Sir, - "Is it too much to ask that Irish commentators be open-minded about the benefits of religious beliefs and practice, lest its demise become a self-fulfilling prophesy?" (Patricia Casey, The Irish Times, February 8th).
In rejecting religion, frail human nature, over-dependent on its own finite resources, physical and psychological, has ever lost its own way in the pursuit of happiness.
In a psychiatric hospital over 30 years ago, it was borne in on me that the then customary habitual practice of religion, sometimes motivated by social or even political considerations, had little of real substance. But the discipline of weekly Mass attendance proved to be the lifeline of recovery as gradually, commencing in hospital, I learned something of the theology of spirituality, or the reality of a loving god at the core of every human heart.
Discovering the Dutch spiritual writer Henri J. M. Nouwen (Out of Solitude) I read of Carl Jung's experience as a consultant. "During the past 30 years (he was writing in 1932) people from all the civilised countries of the earth have consulted me. Among my patients in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.
"It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who has regained this religious outlook. - Yours, etc.,
Gregory Allen, Blackrock, Co Dublin