Opinion

Seamus Heaney pointed to an ecological spirituality that is furiously tender to the earth

Rite & Reason: As the environmental crisis has accelerated I find myself often thinking of the poet

Seamus Heaney appreciated the traditional Christian doctrine of a transcendent God, the God who watches us from a distance. Photograph: Bobbie Hanvey Photographic Archives/John J Burns Library/Boston College

John Scally
Sun May 5 2024 - 00:30

Seamus Heaney would have been 85 last month. I had the good fortune to enjoy a number of interactions with him down the years. He was bemused once when I described him as a rowboat. I explained that it meant he moved forward while looking back. After a moment’s reflection he smiled and nodded in agreement.

Then he caught me by surprise when he told me that in many ways he lived like a monk. He explained that in his work as a poet he “was bowed to the desk like some monk bowed over his prie-dieu, some dutiful contemplative pivoting his understanding in an attempt to bear his portion of the weight of the world, knowing himself incapable of heroic virtue or redemptive effect, but constrained by his obedience to his rule to repeat the effort and the posture.”

One monk in particular held a fascination with him as is evident in his famous poem, Saint Kevin and the Blackbird. The poem is based on the time St Kevin was said to be kneeling with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross in Glendalough, a monastic site not too far from where Heaney himself once lived in Co Wicklow. He described it to me as, “a place which to this day is one of the most wooded and watery retreats in the whole of the country.”

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While Kevin knelt and prayed, a blackbird mistook his outstretched hand for some form of roost and swooped down upon it, laid a clutch of eggs in it and began to nest in it as if it were the branch of a tree. Then, arising out of his great compassion and constrained by his faith to love the life in all creatures meek and tall, Kevin stayed immobile for hours and days and nights and weeks, holding out his hand until the eggs hatched and the fledglings grew wings.

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Heaney explained to me that it was “true to life if subversive of common sense, at the intersection of natural process and the glimpsed ideal, at one and the same time a signpost and a reminder.” He told me that at that moment Kevin was, “linked into the network of eternal life.”

The literature of the early Irish Christians is full of celebration of the fact that God and nature are closely intertwined. The Voyage of Brendan, for example, is the story of St Brendan’s quest to find the promised land of the saints and too pulsates with a strong ecological education message that we must care for the earth and the sea.

Heaney appreciated the traditional Christian doctrine of a transcendent God, the God who watches us from a distance. The Celtic monks laid particular emphasis on the immanence of God, the closeness of God to us and the divine involvement with nature and with the earth, a vital and vibrant presence in the world, animating all of creaturely life. Heaney was intrigued that in Celtic times it was believed that all wells had their source in one great well deep inside the centre of the earth. These were sacred places, protected by protective feminine spirits. In this tradition a rainbow was understood as a love letter from God. He appreciated the idea of the earth as the footstool of the divine presence.

The flight pattern of the geese in their unique V formation would also have appealed to the Celts, each flying in the slipstream of the bird in front

Celtic Christians clung to the tradition of the holiness of nature, which it had subsumed from the pre-Christian Irish tradition. St Patrick’s Irish contemporary Pelagius contended that nature was incorruptible and Duns Scotus Eriugena would later claim that the living body of Christ is in the world as God is in all things. One of the distinctive elements of the Celtic tradition is that the goose was the symbol of the Holy Spirit, whereas in the Christian tradition as a whole the dove was the symbol of the Spirit. The flight pattern of the geese in their unique V formation would also have appealed to the Celts, each flying in the slipstream of the bird in front. As they fly, they switch positions so they take turns in leading and supporting, which Heaney saw as a powerful metaphor of a supportive, nurturing and egalitarian community. So much of contemporary society is about the importance of the individual – but the Celts were attracted to symbols of a sustaining community like the geese flying home.

As the environmental crisis has accelerated I find myself often thinking of Heaney. In his poem on St Kevin he is pointing to an ecological spirituality that is furiously tender to the earth. It is as if he is speaking with the Earth’s voice and asking us all, to paraphrase Yeats, tread softly on the earth because we tread on the earth’s dreams.

John Scally lectures in theology at Trinity College Dublin

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