The force of the unknown confers a particular intensity on human life. If there is such a thing as spirituality it surely roots here in the yearning for a sense of meaning. Spirituality could be defined as the call of individual complexity for meaning, integration, healing and belonging. Spirituality is more than the pious attitude of the explicitly religious. It is the deeper yearning of every life. The degree of yearning can range from the person who scarcely acknowledges transcendence to the person who lives a fully contemplative life. Every life is confronted by the infinite at some point or other. The most intimate and vulnerable area of the mind is the realm that opens on to the infinite. The great spiritual traditions teach us to free that opening for the dangerous intimacy of the divine to awaken. Ultimately there is no such thing as an "unspiritual" life.
The search for meaning is informed by a sense of quest and question. The depth and vitality of a culture can often be gauged by the depth and passion of its questioning. The question is the place where the unknown becomes articulate in us; the threshold where old meaning falls and new meaning strives to emerge. The inner life of contemporary Ireland is riven with questions.
Institutional religion is in a state of accelerating demise. From the anti-clerical viewpoint this is to be celebrated. However, at a cultural level it has troubling implications. It deprives our culture of a critical participant in conversation about our future. The pace of change is breathless. Ireland is swelling - roads are clogged with traffic, towns are barely recognisable within their sprawl, cities are smothering up. And every last nest of untouched landscape is now a target for gaudy development. The infrastructure is not able to accommodate what is emerging. In contemporary Ireland there is driven urgency but little sense of destination.
Politics, the art of the possible, is reduced to market economics. Pragmatism has replaced vision. It is a time when we need careful and prophetic reflection to understand the depth of what is happening to us. But we are in such haste that there is no time for critical reflection. The fall away from religion has been a free-fall. People had practised because they felt forced or because they trusted the Church. Often the faith lacked intellectual underpinning; theology was kept from the people. No theological consciousness was allowed develop in Ireland; consequently, when faith in the system was shattered, there was no ground to fall back upon. At a time when vision is desperately needed, the traditional providers of vision are absent. People are now psychically homeless in a devastating way. Christianity was the dominant thought-frame within which and against which much of our thinking was conducted. The loosening of this frame confronts us with new possibilities and responsibilities.
Institutional religion has often cleverly controlled the sources of spiritual power. Without certain conventions society cannot function. When convention assumes the status of an absolute, it becomes a mechanism of control and falsification. A priest friend tells of visiting a strictly observant contemplative community. An old sister welcomed him. Seeing that he was newly ordained, she knelt for his blessing. He thought how strange it was that a woman who had endured 60 years risking her heart and mind each day into the terse Otherness of the divine should request a blessing from one so young and inexperienced.
When she stood up, he knelt for her blessing. She mumbled something and made a sign of the cross. Then he realised how embarrassed and awkward she felt. She had never been asked for her blessing. As he left he thought how quietly sinister it was that a system had worked to convince this woman that she had no power to bless. A blessing is an invocation of healing and protective love. Surely we all - parents, children, lovers, friends - have the power to lay our hands on each others' heads and invoke blessing. Yet it is something that we have been prevented from thinking we could do. The absence of a discursive tradition in Ireland has had a paralysing effect on the articulation and unfolding of questions. When an issue surfaces here, the two sides of the question often become quickly polarised and its further discussion locked in the repetitive symmetry of tribal combat. The dominant thought-frame is now the economic one. The demise of religion means that there is nothing to counter or critique the awakening of such avarice. The vital edge of a culture must have a balance of critique and creativity. Critique without creativity becomes cynical and barren; creativity without critique ends up as sentimentality. The demise of the tradition has meant that the its wells have become silted up.
