Mark Patrick Hederman would have it believed he is mad. Mad . . . mad, mid-west. But, as with Prince Hamlet in his rotten state, it seems something of "an antic disposition". The pose helps in a world that is out of joint. Or in an institution that increasingly appears so.
It allows for certain freedoms where a heavily controlled uniformity is the norm. The indulged freedoms of the "mad", the "eccentric", "clowns", "idiots", latter-day Prince Myshkins. Poor Yoricks, perhaps. Alas.
He likes to recall the comment of a former Abbot at Glenstal, Dom Matthew Dillon. He once said that of the 45 Benedictine monks in the community there, "43 are certifiably insane and all are trying to figure out who the other two are".
This acceptance of "madness" at Glenstal allows, it seems, for a great diversity of personality in the monastery, where the community, currently, is aged between 32 and 85. It also helps that it is set on 350 acres. There is lots of space and lots of silence, "so that there are some people with whom you never connect although you are aware of them", he has said.
Of greatest assistance, no doubt, is the age-old Benedictine Rule (since 488AD). It is the "trellis" upon which community life is based, he says. This same trellis supported the Benedictines throughout the Dark Ages, when there was little theology, philosophy or learning of any kind in Christian Europe.
It emphasises prayer, liturgy, the great mystery of being and the Being behind the great mystery. It involves the three vows of stability, obedience, and what is known as conversiomorum (a conversion of manners). That, he believes, is "a wonderful phrase - no-one has worked out what it actually means".
For him it means he is obliged to change whatever in his life "is preventing me from being what God wants me to be, and that doesn't mean I conform to the past or the present of the Roman Catholic Church and what they decide". And he most certainly does not.
There is no vow of celibacy involved in being a Benedictine monk. In fact, he believes you can stay a monk and not be celibate, even if "it's a dangerous area". It's "a question of discernment". Traditionally, however, the monks are celibate.
He studied at the Sorbonne in 1968 when, in Paris, it was great to be alive but to be young was very heaven. He recalls the student revolution of that year vividly. For him it was "a first-hand realisation that civilisation can be plucked up and changed overnight". De Gaulle had fled the city, the students were in control and those who had gave according to their ability. Or need. For his part, he spoke to the multitudes about growing tomatoes in Ireland.
He was also part of an even more ambitious undertaking. He and 500 other students locked themselves into a theatre and resolved not to emerge again until they had answered that greatest of questions: "What does existence mean?" Food and drink was brought as the debate continued for three days and two nights. The students finally concluded - unanimously - that the question had been badly formulated.
"We really did believe we could reformulate existence," he recalls.
Nor has he necessarily abandoned the aspiration. As he revealed in an interview with Dr Stephen Costello for his recent book, The Irish Soul: In Dialogue: "I made a vow when I was 19 that I would understand the world I was living in by the age of 40. I would then write that out for other people so they could share the journey and not have to do it themselves; and then I would enjoy the rest of my life, having understood it."
And he has had some success, where so many others have feared to tread. But, he continued, with wistful understatement: "Now I'm 56 and it didn't work out as quickly as I had imagined."
But he has written a number of books, explaining his understanding of the world. Among them are The Haunted Inkwell (recently published by Columba Press); Manikon Eros: Mad Crazy Love, and Kissing in the Dark.
Inevitably, perhaps, Mark Patrick Hederman is a child of the 1960s, possessing all the traits that label suggests: a natural suspicion of authority, an inclusive disposition, respect for the individual view, an infinite curiosity, an agile imagination and a healthy contempt for those who reduce life, or God, to narrow concepts.
He is not particularly interested in theology - "It doesn't relate to anything I feel myself about God" - nor has he ever been convinced, for instance, by Aquinas's five proofs for the probability of the existence of God. None such existed, he said. "If there were, we wouldn't be free," he says. To attempt such proof was to attempt to make a science of belief.
He is no more enamoured of philosophy, which he see as a Western European invention preoccupied with generalisations and impatient of the particular, whether that be of the individual or of specific experience, while being ignorant of older ways. Who needs theology or philosophy when you have such faith? He has never wavered in his belief in God since first becoming conscious of it at the age of nine.
He never wanted to be a priest; it would have meant having to follow "the party line". Hearing confession, for instance, he would have been expected to tell people how they should live life as the Pope or the Curia saw it. It was something he could not do in good conscience. In fact, the decision of Pope Paul VI to change the phrase saying the whole truth was to be "found" in the Catholic Church, to "subsists" in the Catholic Church, "just about allows me to hang on in there". He interprets the change to mean that if you dig deep enough anywhere, you will also find the truth.
He does not believe in natural law arguments, favours women becoming priests, and believes divorce is not wrong ("I have no idea what Christ actually said about divorce. Joyce was very clear on that. Christ died at 33 and as far as he was concerned, he avoided most of the problems that come later." He is aware of situations where people "are destroying themselves").
