Rite & Reason: Religious poetry, like God, runs the risk of being killed not by aggression but by indifference, writes John F Deane.
As I grew into adulthood, I became aware that the artist was seen as someone who stood challenging the Christian ethos (in our case, the sad bleakness of Catholicism) and manifesting an alternative and "liberated" non-faith. Now I feel, with our secular society so much at odds with deep human and universal rights and yearnings, it is the Christian artist who stands as nonconformist rebel and as challenge to such secularism.
These days I'm not so sure that politicians fear the work of poets. It is much easier to ignore such work as poets do not get time and space to present their work properly - and poets who take religion as their theme are generally safely ignored.
We move in a world where politicians, sheen-suited and sheen-faced, glide on a sheened surface, under which truth lies drowning; fiction writers churn out the most blithe and blancmange-wobbly yarns to keep the mind from reality, and bookshops sell them by the millions.
All of this gratefully eschews the value that aesthetic experience brings to human living; it settles for the least, leaving us bereft. If poetry (and the same applies to fiction) is reduced to serving the needs of amusement, the loss to the human spirit is immense.
Poetry pushes experiences that are inaccessible to rational disquisition; it works to lift the rationalist into the shocking position of dealing with things that go bump beyond the thin partition of human reasoning.
I see the need, then, for poetry, and I see how it is ignored. Further, I see the need for "religious" poetry and know that it is even more ignored. It must be said, in its immediate defence, that great religious poetry is non-aligned.
Since Constantine had his vision that he would conquer the world under the sign of the cross, the proselytising urge has been dominant. How often has the name of religion been used for political purposes!
Islam appears to be gaining much ground in its domination of the lives of men; how far does Christianity continue to dominate our lives? Indeed, the question may be asked whether Christianity truly ever did dominate our living. The strength of religious poetry may well offer a clue. In our day the very language and imagery of Christian living appear to have lost a great deal of their force.
By "religious poetry" I mean poetry that delves into questions of transcendence and the soul's longing for immortality, rather than devotional hymns or bland statements of faith.
For those of us who have tried to cling to some meaningful wisps of faith from that Catholic past, the problem is how to revive and renew the old, jaded language and imagery.
The deepest springs of religious poetry are not in any way allied to preaching; if origin and end of inspiration produce a religious poem, then it will be in harmony with all truth.
To be a Christian poet is to try and raise a voice against injustice because the heart loves the world the way God loves it. The imagination sees how it should flourish; when this flourishing collides with the social arrangements people make at one another's expense or at the expense of the earth, the poet is moved to speak out and act in service of the reign of God, thus creating possibilities for resistance and resurrection.
The religious poem insists on the certainty of man's insignificance in the immensity of this hostile universe, yet retains the questioning hope of transcendence.
God is killed, not by aggression, but by indifference. Poetry is murdered in the same way. It is sad to see how religious poetry is dismissed by the facile use of the all-cloaking word "mystical". And it is sad to see how so much Christian, particularly Catholic, writing seemed allied to the right wing.
I urge the pleasures of great religious poetry; I point to its relevant probing; I see how poetry is a way of crossing the abyss between one world and another.
Religious poetry says there is more than this febrile search for the fast lane, the life of progress and economics. Above all, it says there is no limit to the endeavours of the human spirit. It is not, as is often said, a poetry that confines or is confined; on the contrary, religious poetry owns the power to grasp the timeless out of the temporal.
It sets up still, in a time of material prosperity (for some), a divine destiny for all men. It continues to urge that mankind may rise above its own bathetic self. If the churches resist the changes going on around them, then the poet will stand outside such a church.
John F Deane is a poet and fiction writer. This is an edited version of his foreword to his collection of essays, In Dogged Loyalty, the Religion of Poetry: the Poetry of Religion (Columba Press).