On Sundays I turn on Sirius radio, CNN, to listen to Fareed’s Take. Last weekend while I was waiting, cup of tea in hand, an advertisement for California Psychics came on. Apparently millions of people have been helped “to get to the heart of important matters” with the help of the company’s psychics. Millions? I thought. What in the blazes? Actually, the more I ruminate the more it seems the better questions are, Why not millions? What else do we have in the absence of religion? Where else can we find succour in times of grief? Where oh where can we find spiritual sustenance and answers in today’s world-wide bonkerness?
Truth be known, I have looked for clarity in tea leaves, tarot cards and aura readers but it isn’t quite the same as when I was an unquestioning, uncynical and righteously holy child. When I was younger there was no division between Church and State in Ireland. I would find whatever comfort I needed in confession, singing in the church choir or mass. In one way it made things so much easier. As I got older and the scales fell from my eyes, religious certainty bled out of me.
I can pinpoint the blossoming of my disillusionment. It really kicked in in 1984 with the shocking news of fifteen-year-old Ann Lovett who, on a miserable winter morning, snuck out of school, and died that afternoon giving birth in a grotto in Granard, Co. Longford. Her newborn son also died on that viciously cold day. I was 17 myself, waking up to the world, having more experiences of it, wanting to be free, yet still shackled, strangled in fact by the draconian rules of engagement we were supposed to follow. I still remember reading the newspaper and spiritually teleporting into Ann Lovett’s mind. I felt her fear, shame, and abject hopelessness. How many prayers had she cried out, her supplicant words slicing, bloodying the air as new life ripped through her child’s womb? How lonely she must have been shivering on the freezing steps of a place that is supposed to give shelter, in front of a statue of the blessed Virgin Mother herself.
Irish poet, Paula Meehan, wrote a biting poem, full of agony and humanity, from the statue in the grotto’s point of view. The poem is as sharp as any well-honed knife, all the pain of the world in lines like:
“It can be bitter here at times like this,
November wind sweeping across the border.
It seeds of ice would cut you to the quick.”
“…Trees
Cavort in agony as if they would be free
And take off…”
“I hear fish drowning.
I taste the stagnant water mingled
With turf smoke from outlying farms.”
“They call me Mary – Blessed, Holy, Virgin.
They fit me to a myth of a man crucified:”
In Meehan’s poem, the statue is cold and unforgiving. After all, what can a figure made of stone do?:
“And though she called out in extremis
I did not move
I didn’t lift a finger to help her,”
Although the poem, The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks, was written nearly ten years later, it still conveys the bile collectively felt by Irish women and girls who were no longer willing to succumb to the will of the Catholic Church and live their lives in shame for being sexual beings. Why should we go through life heads bowed, knees raw from kneeling in repentance for how we were made? Is it any wonder many of us youngsters lost our religion.
I may not be as devout as I was as a convent-educated teenager, I may be nauseated by news of child abuse, skeptical of virgin births and wars in the name of some god or another, but I still feel the urge to pray. I believe in the possibility of miracles. I still want to place my trust in a higher power, to find exaltation in the divine. For comfort I cling to a few simple prayers like the poem/prayer I imparted to my children when they were small. This one is like a security blanket that you can tuck under your chin at night:
O Angel of God
My Guardian dear
To whom God’s love
Entrusts me here
Ever this night
Be at my side
To light and guard
To rule and guide
Amen
I look elsewhere for exaltation and I find it, thank heavens, in nature. Sacredness is all around us, if we would just take a moment to appreciate it like I am doing right now as I sit under the Styrax tree in my garden. Each bough droops with Japanese Bell flowers. There is music coming from the tree as bees scuttle busily in the small blossoms. The aroma alone is a soft hymn.
Why do snippets of songs or poetry pop into our heads when we see a thing of beauty? I realize words we’ve learned by heart are mini-prayers. They are hand holds as we reach out and are in turn reached back to in the echo of a few illuminating sentences. Prayer-like moments come to me in the form of poetry as I take a moment under this tree. I lay the pen on my lap and look up at the clamouring above me:
“To See a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
Ah, good old William Blake. These lines open the great river of his poem Auguries of Innocence in which we are at first charmed by the nursery rhyme simplicity. I look for the book that holds the rest of his poem:
A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
Puts all of Heaven in a Rage.
A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the Lies you can invent.”
Couplet after couplet (65 in total) reels you into a litany of truth bomb after truth bomb.
You don’t realise you are being sermonized to until the hook is in your mouth. The poem wakes you up to your moral obligations. You cannot look away until exhausted you flop onto the shore of understanding, rightly chastised and hopefully with the intention of doing better. I do like a good admonishing poem every now and again. Must be the Catholic in me.
In today’s world of screeching, extreme views and the righteously wrong, I pray for peace and quiet, so I will leave you with this beautiful prayer poem by Australian poet and cartoonist, Michael Leunig. It is a quietly subversive little poem and if only we could follow through on the pleas – My God! – what a revolution we would start:
God help us to live slowly:
To move simply
To look softly
To allow emptiness
To let the heart create for us.