He is opposed to abortion and compulsory celibacy and objects to categorising any form of relationship, homosexual or heterosexual. "The real fact is that every time two people meet it's a different thing and requires a new category and a new journey for those two people to work out," he said.
And he has little time for the strong leader. "Anybody who is absolutist has to be slightly stupid," he believes, while recognising that "a certain lack of nuance, a blindness or blinkeredness was possibly necessary for decision/action."
Another appealing thing about the Benedictine life, he muses, is its "organised chaos". Other orders had goals, and these predicated structure.
The latter years of the current Papacy, he feels, have been "almost schizophrenic", with the rigid emphasis on authority co-existing with such statements as Pope John Paul's letter to artists. This was "a wonderful document", illustrating that the Pope was "a very great thinker while at the same time he was clamping down on theology in a style that was similar to absolutism".
One "absolutist" who particularly attracts his ire is St Paul. Paul never met Jesus, he points out.
"He never knew what the original human being looked like," he says. "I always say that's because he was so unbearable, Christ didn't want to be on earth with him. Bertrand Russell said that St Paul did to Christianity what Lenin did to Communism."
He also has problems with the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which he described in The Irish Soul: In Dialogue as "the ugliest words ever constructed. They would turn anybody off". Apart from the aesthetics it was also "the most unpoetical linkage of syllables that has ever been perpetrated by the human tongue . . . these things become banners and slogans whereby we are all burnt at the stake, because we ask 'do you or do you not believe in the Immaculate Conception?' and everyone goes to war".
For his own part, he feels that the doctrine (that the Virgin Mary was born without sin) "in one sense, is a blasphemy because what you are actually saying is that the human race created by God is so disfigured and had become so evil that it was essential to have a preacher born without any reference to the mess that pertained. If you take an evolutionary view, then you have a different view of the Immaculate Conception. You say everything was an Immaculate Conception. So it depends on what you mean".
His God is the Holy Spirit. A personal Being, as revealed in the signs of the times, in people and places. His relationship with God is "like connecting with a very refined and reticent aristocratic animal. It's very delicate. You don't force it and you don't talk too much".
It is the primary relationship of his life. "You create a rhythm whereby you are in contact, and it will go away if not cultivated and practised. Monasteries allowed you do that," he says. Most deep relationships are like that, and very rare. For his part, he believes that if you connect with five people in your life, it is enormously enriched. His relationship with God is, he feels, "like being a secret agent getting instructions over a bad radio, and often being asked to do the most ludicrous things".
The Jungian concept of synchronicity best illustrates this way of the Holy Spirit communicating anonymously, he said. That concept of meaningful coincidence.
"For me, coincidence is the way in which God is present in the universe anonymously. It's like the unconscious. Nobody knows if things come from God," he says.
Which brings us to artists, whom he sees as prophets, "in the literal sense, speaking out before their time". They become "the unwitting mouthpiece of the psychic secrets of their age" and are "often as unconscious of this as sleepwalkers".
For him, above all, there is poetry - "in the most original and deepest meaning of the word" - where language is not a tool and expression not a technique, but where both language and expression "are the way in which Being, what really is, can appear".
It is "an art of excavation and exploration, seeking meaning where scientific words or normal human discourse can no longer be trusted to register the subtlety of what is being experienced".
He refers to a letter James Joyce wrote to his brother Stanislaus, saying: "I like the notion of the Holy Ghost being in the ink- bottle." (Hence the title The Haunted Inkwell). The Holy Spirit, he believes, "hides in the inkwell so that inspiration can exceed the most extravagant efforts of the artists".
Hederman quotes Carl Jung, who said: "It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or the unconscious." But, he points out, it is from the unconscious that all great spiritual or religious art emanates.
Art "is truth entering history and emerging in a recognisable and durable work", he says. It was theology. It did not merely illustrate theology, but was in itself a theological act. "It is God actively involved in the work - divine energy."
It is this idea he explores in the The Haunted Inkwell, through the work of Iris Murdoch, Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, James Joyce and Seamus Heaney. The purpose of the book is "to confirm the poet in a lonely and exigent task, which is all the more necessary in these times".
The Haunted Inkwell: Art and our Future by Mark Patrick Hederman is published by Columba Press (£11.99/€15.22)
Mark Patrick Hederman, left, was born in Ballingarry, Co Limerick, and has been a monk at Glenstal Abbey, Co Limerick, for more than 30 years, during which time he has been headmaster at the school there as well as its dean. He attended school at St Gerard's in Bray for three years before going to Glenstal. Later, he studied philosophy and literature at UCD and did a doctorate in the philosophy of education, during which time he studied at the Sorbonne.
He has lectured in Ireland, the US and Nigeria. He and his past pupil, UCD philosopher Prof Richard Kearney, founded and edited The Crane Bag, a cultural magazine