Art as Solace

Art as Solace

 

When I was a child, growing up in Dublin City in the 1990s, I said my prayers almost every night. Up until the age of ten or so, I said them, as the saying goes, religiously. For most of my childhood, I shared a bedroom with my two brothers. Older brother was in the double bed pushed up against the bunk beds, younger brother in the bottom bunk. So, I didn’t kneel, or talk to God out loud. It was a private thing, whispering or just speaking to Him (it was always Him) in my mind.

 

Here is how it went. First, in Irish, na paidreacha: the Ár n-Athair, the Sé do bheatha, a Mhuire, and the Glór don Athair; second, their English counterparts: the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be to the Father. This was followed in later years by O Angel of God, and I would then round the prayers off with my requests, as I was taught to. I would ask God to bless “Mammy and Daddy and older brother and sister and baby brother (who remained a baby in my prayers well into early childhood) and Grandad Fitz in hospital and Grandad Higgins up in heaven and, and, and…”. The list expanded and grew unwieldly throughout the years. One morning, driving to school, we saw a black and white collie get hit by a car. I was very upset. The dog duly entered the litany.

 

Like so many others, I was quite an anxious child. There were many nights when I could not sleep, besieged by dark thoughts and demons, imaginings too large and slippery and multifarious for my little plastic brain to contain. I had not yet built up the defences to fully contend with myself (I still haven’t, but I have made some progress). Prayer, and by extension religion, was a kind of solace, then. A way for me to deal with the bad things in the world, and to exert some control.

 

I would say we were an average family for the time when it came to practising religion. My siblings and I were all baptised, and made our First Holy Communion and Confirmation. We went to Mass most Sundays, especially while I was in primary school, and my parents retain their faith today. They were both raised in the late-50s and 60s on farms in Corca Dhuibhne, the west Kerry Gaeltacht. Back then, Catholicism was a palpable, community-wide thing. In my mother’s house, the family knelt together every night to say the Rosary (An Paidrín). If there was a bad week of weather, farmers had to get permission from the pulpit to work on a Sunday. Priests dictated the day-to-day customs and morality of their flock. As we know now, many suffered as a result. But, for people back then, that was just how things were, and communities existed under the aegis of the Church. Both of my grandmothers were devout Catholics. My maternal grandmother, Nell Higgins, in particular, was deeply religious. She suffered through immense struggle and personal tragedy in her life, buried her husband and three of her adult children before her. But she never lost her faith. In fact, her steadfast belief seemed to strengthen as she grew older, and when she died, at the age of ninety-five, surrounded by family, she seemed fully at peace. I believe that she truly believed that she was going to heaven to meet her God. Religion as solace.

 

But my parents, and almost all of the parents of my friends growing up, were less religious than their parents, our grandparents, had been. And so it followed that we were less religious again. We inherited the forms and the gestures – the mould but not the proper stuff of faith. For me, today, there is no longer any solace to be found in organised religion. I do not believe in God; I no longer believe that my prayers will be answered. This decline in belief happened gradually. There was no great moment of realisation. God went out with a whimper, not a bang. The revelations of widespread institutional abuses committed by the Catholic hierarchy over many decades played a big part. By the time I was in my late teens, at the end of the 2000s, the slow drip of scandal that had begun in the late-80s had become a deluge of horrifying accounts that finally served to weaken the iron grip of the Church on the country. Modernity played a role, too. Ireland opening up to the world. As did the New Atheism movement, YouTube, and studying philosophy in university. Somewhere in the midst of all this, I decided that I could no longer believe in any God.

 

So, I am an atheist. At times, in my weaker moments, a pained agnostic. I was probably less sure and more vehement in this lack of belief when I was younger, in my early 20s. I had the kind of youthful, righteous certainty that comes with ignorance. But I was never a triumphalist non-believer. I understood and still understand the structuring effect Christianity has had on Ireland over the past 1,500 years or so, as well as its wider impact on Europe and much of the world. Religion is not something that can be sloughed off so easily, like an old skin. Or, to mix my analogies, its roots are buried deep. I think often about what might take God’s place. In recent years, I have been particularly concerned with the rituals, the formalities, and the binding ceremonies and sense of purpose that a shared faith gives to a community, and how these can be established in a more secular world.

 

Much like the faith of most people I know who still believe, my lack of faith is full of contradictions. I reject the church in my life, condemn and abhor its treatment of women and the LGBTQ+ community, yet I am close with a number of devout, practising Catholics who are among the most charitable, loving and giving people I know.They are not responsible for the sins of their Church. Much as I was comforted by my grandmother’s comfort on her deathbed, I would never seek to strip someone of their belief. I do not believe, but I will accompany my mother to Mass from time to time, especially at Christmas, to be with her, and to hear what the priest has to say. I also love visiting churches and cathedrals, in Ireland and other countries; love the paintings, frescos, stained glass, statuary, and the hushed, old beauty of the buildings. I appreciate the place that this aesthetic beauty has in Catholicism; I hate the conservatism that goes along with it. I love terms like grace, transcendence, and what they signify. I love the tradition of an Irish wake. I try to be firm in my lack of religion, but sometimes I take the easy way out, slip into the groove, go along with things. You might read all this as someone who is still grappling with their faith and belief, but I am not. My lack of faith is settled. What is not settled is my want and need for community and shared ritual. I want something to believe in.

