Reasons to believe

The Irish poet, former parish priest and author of the bestseller Anam Cara, talks to broadcaster Joan Bakewell about faith, beauty and the divine

Joan Bakewell: You talk about landscape as the ?first-born of creation?. You talk about it as ?the primal living womb?. Now landscape is inert. Isn?t the point the impact of landscape on people?
John O?Donohue: I don?t believe that at all. I think there?s a choice. It makes a huge difference when you come out of your home in the morning, whether you believe on the one hand you?re stepping into inert space, which is endless, or whether you?re stepping into something that is animate and alive. And I really believe that landscape is alive. One of the amazing things about humans is the way that we have usurped the notion of consciousness. We?ve cut out the whole animal kingdom and we?ve also cut out landscape. Now, they?re not conscious in the way that we?re conscious. No human mind, even the greatest ascetic, could endure the silence and stillness that landscape endures, and the silence that animals endure. And we werethe last arrivals, the human-come-lately ?a few minutes to midnight, if you takethe whole thing as just one day. And yet we have claimed everything in our name and reduced it, and I think that is something that has had disastrous consequences, and we?re making our planet unliveable, and we?re doing huge damage. And I think that the other point is that landscape is the first scripture. It is the wisest text, because we?re not alien to it.

JB: In what sense would you say that landscape is living? Was it living and present before mankind?
JO?D: I think it was finding and deepening and developing its own textures, and its own system of inner echoes. And it has a sense of home in it that predates us. I know fields up the mountains where we have cattle at home ? my brother has cattle ? and when I go home I herd the cattle for him. And you?d arrive up there to these fields, where nobody walks, except for once a week my brother and neighbours. You would have a sense that this place has a sureness in its own identity, a belonging, and some kind of primal spirit.

JB: Is this pantheism?
JO?D: No, I don?t think it?s pantheism. I believe that the biggest theological question is: is there anything outside God? Everything must subsist within divinity. And I think that the actual truth is that we are so intimately?skin, breath?close to the depths of the mystery that if we were more conscious of it, maybe we would feel suffocated by it.

JB: You live in this wonderful landscape, and you?ve chosen to live alone there on a mountainside, surrounded by often quite wild weather. What can you say to us who live in cities? What about the cacophony of life that gets in the way?
JO?D: That cacophony is there in nature, even in the midst of bleak landscape as well. You have storm, rain, fog and mist in the west of Ireland, which is the ultimate invitation to melancholia.

I?m not arguing for landscape as just a benign presence which is the source of relentless epiphany. I?m arguing for it as a primal companion that has all the dexterity and multiplicity of a huge kind of presence. I remember in California some years ago, hearing the physicist Brian Swimm say that we are of one of the first generations that have managed to successfully forget that we live in a universe. I think that that is true. I think smog at night in the city blocks out the sky and you don?t know that you are in the midst of an incredible infinity.

JB: Let?s talk about your background. Father and uncle farmers, father also a stonemason. Your mother you speak of as the shelter of your life. Was this a devout family?
JO?D: It was a devout family. It was open, it was a truthful kind of family. My father was an incredibly independent person, an affable man, clear and independent and free. And he was great fun, but was also in some beautiful way haunted by the eternal, constantly. He was a very prayerful man. He was the holiest man I ever met, priests included. If he was working in a field alone in the mountain, if you brought him up tea, you?d often hear him praying before you?d see him. So he was really in the presence, and he had this sense of the transience of things ? there was a constant focus on the fact that we were merely strangers and visitors here.

JB: You went away to boarding school at the age of 12 and then you went to Maynooth seminary in Ireland. When did you decide to go into the priesthood?
JO?D: While I was in secondary school, I wanted to do something that would make things eternal in some way. The two things I thought about were medicine and priesthood. I finally realised that if I didn?t have a go at priesthood it would always follow me. So I did, and studied for the priesthood with a Beckettian clarity about the Church and religious systems. Maynooth is one of the most amazing centres of learning in Europe. My mind woke up in university and suddenly I began to see that thought and perception are the lenses through which we see everything. And realised the huge privilege, and the awful responsibility of trying to think creatively and critically.

JB: That hasn?t always been the legacy of the Catholic Church, to think creatively and critically. It?s very often happy for you to conform and not question. So did you come into conflict, or did you find these challenging intellects you were among stimulated you?
JO?D: They really stimulated me. I found a hospitality for the things that I was opening up and when I eventually left the priesthood after about 19 years, and I was looking back on my priestly time, it was almost a time of deconstruction. For an awful lot of people I was helping undo so much of the false netting that was crippling their own spirits.

JB: What is this false netting? Are you talking about the doctrines of the Church?
JO?D: No, I?m not talking about the doctrines of the Church, which I?ve great respect for, the Incarnation, the Resurrection. I accepted them clearly. I think the Catholic Church is really wonderful at sacramental structure, the mystical tradition, the prayer tradition, the intellectual tradition, which can hold their own with the best in any religious system. My preaching always tried to make an opening for people where I think they?re not trustable at all ? in the area of Eros. I think a lot of the notions of sin, particularly in relation to sexuality, put huge burdens on people that should never have been put on them. I trusted the native scent of my own experience more than their prescriptive ideas about what should be, because I knew my body.