Ireland has a unique imaginative tradition. Our critical imagination needs to engage this impasse to free up these wells of knowing. The imagination is the heart of true spirituality. Only with the imagination can we initiate a retrieval of vision that will speak to the complexity and contradictions of our present confusions. We radically need to replenish our whole concept of the Divine. God is no bland moralist. Our mythological, monastic and mystical tradition suggests the richness of God's imagination, alive with Otherness, danger and fascination. The 19th-century Romanisation of Irish religion has served us very poorly. We need a more courageous re-presentation of the deeper archaic layers of pre-Christian and Christian mythologies which have forged and sustained our spiritual consciousness. At a darker level, revisionism has expunged the pain from Irish history; in this time of driven desire we need vital connection with this "dangerous memory".
The spiritual has now come into vogue. Even people who prided themselves on being "a-religious" can now hold forth on the adventure of spirituality. Yet the uncritical takeover of the spiritual may serve to fill the vacuum left by religion but is itself in danger of developing the same wearisome didacticism and whiff of coyness. The change and challenge we are experiencing demands a vision which is grounded deeper in the narrative of our experience and memory.
The larger question here is the question of tradition. We live in times when tradition is disavowed. Yet a living connection with tradition is vital for the health and vibrancy of a culture. Tradition is to the community what memory is to the individual. The loss of tradition renders a significant portion of the culture homeless and confused. Our poise at these intense thresholds would be greatly enhanced by a retrieval and reawakening of the resources in our diverse and complex spiritual tradition. A tradition is a huge archive of wisdom, shadow and memory. It holds the lived experience of a people latently present as a possibility. It offers a mirror to current identity and provides stepping stones to the future. A great religious tradition holds wisdom; it is the archive of the religious imagination that has concentrated on the central questions of the origin, meaning and ultimate homeland of human identity. It is a huge loss for a culture when access to this harvest is closed because of the limitations of the representatives of this tradition.
In contrast with cults or fundamentalism, theology attempts to keep the frontiers between memory and possibility open. To keep the true questions of meaning free from facile and unworthy answers. Within a cult the counter-questions are banned.
Within a great theological tradition, the awkward and critical questions are welcomed; they help to mine the sources of revelation and illumination with stringent rigour espousing only loyalty to the truth. When an institution outlaws questioning as disloyalty, then it has substituted its sense of service for self-protection.
This is where the voice of the prophet needs to be heard, the voice edged with wilderness that reminds us of the destination. We have allowed the depth and breadth of our spiritual tradition to fall into the hands of functionaries who, in most cases, have no real acquaintance with, or knowledge of tradition.
Perhaps it is time to take back the power and reawaken our sense of critical participation in our own culture. Many of the functionaries are merely adept custodians of the gateways. They are proficient in the legality of membership and convention. But they can tell little of the landscape that lies beyond the entrance. They do not seem to know of the mountains or where the wells are hidden. This is where the voice of the prophet needs to be heard, the voice edged with wilderness that reminds us of the destination. We have allowed the depth and breadth of our spiritual tradition to fall into the hands of functionaries who, in most cases, have no real acquaintance with, or knowledge of tradition.
Perhaps it is time to take back the power and reawaken our sense of critical participation in our own culture. Many of the functionaries are merely adept custodians of the gateways. They are proficient in the legality of membership and convention. But they can tell little of the landscape that lies beyond the entrance. They do not seem to know of the mountains or where the wells are hidden.
Critical thinking is illumination. There is a surprising symmetry between the structure of the mind and the depths of the world. Thought seeks to portray the alternating rhythms of this symmetry between knowing and unknowing, fact and possibility, word and silence, finite and infinite. Ironically, human presence is never fully there, never quite gathered; it is always attempting to cohere to a tenuous threshold in the half-light. The labour and light of thought derives from the urgency of this endless, inner transcendence.
Individual identity and presence evade the grasp of direct perception. Personal experience is only the kinetic surface of unchartered depths. This distance between experience and understanding drives the search for spiritual meaning.
