‘Walking Ghosts’ stories by Mary O’Donnell. Mercier Press, 2026.

This text, 'Believing Unbeliever', is licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. No part of the Work may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purposes of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. The Work is protected and reserved from text and data mining.