David Tacey

David began his address with a personal anecdote, an experience which represented a crisis in his personal and professional identity.

“I had seen myself, or I had wanted to be, a Catholic intellectual, and here I was being rebuked by the Church. I had long realized that although I was a university academic, I did not fit into the academic world because I was too religious. I was an outsider in my own workplace, which was aggressively secular and resistant to anything religious. In fact the constitution of my university forbids the proclamation of any religious faith on campus, stating that any such proclamation can be reprimanded and the offending party summarily dismissed. But here I was, fast becoming an outsider in my church as well.

“I would like to belong, but it seems as if I cannot belong. Not that this is merely my personal fate, it seems to be part of my ancestral fate. I am a descendant of a line of Irishmen who spoke their minds about religion and who had a mystical bent. My grandfather was a mystic of deep faith, but it forced him to walk alone in much of his journey. I am a sociable person and one who believes that the Spirit brings us into fellowship with others. But sometimes, if one has to express certain things that seem true, but others do not want to hear them, one has to do so as a solitary individual and not on behalf of a tradition.”

An as yet unresolved tension

“I recognise that a rupture has taken place in our world, and it is now impossible to bring back the cultural landscape of the religious past. One of the great changes over the last five hundred years is the shift of authority from outside sources to the individual. Protestantism initially ushered in this change in the 16th century, but it seems to have affected everyone in the modern West, including the modern Catholic. I do not see this change being reversed, and if religion wants to dialogue with the modern spiritual condition it has to recognise that the individual is empowered today in ways that would have been unthinkable in the past. The modern Catholic is in a curious position, because although the mystical traditions of Catholicism are about the search for the spiritual authority within the individual, the official view still seems to be that the self is not to be trusted and to turn oneself into one’s own spiritual guide is foolish in the extreme. There is a great, as yet unresolved tension between the ‘Protestant’ attitude of the modern West, the official teaching of the Catholic church, and the Catholic mystical writings that are exerting an everincreasing influence on modern seekers.

“The global situation regarding spirituality and religion is full of tension, and eventually there must be some kind of resolution to this tension. Among the students I teach, personal or grassroots spirituality has been one way in which the built up tension in the secular psyche has been expressed, and many of them burrow away at their individually designed spiritual pathways. But this strikes me as merely a phase in our present culture, and eventually the spiritual will demand more than a personal expression. Eventually there will have to be a public reckoning with the sacred, because the sacred is not a personal possession or a private experience, but the centrepiece of our existence. If it is the Spirit that we contact in our interior journeys, this spirit paradoxically urges us to enter more fully into the outer world, because the spirit is incarnational, it wants more engagement with the world, and does not like to be hidden in the closet of personal introspection.

“Historically speaking, we live in tense times. As the poet Matthew Arnold said: we ‘wander between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born’. No one yet knows the shape of the future, and I don’t have a crystal ball either. But one thing stands out for me: in the future, we won’t be doing religion in the old way. The spirit of the time has moved on, and we have to move with it, no matter how much religious people like to believe that traditional forms are eternal and never need to be changed.”

The Christian of the future

“It was Karl Rahner who said: ‘The future Christian will be a mystic or he or she will not exist at all’. This seems like a tall order, and perhaps initially, an unlikely possibility. But the more I think about it the more true it becomes. The old way of knowing God, as a distant reality glimpsed occasionally in rites or symbols, needs to be replaced by a more powerful and transformative experience of God as an ongoing reality at the core of our lives. Once we sense God at these depths, we can never escape him, and ‘losing our faith’ is no longer an option, since God is synonymous with what is most true and intimate about ourselves. This does not mean that we need to experience God as a constant presence. The fact is that we sometimes experience God through absence or lack. That is why longing becomes so intense, because we want to connect with what feels far away, and we want to bring it close. What makes the Christian mystics so appealing to modern taste is that they experience God as the beloved and they begin, as we begin today, with a sense of emptiness. They went in search of God because their distance from God was unbearable. Here Louis Dupré is illuminating:

Precisely this sense of emptiness accounts for the strange attraction mystical literature holds for our contemporaries. For most mystical writers have at one time or another expressed the emptiness that in some way corresponds to the sense of religious absence that so many feel today. The modern person is justified in turning to the masters of spiritual life by the fact that in his emptiness he has nowhere to turn but inwardly. The contemporary person is forced to start the spiritual journey from within, even though that is the place where he/she most grievously encounters a void as silent as the secular world that has ceased to speak in sacred tongues.

