by Veronica Brady

Spirituality is at once very simple and very misunderstood.  As these lines by Gerard Manley Hopkins tell us, the world is "charged with the glory of God", shot through with beauty and terror.  But all too many of us are blind to this, preoccupied with what D H Lawrence called "the business of money-making, money-having and money-spending", and the pursuit of power and pleasure, "distracted by distraction from distraction".

This means that all too often 'spirituality' is profoundly misunderstood, becoming just another commodity, a source of pleasure or power, a way of making us feel superior to others, secure and exempt from the privilege and panic of existence, a kind of cosmic Linus-Blanket.  Interestingly, the definition in the Oxford dictionary, implies something like this.  Here 'spirituality' is defined as "concerned with sacred or religious things; holy; divine; inspired; refined; sensitive; concerned with the soul or spirit, etc..., not with external reality" - in other words, something somehow apart from everyday life.

Spirit in the Midst of Life

It is also essentially dialectical.  "God is thought of as God", according to Eberhard Jungel, "only when thought of as a God who reveals himself"[ 3] , as the Other who breaks into our lives.  The best short definition of God may thus be as interruption, an experience which ruptures the surface of the common place to reveal new intensities, new splendours and terrors, new possibilities within us.  So Martin Buber reflects:

There are moments of silent depth in which you look upon the world-order fully present.  Then in its very flight the note will be heard... These moments are immortal, and most transitory..., no context may be secured from them, but their power invades creation and the knowledge of [humanity], beams of their power stream into the ordered world and dissolves it again and again.[4]

art should be an affirmation of life, not an attempt to bring order...but simply a way of waking up to the very life we are living, which is so excellent, once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of the way and lets it act of its own accord.[6]

mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens.  Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment - and soul making means differentiating the middle ground.[7]

What makes a major artist, I would submit then, is the sense of self and life as dialectical, not one dimensional, open to the interplay of what is other, what cannot ever be fully put into words.  Hence Rimbaud's enigmatic "Je est un autre" (I is another).  Hence, too, the novelist Patrick White's description of the musician, Moraitis, playing the cello in The Aunt's Story:  "he wore an expression of sleep and solitary mirrors.  The sun was in his eyes, the sky had passed between his bones".  Perhaps the most vivid expression of this sense of self as somehow from time to time swooped upon, claimed by an otherness which transfigures and breaks open the ordinary is Robert Adamson's Drawn with Light.[8]

The poem begins with the image of an owl swooping low over the city, hooking a rat from a lane, "owl-eyes adrift, drawn by moonlight".  But the eyes and the moon fuse into an image of fire, a sense of some "silent language" beyond us in an "age of precious mumblings", of "clever emblems" of advertisers and politicians, of:

Sports heroes, suspended in the air
  to sell alcohol, pictures of sleek yachts
their spinnakers ablaze
  with multicoloured jingocam.

...Drawn with light
so that the image perfects itself
in our seeing it - Drawn out from
dark
to make bright images of life in our
livings
lucidity, clear fire.

Understanding of this kind is the other side of scepticism, of disbelief in the crowding preoccupation with property, power and possessions.  One begins to know what Jesus meant when he said that unless we "become as little children" we would not "enter the Kingdom of Heaven".  Children know, as all art knows, that what we call 'real' is what we agree to do so, and that this 'reality' depends on the stories we believe in.  As Nietzsche remarked, therefore, "we possess art lest we perish by the truth."

Art reminds us that life is stranger, more beautiful, demanding, joyous and painful than common sense knows.  The holy then, is mysterious.  It underlies the vision of tragedy and, indeed of any good novel which gives us a glimpse into the mysteries of the human condition.  Far from being unworldly or abstract, this mystery exists in the midst of our lives as a wonderful passage in Margaret Attwood's Alias Grace makes clear.  Grace comes into the kitchen early in the morning.

There was a strange light, as if there was a film of silver over everything, like frost only smoother like water running thinly down over flat stones; and then my eyes were opened and I knew it was because God had come into the house and this was the silver that covered heaven.  God had come in because God is everywhere, you can't keep him out, he is part of everything there is.[9]

I said, what do you want here? But he did not answer, he just kept on being silver, so I went out to milk the cow, because the only thing to do about God is to go on with what you were doing anyway, since you can't ever stop him or get any reasons out of him.  There is a Do this or Do that with God, but not any because.[10]

So a genuine spirituality, like art, is open and dynamic, opening out truer possibility.  In this sense both are the hope of a world so badly in need of transformation.

Sister Veronica Brady is a writer and commentator on media, culture and social issues.  She has just completed an authoritative biography on the poet Judith Wright.  She is an associate Professor in the Department of English, The university of Western Australia.
 

References

   1. Gerard Manley Hopkins, A Selection of His Poems and Prose, 1954, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
   2. Olsen Steggink,  "Study in Spirituality in Retrospect", in Studies in Spirituality, 1:1, 1991, p21.
   3. Eberhard Jungel, God as the Mystery of the World, 1983, Grand Rapids, Eerdmass, Michigan, p158
   4. Kees Waaijman, "Spirituality as Transformation", Studies in Spirituality, 1:1, 1991, p31
   5. Jean Baudrillard, Revenge of the Crystal, 1990, Sydney,Pluto Press, p63.
   6. ibid, p83.
   7. Karen Claire Voss, "Mysticism and Exotericism", Studies in Spirituality, 6, 1996, p107.
   8. Robert Adamson, The Clear Dark, Sydney, Paperback Press, p60-61.
   9. Margaret Attwood, Alias Grace, 1997, London, Virago, p367.
  10. ibid.

This article was published in New Renaissance magazine Vol. 8, No. 1 (c) 1998 Renaissance Universal, all rights reserved. 

Comments

Add New Search

Write comment
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Website:
Title:
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

Powered by !JoomlaComment 3.12

Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.