Questioning values of secularised mid-Atlantic culture

In January 2018, a survey in the Guardian newspaper found that one in five adults pray despite saying they are not religious. It seems, it reported, that for many non-believers it is an instinctive response to a crisis. I recognise this response as a crying-out, a plea, an appeal, even a groan or mumbling, not unlike the kind that we hear in the biblical psalms.

These Hebrew poems, probably written over five centuries ago, represent a search for wisdom in moments of joy and suffering, agony and ecstasy. This poetry has been at the heart of both Jewish and Christian liturgies across millenniums.

Fascinatingly, that survey also said that, among those who do pray, family topped the list of subjects of prayers, followed by thanking God, pleas for healing and for friends. All such themes are addressed in the psalms – “I thank my Lord with all my heart” and “He heals the brokenhearted, binds up their wounds”. Indeed, the psalms display a vast spectrum of emotions and entreaties, and it seems that time has not changed our human cries.

In a new book of poems, Testament, I have dared a psalter with 150 many-mooded psalms of my own. I use the word “dared” advisedly. I have been building up to this for a long time. My world view has suffused all my poetry, but this is different. This is a coming out.

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I know that such a work is of its nature controversial and may well fly in the face of the spirit of the age. I feel it may be particularly countercultural in a newly secularised Ireland. I know these changes are an understandable reaction to some of the narrow-mindedness, censorship and abuses of the past, often in the name of religion.

On the other hand, I sense a deep thirst for meaning, for some greater context for our lives. Even many of my generation who kicked over the traces and rejected all tradition in the 1960s may be searching. People of my age in Ireland find themselves questioning the values of our secularised mid-Atlantic culture. Younger generations may seek a spiritual depth in other ways.

Monopoly on truth

It is a searching no one ever completes and none of us have any monopoly on truth. Maybe some of that quest has a place in the public domain.

There is a long tradition of such explorations in poetry in English. Think of John Donne, George Herbert or, nearer our own times, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Perhaps this strand of the poetic tradition has grown thinner. Nevertheless, Patrick Kavanagh’s poem Lough Derg is arguably one of the finest long poems of our time and it is profoundly theological, rich, humorous and compassionate:

This was the banal

Beggary that God heard. Was he bored

As men are with the poor? Christ the Lord

Heard in the voices of the meanly poor

Homeric utterances, poetry sweeping through.

By following in this vein and particularly in the tradition of the psalms, what am I trying to do? I’m giving voice to my own seeking. I’m also attempting to offer poems in a contemporary idiom which resonate with the Hebrew psalms. In my own experience I find I echo the wide range of cries and emotions they express. And, like them, I do not follow a logical sequence but rather embrace each moment with all the interwoven themes and repetitions.

But I trust that, given our common frailty, others may share my moods:

All in your world now sighing in my sigh,

Humanity cries out though I say ‘I’…

Depth of wisdom

In our busyness it’s so easy to ignore, to subdue, all the unspoken words of our hearts. Testament is an invitation, an appeal to accept all the cries within ourselves and others. Maybe I’m trying to persuade readers to take the title of this Rite and Reason column literally. I’m attempting to show them the depth of wisdom in its three words.

So often we’re presented with the either/or option: rite or reason. Why not take the “and” seriously? Why not both rite and reason? We do not need to choose between them. We rejoice in reason and all it has brought us in thought, in argument, in science, in medicine and in all the extraordinary technical achievements of humankind.

Alongside all this I’m convinced that we need the rites of the heart. We are allowed our yearnings, our celebrations, our fears and anger, the moans of pain and lament, the doubts, the hesitations, the groans, the hopes, the cries of acceptance and thankfulness:

For each of us is hiding deep inside

A loneliness that only you appease;

Though often we dissemble out of pride,

Our owning our fragility brings ease.

A peace rewrites our wounded life’s memoir,

Your endless love fulfilling who we are.

Poet Micheal O’Siadhail’s latest collection, Testament, will be launched by former president Mary McAleese in Trinity College Dublin on Tuesday, October 18th