“It seems to me that contemplative living will be the basis of religion in the future. Religious traditions need to get out all the dusty tomes on the spiritual life that sit buried in theological libraries. People today are passionately interested in the experience of the ‘God within’, and the mystical writers knew a great deal about that experience. This is ironic, because the Churches are often ambivalent about their mystics, who are treated with the same disdain as prophets. But it seems that old style religion, involving congregational worship, large parishes, orthodox rituals and ceremonies, are attracting very few young people, and may not survive into the future. What attracts people today are small study groups, or meditation and prayer circles, which Cardinal Martini calls ‘cells of evangelisation’. The new interest in religion and faith is personal rather than collective, existential rather than devotional, experiential rather than instructional, and passionate rather than moralistic. It is concerned with encountering God in this life, rather than preparing to meet him in the next, which is the more traditional approach. It is ironic in some ways that the apparently nonreligious youth of today, who do not conform to religious norms, seem to be more religious than their forebears who are upset by their apparent refusal to toe the line. Religion is in a new key today, and the sooner religious organisations can understand this the better off everyone will be.

“The unexpected irony of recent times is that modernity is bringing on a turn to the mystical. Modernity had not intended this, and yet its secular conditions have alienated people so radically from traditional forms of faith that the spirit has risen up in protest.”

Not talk about God: rather some experience of God

A whisper, a wink, a tremor of bliss
T.S. Elliott

“People today like to mix religion with the notion of a therapeutic personal journey, and the emphasis is on linking personal growth with faith development. This is new, because in the past one was simply handed faith in a less complicated way. I cannot recall my parents ever talking about faith as a ‘journey’ – they were simply handed it by the church and their parents, and they stuck with it through thick and thin. But the problem with this is that there was little or no emphasis on the stages of faith, on outgrowing one stage and entering another, and little opportunity to ritualise movement between the stages, or even to admit than an earlier understanding of God, for instance, had been outgrown. Faith seemed to have only one form, and there was no subtle gradations or nuances. But today there is no such thing as a package deal or a one-size fits all approach. Everyone likes to explore faith in his or her own way, and at their own pace, according to their stage in the journey. What we are seeing is more individuality, variation and difference in the experience of faith, an attitude which is berated by the old fashioned as a ‘pick and mix’ approach. Each of the features of the new style of faith is subjected to criticism and denigration by the old brigade. However, this ritual humiliation will have to stop if religion wants a future. The personally tailored approach to faith is the way ahead, and I see spiritual direction and counselling becoming ever more important in the future.

“These are spiritual dark ages, and a new style of religion has to be found. The task of religion is far more difficult today: it has to lead people within themselves, into their heart lives, to find that part of them that is capable of developing faith. The head or intellect has pushed faith away, with its belief that it can get on well without it.

“The role of religion in dark times is to draw faith out from people, and not instil it into them, from above. This involves us in the art or science of spiritual education, noting that ‘education’ derives from the Latin educare, meaning to lead out or draw forth. This is how religion needs to be conducted today, if it is to make sense and to gain existential purchase on people’s lives. The light of the divine is lost in the darkness of the human interior, and we have to be prepared to go in there, make contact with it, and lead it out. Religion that operates in the old-style, imposing itself from above, will no longer work, and if we persist in that style, the religious traditions are doomed. Opening up to the interior person is the future of religion and the tradition that can achieve this first is the one that will be assured of a strong and noble future. Reappropriating the mystical traditions, monastic techniques and styles, and pathways of interiority and contemplation, is the way ahead.”