 

Christians, in this country and overseas, like to point towards the miseries that modernity has supposedly brought on us all. They speak of a crisis of meaning, and claim that the receding of religion from public and private life has left only a dark void in its wake. In some respects, I agree with them. In Ireland, as in much of the world, consumerism has become rampant. Belief in God seems to have been replaced by belief in the Market. Everyone is overworked, underpaid, and there are very few places to live. All of us, from the youngest child to the oldest person, are preyed upon by capitalistic forces via addictive devices that track our every move. The goal is extraction. There is also an epidemic of loneliness, with Ireland ranking in a recent Europe-wide survey as the loneliest country in Europe. It is the elderly who are most affected by this, becoming increasingly marginalised in a society that no longer values them. Surely, this is not what we want? But often the religious analysis ignores the rampant neoliberal ideology that has vastly increased inequality in society and turned us from human beings into mere hollowed-out consumers. This, and not the turning away from the Church, is the real cause of a crisis of meaning. And the two do not go hand in hand. It does not have to be so.

 

So, while I may have some sympathy with the diagnosis, I disagree with the supposed causes, and I wholeheartedly reject the prescription. Turn the ship back around? Retreat once more into closed-off, parochial society, in which women, children and the vulnerable were brutalised? The bad old days when great art was censored, homosexuality criminalised, and women were not given autonomy over their bodies? No. With respect to my religious friends and family, that cannot be the way. But what is the alternative?

 

Despite the myriad of challenges a secular Ireland faces, there are many positive signs and movements. The strong, driven, open community that has formed around the Irish language and the traditional arts, for example, is one. This community has existed for many years, of course, but has recently greatly expanded as more and more people attempt to reconnect with their heritage. It is open, welcoming and diverse, and steeped in the language of the island that stretches back longer than Christianity and offers another way forward, separate from the capitalist-colonial model that dominates. This is a way rooted in nature and the land, in the practices and traditions of the old days. It looks back to our past for guidance, but advocates fiercely for contemporary issues and is firmly faced towards the future. It is both inward and outward looking, local and global, and is an inspiring counterpoint to the nativist, recalcitrant nationalism that has reared its ugly head in recent years.

 

I also take inspiration from some of the secular ceremonies. The weddings and the funerals. Especially those that emerge from the solid foundation of a community, and are proper expressions of those they celebrate or mourn. Years ago, a woman I knew well and loved died after a battle with cancer. Her funeral was fully secular, and it was the most powerful, resonant, fitting ceremony I have ever been to. It was officiated by a close friend, not an aloof stranger. It was full of stories about her past, told by those who knew her best. Full of art, poetry, music, song. It was a celebration of her life, of her very essence. We were soothed by who she had been, by each other, not by the cold comforts of everlasting life. It is in this closeness, in these kind of ceremonies, that I see a way forward.

 

Personally, I still seek solace and transcendence. I am a spoken word poet. It is my art and my life. Much like the prayers long ago that were drilled into my still plastic brain before I had a chance to say no, there are many poems alive in my head. My own, and others’. And what are poems, really, only prayers by another name? To know a poem by heart is to have the art of it forever inside you. It is a part of you, and you can draw from it whenever you like. When I write sometimes, and when I perform, I feel a kind uplifting. It is both expression and invocation. I process it and it forms me. After years of working I have found something I love and I embrace it every day. Occasionally, I get a glimpse of something within the words I am uttering. I catch the feather of a true self, just for a moment, just out of reach. In my work, I seek transcendence and empathy. I seek bridges between people. A friend of mine, the great spoken word poet Paul Curran, died in 2018. His funeral in a church in Coolock in the north of Dublin was packed. A priest who knew nothing about Paul spoke of sin and death and everlasting life. Paul’s best friend, who knew him better than anyone, read When I Have Fears, by John Keats. For Paul, poetry was prayer. I think of this line from his poem, “Drive”, almost every day:

 

“... I knew there was a reason. A great upheaval redeeming a feeling so primeval to my very being that I burned to do something great. And that a moment of art, a moment parked in a car that sparks a poem or even just a flow, is worth more than half the world will ever know.”[1]

 

I no longer say my prayers at night to an unresponsive God. My prayer is secular. It is rooted in nature and empathy, humanity and the world. Really, it does not matter if what you believe in is true, what matters is that you strive to believe. Maybe I will never get there, but I am working to truly believe in art. Art as a way forward. Art as solace. Art as life. I am working to make poetry my God. I speak to Her every day.

 

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