Faith, spirituality and art: new perspectives for the twenty-first century?

Every door on the third-floor corridor was locked, because treatment centres for people experiencing fentanyl addiction need to keep the people inside the rooms safe. However, as we passed one particular door, the Corkman who directs this visionary Canadian facility and who was giving a small group of us a tour exclaimed, “Oh! No! Hang on!” and doubled back, shuffling through his keys to find the right one. “Siobhán, I want you to see this room and I bet when I open this door, you’ll know exactly why I’m opening it for you!” He unlocked the door to reveal a lovely, bright, large circle of a room set up for people to make art. It was filled with desks, easels, papers, and copious supplies for mark-making. The rest of the group looked on perplexed as I stepped through the door and immediately laughed and shared a knowing look with our host. “Tell them!” he smiled. “The Sacred Heart!” I replied, “and, not only that, but in its proper position: centre of the far wall as you walk into the room – quite a feat, given all the glass.”

Never before having seen the framed picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that was standard issue in nearly every Catholic Irish house in the twentieth century, the rest of the group asked questions. Is it, like, kitsch? Is he a saint of some sort? Or a guardian angel? Is his heart broken? What does it do? Why is this religious imagery allowed when other sorts aren’t? In response, our host simply explained that someone who had enjoyed the art room put the picture there when they moved on.

This moment got me thinking about the essays in this Kaleidoscope project, many of which have in common a sense of the power of a once-shared world as well as the mixture of grief and relief that has been left in its wake. In particular, it made me aware of the complex ways in which many more of the new forms of spiritual life/nourishment/community are open to echoes of the old than has perhaps yet been acknowledged. Those ‘new’ forms don’t come labelled as ‘religion’, and many if not most of its practitioners would probably directly say, ‘this is not a religious thing’ but that doesn’t mean that improvised symbol-placement or language-use from the ‘old’ is out of place in these new spiritually nourishing and ethically formative encounters.

What do I have in mind when I talk of new forms of spiritual life/nourishment/community? They are too numerous to catalogue in a short essay, but as indicative examples I list here those happening within a ten-mile radius of the small village in Co. Mayo in which I live … and this is not an exhaustive list.

Pride marches
Men’s Sheds
Women’s Liturgy/Ritual Groups
Song Circles
Folk Clubs
Drag shows
Surfing events
Farmers’ markets
Local café culture
Traditional music sessions
Rock and jazz jam sessions
Seed sharing circles
Artists’ collectives
Gallery openings
Photography clubs
History clubs
Tidy Towns groups
Brigid Circles
Dark skies walks and observations
Environmentalist/nature conservation groups
Antique vehicle groups
Conferences
Street meals (in summer!)
Festivals
Yoga classes
Swim groups in civic pools
Sea swimming and river swimming groups
Mountain rescue groups
Hill-walking groups
Dog parks
Therapy groups
Sexual abuse survivors’ groups
Suicide survivors’ groups
Families of suicide groups
AA meetings and other recovery communities
Darkness into Light walks
Film clubs
Learning English groups
Gaeilge chats
Allotment associations
Edible garden projects
Support groups for various medical conditions
Bereavement groups
Choirs, including children’s choirs
Sports – too many different sorts to list, but GAA is of particular note.
Walking groups
Therapeutic events and communities, such as radical compassion circles
Senior citizens’ lunch clubs
Meditation sits
Dancing – set, step, ballet, ballroom, social, line, disco, freestyle
Plus, the resource that is Folklore.ie, and the community around it

You will notice the above list contains no individual activities. Those, too, are copious and worthy of attention, but they are much harder to study, being by definition more private. You will also notice that the list contains some activities that have been going on for decades; they are ‘new’ in the sense that they are newly acknowledged as potentially having a spiritual component in this culture where, for too long, only ‘church’ was credited as spiritual and these activities were deemed merely ‘social’.

Over the course of four series of ‘religious affairs’ radio programmes that I presented for RTÉ One (for The Leap of Faith and for Witness, with Siobhán Garrigan), I interviewed people involved in many of the experiences listed above, and two phenomena were particularly noticeable. The first was the plain power of gathering. Gathering was repeatedly reported as sating a hunger for belonging. It was also repeatedly reported as permitting something greater than the sum of its parts, with numerous guests referring to ‘when the magic showed up’ or the ‘mysterious’ power that came through doing something together with others or the ‘unexpected but very welcome’ feelings of a bond greater than had been there before and the ‘encouragement’ it brought.

Allied to this observation about the power of simply gathering was another: we are more capable as ritual agents than perhaps we realise. As the many interviewees attested, we have all sorts of languages at our disposal and do not have to rely on specific, established families of ‘god-language’ or ‘dharma-language’ in order to create and participate in effective rituals. When I hear students longing or calling for ‘new rituals’, it is often the case that some pointed questions and some attentive listening can draw out of them a plethora ways in which either they are already involved in such (but hadn’t named them as rituals) or could easily imagine such, if given the confidence, or just the ‘permission’ to go and do it. Plus, if they need a little help, there are Ron Grimes’s books.[1]

The second phenomena that struck me from the radio programmes was the immense popularity of books and podcasts that named the sorts of experiences listed above as spiritual. For example, Noirín Ní Rían’s ease with weaving ritual practices from a range of cultures and Michael Harding’s use of Buddhist practices to heal from the repressive Catholicism of his early life gained large and appreciative audiences. And the ways that Pádraig Ó Tuama spoke about how his podcast Poetry Unbound (from NPR’s On Being Project) provided a resource of theo-poetical voices and ideas for those like him, and me, who the church has rejected as well as for so many more, resonated deeply with our audience … which should not come as a surprise given that his podcast has been downloaded 20 million times since 2020. Such an interest in ‘new’ ways of speaking theologically is also, of course, not so new. One only has to remember the massive success of John O’Donoghue’s books (such as Anam Cara) to recognise that both the hunger for new articulations of a life of faith, and the creative response to that hunger, have been emerging for quite some time.