Experimenting with spirituality in a secular university

“I see what I do as a form of what the Second Vatican Council called pre-evangelisation; that is, sensitising individuals to the interior life and urging them to see the value of adjusting themselves to a higher will. I try not to use overtly religious language, but confine myself to literature (especially poetry), philosophy and the psychology of religious experience. I do not encourage them to meditate or pray, but I create a ‘climate of validity’ in which they can experience the non-rational aspects of their lives. I use religious poetry to this effect, as well as inspirational writings from various traditions, including Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Aboriginal. I attract students from a variety of backgrounds: most are secular, humanist and atheist, but a few come from Jewish, Islamic or Christian families. I have to ensure that my discourse is open and inclusive so as not to offend students from any traditional or cultural background. This is difficult to achieve, but with the writings of Thomas Moore, John O’Donohue, David Mowaljarlai, Margaret Atwood and Mary Oliver it is a distinct possibility. I encourage students to review their personal experience, and write about moments of healing or grace in which they have felt the presence of something greater than themselves. I encourage them into an experience of the intimacy of God, but I refer to God as ‘the sacred’ in case I offend atheists or others who are allergic to God language. The task for me is to get underneath the social persona that professes to be atheist or agnostic, and touch the inner life which I believe is open to the presence of God. One of the mottos of my work is the Latin maxim: ‘Called or not called, God is present’.

“Knowing that students would refute a position of faith if I engage them in a rational discussion, I do not bother with this form of education. I have come to be suspicious of the rational intellect, and believe that it subverts our native potential for an encounter with the sacred.

“Secularism is an illusion that we live by, or a fiction we tell about ourselves. It is the mask worn by society, and it is a mask that has proved useful in some respects, because it has helped to distance us from the heated and potentially destructive and divisive nature of religious passions. Beneath our secular mask, which has been slipping in recent years, there are strong currents of religious and spiritual life which demand expression.

“Hundreds of students have entered my course on spirituality from an atheist or secular starting point. Why do they enter it at all? They enrol to discover what they have hidden or denied in themselves. The course is not essential for any degree program, it is an elective which students choose of their own free will. When I confronted a vocal atheist about why he had enrolled, he waved his hand about the room and said: ‘I enrolled to find out what youse believe’. I read this psychologically: he entered to find out what his inner self believed, with which he was out of touch and hence projected onto those around him. It was ironic that he gestured to everyone in the class, as most were not believers. They were, like him, sceptical about religion but, unlike him, prepared to bite their tongue about this and allow the other side of life to make its claim upon them.

“One student, Steven, who denied religious faith at the start, wrote this at the end of the course:

It is hard to sway a convinced materialist like myself from his constant scepticism about religious matters, at least I thought it was before this course. But it is terribly hard to continue to oppose the idea of ‘spirit’ when it is presented in poetry and inspirational writings. Before the course, I blocked out religion as irrelevant to my life, it made no sense to me at all in its conventional, archaic and drab form. But when spirituality is expressed in poetry, passion, and subjectivity, I have to take another look, as these expressions are inspirational and move me in an unexpected way. I now see that emotion and spirit can be included in my world, and I can have such elements without straying from reality.

“When a secular person is ‘moved’ in an ‘unexpected way’, he is able to change his views of religion and discover that it is speaking directly to him. I often notice that young men are concerned about the problem of reality and how best to adjust to it. Steven says he is pleased he can have spirit ‘without straying from reality’.

“Secularism has conditioned our notion of reality, defining it in its own narrow terms and excluding spirit from the real. People dare not affirm spirit in case they become ‘unreal’ to themselves and thus disloyal to their concept of reality. However once spirit has been presented to them as a reality accessible to their subjectivity, they are prepared to turn around. What this tells me is that religious education needs to focus on subjectivity and not confine itself to the outside world. Bernard Lonergan puts this memorably in a simple formulation:

The fruit of the truth must grow and mature on the tree of the subject, before it can be plucked and placed in the absolute realm.