Some styles of the new spirituality have raided the tradition for beautiful insights, conveniently eradicating the ascetical and the ethical. Contemporary Ireland is going through an ethical crisis. There is a surplus of billions, yet there is a huge number of people caught in the poverty trap. There should be no homeless children, no worn-out mothers scraping to provide their families with a proper dinner one day a week. It is always amazing how accommodating the poor are. How silent they remain, how their time is made worthless by endless waiting. How they are so often the first to the polls to vote back in precisely the structures that disenfranchise them.
Contemporary Ireland might now master the art of accumulating wealth, but it is becoming an ever harsher place for those who become vulnerable. Consider all the innocent people who have been sentenced to death by being infected with HIV and hepatitis C, and how slow the hidden Government is to look after them.
Imagine the Government inviting some brilliant public figure to front a temporary ministry for poverty and giving them the resources to analyse who is poor and the causes and structures of poverty - and to include people such as Peter McVerry, Sister Stan, whose life-work is with the marginalised. The caring professions are vital in keeping the humane tissue of a society alive. Teachers, nurses and doctors should receive what they are demanding. Otherwise, the competent and caring will gradually abandon these professions, and the future cost to the heart of society will be immense.
Sometimes those in authority and power are fatally distant from the real experience of people. They literally do not know what their decisions force people to endure. When I lived in Germany I remember meeting a brilliant young judge. He was troubled by his role and the exercise of his power. Once a month he endeavoured to spend a day in prison. Naturally, this only served to trouble him further. It did, however, drive him to engage in a rigorous structural critique of the whole system and social context in which he worked.
Nothing divides a society like greed. It diminishes the nadur, the nature of a people. It helps to create an elite which is strong, which excels in the empty warriorship of the competitive, and a majority who are vulnerable and voiceless. Politics and power are Darwinian zones where only the strong survive. Yet there are people in those areas who care and still have not forsaken the art of kindness.
The difficulty for most of us is that we move within our own circle and come to know little beyond it. An acclaimed Irish filmmaker, while speaking to a group of film students recently, said the following: "Who do you meet? Do you ever meet the poor in your local area? Do you know who the local prostitutes are? Do you know who is suffering from terminal illness in your town? Do you ever meet the people in the old folks' home? Do you meet the powerful and the moneyed? The youth stranded between digital space, the ruins of religion and the drug zones? If you are not exposed to such a range of people, you will never come to know the depth of this society, and your films will have no force or truth." Perhaps the media has a role to play in freeing itself from the pseudo-verities of surface culture by exploring the awkward questions under the surface; this could open a pathway of conversation between the forsakenness of need and the abundance of resources and possibilities that are there. Imagine a television programme called The Awkward Question, which would traverse the real margins while avoiding the political correctness and the predictability of false balance that absorbs protest.
The revelations of insidious and systematic corruption at so many levels of our society have led to a huge loss of innocence. Ideals have been shattered. The role of ideals in a society is a tender question. All offered ideals deserve the scrutiny of the critical intellect. Yet without a substratum of ideals, a society loses its nature. For people active in the work of consciousness in our society, there is now a great challenge to articulate some fresh ideals which can help us to forge a vision for the future. As the Bible says, "without a vision the people perish".
One would expect a significant contribution from our universities. A university is a place where the wisdom of a culture is excavated through scholarship and brought into full and fierce confrontation with the prevailing idolatries that accrete on the surface of a culture. Imagine scholarship which would engage the disciplines of history, psychology and theology in an analysis of the deeper psychological structures of our present culture. In which the disciplines of philosophy and literary criticism would excavate the terrain where the narrative mythologies and discursive questioning engage. Rather than packing portions of our heritage as a product for strangers, we should engage it as our inheritance to help us meet the unimaginable transformation that information technology is going to effect in the next 10 years. Without a sense of ground and rootedness, spirituality becomes mere self-indulgence. Theology and history are sisters. The meaning we yearn for can only be satisfied through excavation of this threshold; this would engage the depths and shelter of our tradition and reflect the rhythms of symmetry between our memory and possibility.
John O'Donohue is the author of Anam Cara. His latest collection of poetry is Conamara Blues (Doubleday, £12.99 sterling).