Academic studies of faith in Ireland can get it wrong when they view religion as a zero-sum game in which one is in or out, a believer or a non-believer. Thus, the atheism ‘debates’ of the early twenty-first century, with their reduction of whole complex religious systems across many and varied cultural expressions to the question, ‘do you believe God exists, yes or no?’ Thus also studies of 20^th century Irish Catholicism that portray it as a monoculture without due heed to a) its historical novelty (pre-famine Catholic practice worked very differently), b) local diversities of practice, including manifestations of resistance, and c) the political and colonising ends for which such a supposedly homogenous version of practice was manufactured/deployed.

Similarly, academic studies of faith can get it wrong by interpreting the current changes in spiritual practice on the island as primarily indicated by whether or not people attend a formal place of worship. It is true that Irish people no longer go to church in anything like the numbers they once did. Many suffer acute pain because of the church’s abuse, betrayal, and deception of so very many of its members. Yet more people just can’t stand the persistent misogyny of the Catholic church. And encroaching secularity is a tide the Irish were never uniquely going to turn back. But to see any or all of that as ‘people are less religious than they were’ is to show a remarkable lack of curiosity about what is actually going on in people’s lives that aids their spiritual flourishing, as well as to define religiosity in far too narrow a set of terms.

Moreover, to view Irish religiosity in these limited ways is to deny an essential component of this Kaleidoscope project, which is its decolonial impulse, because to do so acquiesces to the same normative and universalising definition of religion/theology on which the colonising project relies. As An Yountae has recently put it, “The dominant Western epistemic framework that informs both colonial knowing and, to some extent, contemporary decolonial theory tends to subsume the vibrant reality of these various religious (spiritual-poetic-creative) sensibilities to secularist categories.”[2] And this has a particularly constrictive effect on our understanding of the lived experiences of Irish people whose ‘independence’ from ecclesial domination lagged well behind their national independence from Britain.

If we can discern and reject what Yountae terms “the unmarked predominance of the secularist framework in the academic study of religion that in a way reinforces the Eurocentric episteme”,[3] we can discover in so-called secular gatherings and reflections the very rituals and ideas that express a nascent post-colonial faith. As evidence of such a claim, there is, for a start, all the experiences listed at the beginning of this essay and the ways that, when questioned about them in my research, participants reach for language of soul and mystery, sacrality and meaning-making, profundity and ethical commitments. Very often on my radio programmes, musicians, artists, or community activists would say, ‘I’m not into institutional religion, but this thing that I do is at the core of my life’. Meaning, it may not be ‘church’, or ‘religion’ as we’ve been given to understand it, but it is spiritually vital.

Moreover, there is a wider phenomenon at play, which Ireland is far from alone in exhibiting, whereby large sections of the population are neither ‘for’ nor ‘against’ institutional religious structures but instead view and practice organised religion ‘occasionally’. This phenomenon is something which the census as currently constructed cannot capture, but the sheer extent of which is brought to light in Sarah Johnson’s recent research.[4] Indeed, Johnson suggests that ‘occasional religious practice’ is now the dominant way that people in Europe and North American relate to Christianity. Occasional religious practice involves going to church occasionally (e.g. for Christmas) and for life-events (e.g. for funerals) and this being recognised as its own form of religious practice. People practicing in this way “identify as religious, non-religious, somewhere in between, or even affiliate with religious traditions other than the one in which they are practising at that moment.”[5] Understanding occasional religious practice not as a failure to practice ‘properly’ but as its own legitimate form of religiosity, and acknowledging the diversity of identities and motivations associated with it, is also essential to understanding new forms of religious practice.

Furthermore, it is crucial to acknowledge that new forms of religious practice are also happening within routine religious practice and not only outside of it, again disturbing the ‘either/or’ model through which faith has for too long been interpreted. For example, Gerry O’Hanlon has recently pointed out the scandal of failing to recognise just how radical is the move to synodality instituted by Pope Francis. “No longer is it a matter of a more collegial church with a balance of papal and episcopal power, now it is the People of God who are at the top of the ‘inverted pyramid’, and pope and bishops are at their service, to promote their mission. No more ‘helping Father’, rather a reimagining of church at every level, including local parish, so that it is the baptised who are the chief protagonists.”[6] He admits that synodality is as yet far from fully implemented, and laments that when it is, the lack of parity for women in the church will be rendered even more unjust, but he nonetheless emphasises the enormity of this change and how extensively it will affect the church from local Irish parish to centralised Roman rule-makers.

Finally, it must also be remarked how many new forms of spiritual practice have been developed by Irish churches in the last twenty-five years by working across previously forbidding boundaries. Stand-out examples relate especially to ecumenical endeavours such as the 4 Corners Festival in Belfast, the Eco-congregations movement, and the many and growing events marking the feast of St. Brigid since it was elevated to a national holiday in 2023. There are also local practices which I suspect aren’t really new, but upon which light is now allowed to shine, such as, here in Co. Mayo where a community-wide invitation is issued to a Mass which is said in the graveyard on the bay, beside the ruins of the old abbey at dawn on Easter Sunday morning. It is said you can see the sun dance, the whole of creation feeling its joy, and it is probably an echo of an ancient gathering. Our local parish priest reports that more people come to that Mass than any other over the Easter period, and that he sees many people there that morning who he doesn’t see for the rest of the year, and that that’s okay. Just as the Sacred Heart can watch over Canadian people recovering from addiction in an arts workshop and it doesn’t matter one bit if they do not know who the older Irish people think he is.

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