“Too often, religion expects us to admire the fruit of truth in the absolute realm, but today it must be grown on the tree of the subject, and experienced as a content of the heart. The tradition that learns how to do this first will be the one that thrives.  “My second example comes from a young woman, Jenny. She had made the typical distinction between personal spirituality and organised religion. She did not share Steven’s materialism or disbelief, for she could sense, like so many women, the presence of spirit in her life. But she could not find much purpose or ‘living reality’ in religious traditions.

By the end of the course, she admits that she can now see religion in different terms:

Before I started this subject, I was confident in ‘bagging’ Christianity for the way in which it had failed me. Empty rituals, outmoded morality, and corrupt institutions, etc. Yet as the weeks have passed, I have come to realize that a more sophisticated dialogue is at my disposal. I have discovered that my childish repudiation of the Christian Church revealed a lack of knowledge into the nature, depth and multi-layered appearance of spirituality within religion. I come away with greater respect for my religion of origin, and for the presence of spirituality in what I had thought was a dead and moribund institution.

The controversial nature of preevangelisation

The spirituality course creates a climate in which various faith positions can be re-experienced and re-affirmed. This process, if sensitively handled, can operate in a multi-faith and multi-racial context. If I had come across as more overtly religious, using fully articulated Christian language, for instance, then much less spiritual development would have taken place. I would have offended or insulted the majority of my students. The Islamic students would have walked out, and the Jews, whether practising or not, would have followed suit. The lapsed Christians, the secular, and the atheists would have protested, and we would have been embroiled in political wrangling and intellectual warfare. By refusing to preach, by looking for a ‘generic’ language of the spirit, peace and harmony reign in the multi-cultural classroom, and each individual is free to affirm whatever faith position is pleasing to their soul. One of my mottos for this course has been ‘Less is More’. The less evangelical I am, the more the religious life seems able to spring forth in students’ lives.

“Despite this positive experience with my students, I have received a fair amount of negative feedback from both secular and religious authorities. Some religious people have told me that my course is too soft, open and ill-defined. It seems to them that I am validating every type of faith experience, and as a result I have been branded a polytheist. I am not a polytheist, but from a narrow minded perspective, I can see that it may look that way. I have a specific faith of my own, but in my public work I see myself engaged in a form of teaching that encourages diversity and plurality. After all, our community is diverse, and it would be most unfortunate to deny this fact and operate in a onetrack mode. Various evangelical media organizations visited me while the course was running, and most were puzzled by my motivations and interests. They did not understand what I was doing and were worried by the plurality of it all. Clearly, pre-evangelising was not something they endorsed.

“The artist Michael Leunig spoke to me about my teaching and said that I had been working behind enemy lines. He said this must have been exhausting. He was right, but it was also exhilarating, to be part of this experience, and to realise that ‘secularisation is merely a manner of speaking’.”

David Tacey

David was raised in Alice Springs, central Australia, and it was here that he was influenced by Aboriginal cultures and their religion and philosophy. From Alice Springs, he moved to Adelaide to attend universities, reading philosophy, psychology and literature.

After completing a PhD in literature and analytical psychology, he moved to the United States, where he conducted studies in archetypal psychology, with a focus on the psychology of religious experience. He was a Harkness Postdoctoral Fellow of the Commonwealth Fund, New York, and his studies were supervised by James Hillman. His main interest is in tracking the spirit of the time in contemporary society.

David is Reader in Literature and Associate Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne. His search for meaning in the postmodern world takes him into theology, religion, sociology, the arts and culture.

He is the author of nine books, including ReEnchantment (2000), The Spirituality Revolution (2003) and Edge of the Sacred (2009). His books have been translated into several languages, including Spanish, French, Chinese and Korean.