From paganism to mysticism to Christianity, plurality defines Munster Literature Centre's annual festival this week, writes Mary Leland.
Good heavens (if heaven is allowed), this is going to be fun! Mark Patrick Hederman defends his use of the BCE/ACE (Before Common Era/After Common Era) dating system, rather than BC/AD, in his publications as a means of meeting what he sees as an obligation to get rid of everything in his culture that is offensive to other cultures.
Hilary Wakeman joined the Church of England because it was the nearest church to her home. Priest, publisher and preacher Jim Cotter is a counsellor and writer whose work includes Good Fruits: Same-Sex Relationships and the Christian Faith.
That's just a tasting menu of the contributors gathering in Cork from this Thursday for a literary festival on the theme of religion and spirituality. Given the title Belief and Unbelief by Munster Literature Centre (MLC), the festival has a cast-list which includes James Harpur from west Cork, American-based Russian Ilya Kaminsky, Beijing-raised Yang Lian, Augustinian Padraig J Daly, Dublin's Gerard Fanning, Jim Cotter from the Welsh parish once served by RS Thomas, New York's Darcey Steinke, and the home-grown clutch of William Wall, Thomas McCarthy, Liz O'Donoghue and Patrick Cotter, director of the MLC. All that is missing are poets Theo Dorgan and Leanne O'Sullivan, both of whom had to cancel.
It's a busy week for Patrick Cotter all round, as Wednesday sees the launch by Arlen House of Perplexed Skin, his first collection of poetry.
Under his management, MLC hosts a long weekend of literary discussions and readings each year. Last time the focus was on war and politics, the year before that on love and sex.
"It's true that the mass media pays more attention to love and sex, but in fact the mind/body/spirit sections of the big bookshops are usually very busy," says Cotter, who spent some years with Waterstone's in Cork. "In this programming, we're aiming at plurality, so the topics range from Celtic paganism to Judaism and Buddhism and different shades of Christianity. We're missing Islam because the timing was wrong for the speakers we wanted - their absence is not an oversight."
Despite the variety which defines this weekend's programme, it looks as if the character of the event could be summed up in the person of poet James Harpur, whose publications include last year's collection, The Dark Age (Anvil Press). As well as poems on the Book of Kells, the book contains a meditative sequence on St Symeon Stylites, the hermit who made his home on a pillar in the Syrian desert.
"The Dark Ages as a period fascinates me because of its tension between the new, increasingly dominant Christian faith and the old pagan religion," says Harpur. "Irish monks and monasteries were notable exceptions to the breakdown in communications and the decline of literacy and even of culture which followed the collapse of the Roman empire, while Symeon represents the paradox of wanting to get away from the earth's materialism and society even though he also needed them. He wanted to see angels, but in the end all he could see were crowds of ordinary people camped around his column. He had to accept his incarnation."
In his poetry, Harpur offers sympathetic insights into the hermit's life, which are compelling not least for his crafted yet sincere impulse towards identification. With a grandfather who was a Church of Ireland minister in Co Laois and several other clerics in his lineage, Harpur's engagement with Christian mystics is understandable, although he says he is not a Christian in the conventional sense: "I don't reject church-going, but I don't rely on it."
Published simultaneously with The Dark Age was Harpur's second recent book, Fortune's Prisoner, a translation of sixth-century poems by Boethius, the philosopher, scholar and Christian theologian at the court of Theodoric, the Ostrogoth ruler of Italy. Harpur, like other scholars, makes the point that it was from a pagan heritage rather than the Christian theology to which he was committed (and for which he was to die by the executioner's sword in AD 524) that Boethius draws most of the inspiration for his Consolations.
This sense of the expansiveness of Christian belief, a kind of flexible orthodoxy, seems to have attracted Hilary Wakeman, among the first women to be ordained in the Church of England and now retired in her former parish in west Cork. A canon emeritus of Norwich Cathedral, mother of five children and wife of poet John Wakeman (editor of The Shop magazine), her books include Saving Christianity: New Thinking for Old Beliefs (Liffey Press). This Saturday she will moderate a festival discussion on Spiritual Writing in a Secular World.
Always keen on ecumenism, she opted for an Irish parish in the belief that it would happen here faster than in the UK.
"Well, no, it hasn't happened yet," she admits, although she continues to be intensely involved in inter-church relationships. "Religion used to be in a church-shaped box, and now that people are no longer so in awe of ecclesiastical authority they are finding religion, faith, spirituality outside the box; that is, they are finding that it is everywhere, unconfined. It doesn't mean we no longer value what our faith traditions offer, which would be a minus, but that increasingly we can find God, the divine, in all of life - which is an enormous plus."
A different perspective is offered by poets Eileen Sheehan and John W Sexton from Co Kerry. Their affiliation is to a benevolent paganism, which means they would probably be left outside the "underground cathedral" which Mark Patrick Hederman (of the Glenstal Abbey Benedictines) believes is being built, with artists as architects. To illustrate his own conviction that art takes on a visionary role when politics or religion disintegrates, Hederman quotes Rilke's observation that in destitute times we have to rely on the poets.
One example of such cross- fertilisation is Lorcan Walshe's exhibition at Collins Barracks, based on early Christian treasures in the National Museum of Ireland. Hederman sees the result as something of a spiritual excavation, revealing connections in vision and faith through art.
Other examples are Anne Madden's "extraordinary landscape of possibility" in her retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and Seamus Heaney's District and Circle collection, with its emphasis on being underground, digging down as well as back, a process hinted at in the title of Hederman's book, The Haunted Inkwell ("when you dig deep enough something else comes out, some magic, some ghost, perhaps the Holy Ghost"). This is dangerous language from a monk who prefers to use BCE and ACE for his historical dates.
"I'm talking about the holy spirit, which is in all religions," he states. "I belong to the Christian tradition, and the whole point of Christianity is to get rid of everything that would be a stumbling block to others.
"Most religious wars are made up of literal and unthinking misunderstandings. Any words which we use without thought, which are alienating to other cultures, shouldn't be used."
Belief and Unbelief, a literature festival at the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, runs from Thurs to Sat