JB: You were called to the priesthood, and you had a parish. After 19 years, you closed that book in your life. Why did you do that?
JO?D: The best decision I ever made was to become a priest, and I think the second best decision was to resign from public priestly ministry. There were two reasons primarily. One was conflict with the bishop, who wanted to appoint me full-time to a pastoral ministry, and I wanted time to write. He wanted all or nothing. And the second reason was I found it difficult to represent a lot of the positions. I was finding the system of it more a burden than a gift.

JB: Let?s talk about the development of the ideas within the Celtic tradition, because they have furnished and nourished your language, and it?s your language that has made you so popular and accessible to people. Where does this Celtic tradition come from? Was it something in your scholarly background? Was it in your father?s prayers? Is it pagan? Is it Christian?
JO?D: It?s all of these things. I went to T?bingen for four years, learning German, working inside the white monastery of Hegel?s thought for these four years. When I returned to my own culture, I got another look at it as if from outside. During my first morning home, there were a few neighbours in, and I was saying nothing and just listening to the conversation. There was a full hour of discussion in which not one analytic sentence fell. Yet so many things were discussed through anecdote and the oblique respectfulness and resonance of story. And I said to myself, ?There?s something in this tradition.?But what I tried to do was to make explicit some of what I would consider the implicit, philosophical perception behind a lot of the Celtic intuitions.

JB : Talk about your definition of the soul. What do you believe the soul to be?
JO?D: Christians say in one of the creeds: ?We believe in the ? seen and unseen.? One of the most exciting arenas is the area of the invisible. I don?t consider the invisible empty. I think it?s dense with refined presences that are not coming up on the radar of our perception, our concepts. My understanding of ?soul? would be that it is the unseen, hidden dimension of the self, and that it is the place beneath or beside or above the mind and consciousness. To put it in imagistic terms and spatial terms, I think it?s the kind of field of presence or colour or light that suffuses the body and that holds the body, so that the body is actually in the soul. Meister Eckhart says that the soul has two faces. One faces towards the world, and the other faces towards the divine, where it receives, as he says, ?the kiss of God?. And one of the most radical and subversive things I ever read anywhere was in the Latin writings of Meister Eckhart, where he said that there is a place in the soul that neither time, nor flesh, nor no creative thing can touch. So I think that the exciting thing then is you?ve all these individual humans dwelling in these bodies. These bodies they are. And then you have the world of the between, where in some strange way, without knowing it, we?re all connected. And the script of that between-ness is not visible.

JB: You speak of life, the individual soul, the great presence, the two-way facing. But what is the divine?
JO?D: The divine is that which is totally and utterly itself. It?s the cradle of origin, the primal presence. I find it so ironic, that at the heart of Christianity, well of any of the religions, you have the centrality of the uniqueness of a poet/carpenter?Without the idea of individuality and individuation Incarnation would make no sense. Without the idea of imagination, we?d have no Incarnation. If Jesus had had no imagination, there?d be no Incarnation. We?d know nothing of the Trinity. I think that the deepest thing in individuality is the divine presence. To put it in colloquial terms and loosely, we?re undercover gods and goddesses, hanging around in clay form. And sometimes we glimpse it, but mostly it?s darkened from us. That?s a lovely line of St Paul, ?Now we see in a glass darkly, then we shall see face to face.?

JB: But there could go along with that a sort of spiritual pride, which elevates us into god creators.
JO?D: That?s right. That was Feuerbach?s position, who said that the word ?God? actually stands for the optimal characteristics of the human writ large. Humans are fascinating, precisely because of the eternal restlessness that?s within them. And also, they?re so poignant because of their vulnerability. And also of course the other side of it then is our huge capacity for negativity and for destruction.

JB: In Anam Cara you certainly did reach people. I wondered how much you were answering your own questions as you wrote it, and what your own needs are, that need to be answered.
JO?D: In some way unknown to myself I was bringing out on the table my own intuitions and giving them time to unfold. One of the things that I really feel so drawn to, is the divine. I do go through Beckettian periods when there?s absolutely nothing there. But of course ?nothing there? ? for me, I don?t look on absence as the invitation to close my account with God. That?s the deepening thing ? I?ve always found it. An old spiritual director taught me in my first year when I was studying for the priesthood. I went through an awful six months of bleakness. And he said, ?It?s like when the seed is sown? and he said, ?The ground is raked and it?s sore, or the pruning, and something else comes through.? I often think that a lot of suffering is just getting rid of dross in yourself. And sometimes lingering and hanging in in the darkness is often ? I say this against myself ? a failure of imagination, to imagine the door into the light.

JB: Is that the essence of Good Friday?
JO?D: I think it is. I?ve always found something awfully disturbing about Good Friday. It never lets me alone ? even if I had forgotten which day it was, I?d know the day it was, because I think that something happened there. Some kind of awful, raw quickening that always comes alive on that day. It was where, of course, the ultimate cry of human longing ran headlong into the silence of God, and was left ? the cry was left out there like a huge, red hook trying to reach up into the heavens, but nothing received it. It?s a day of being touched by the void ? it?s the day of the abyss.

This is an edited version of a talk due to be broadcast in the series Belief on Radio 3 on Good Friday.,/I>