Rite and Reason: The prophetic voice of a French priest may be what we should be listening to at this time of crisis in Irish Catholicism, writes Éamon Maher.
February marks the 26th anniversary of the death of the French priest-writer, Jean Sulivan (1913-80). The more one reads his novels, short stories and essays, the more relevant his message to the "post-Catholic", "post-Christian" Ireland of today becomes.
These terms will not be universally accepted, I know, but there is a definite sense in which the majority religion in this country is undergoing a crisis: fewer people attending Mass and the sacraments, a massive drop in vocations to the religious life, disillusionment among the clergy and the faithful alike.
Sulivan, rather than seeing this in a completely negative light, would view it as an opportunity. In his spiritual journal, Morning Light, published in 1976, he wrote: "Like the storm clouds of the exodus, the church's face is more luminous today than when it seemed to rule. It has found glory in its humiliation". These lines were written at a time when France was undergoing similar problems to what is currently happening in Ireland.
The main difference between the two countries lay in the ability of French intellectuals, lay and clerical, such as Jaques Maritain, Yves de Congar, Daniélou, François Mauriac, Bernanos and Sulivan to raise a voice of protest, while remaining within the broad structures of church.
Sulivan was a diocesan priest, but an understanding superior, Cardinal Roques, a man ahead of his time, allowed him to devote all his time to writing. This was a daring decision, as Sulivan was not renowned for towing the party line.
Regularly critical of institutional religion, he saw his writing as an attempt to prolong the Word, with its call for uprooting and rebirth.
In his view: "The poem of the Gospel deals with existence and is intended to rise like yeast. Its style is just the opposite of a message that tries to control our lives with slogans and principles".
The closest Ireland has come to producing a cleric with this finely attuned understanding of the Gospel may be the Benedictine monk, Mark Patrick Hederman, and it is no coincidence that he did his doctorate in Paris with Emmanuel Levinas.
The French possess the capacity for debate and intellectual exchange that has been lacking in Ireland because of the traditionally unthinking nature of religious observance here. Thus we tended to associate sex with sin and the priest's authority was rarely challenged.
In his recently published Memoir, John McGahern writes: "The ideal of the society was the celibate priest. The single state was thus elevated. The love of God was greater than the love of man or woman; the sexual, sin-infected and unclean."
Sulivan, on the other hand, posited the view that religion isn't about laws and regulations, that it is more a question of following a path to self-discovery.
His stay in India at the ashram of the French Benedictine, Henri le Saux, who took the name Abhishiktananda, showed him the benefit of inner calm and meditation as a means of prayerful communication with God. Like the Indian guru, Sulivan tells his readers to search for answers within themselves and not to look to him for spiritual guidance.
His writings are like one great poem because he believes that the poetic function of art can reveal the spiritual meaning of things, by extracting from the apparent chaos, from the bottomless void, a harmonious image of the world.
The symbolic can thus render visible the invisible, by going from disorder to order, from emptiness to fullness, from the unformed to the formed. In the end, what matters are the few moments of "epiphany" which open on to an experience that is other-worldly and where one may catch a glimpse of the divine.
There are a number of Sulivan's books available in English translation and I would strongly urge people to read them. His is a prophetic voice that transcends time and cultures and speaks an inalterable truth.
I'll finish with a short extract from his memoir of the death of his mother, Anticipate Every Goodbye, which was a great comfort to me recently during a family bereavement: "We are all blind thinking that life consists of possessing material goods, holding on to this, then that, getting to know one thing, then another, trying desperately to ignore the fact that the whole process inevitably amounts to absolutely nothing. Life isn't just a game where you have to possess and know as many things as possible. Rather, it is about reducing yourself to zero, living in a new and more authentic way."
We could do worse than to ponder such words in the Ireland of the third millennium.
Dr Éamon Maher is director of the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies in IT Tallaght and the translator of Jean Sulivan's memoir, Anticipate Every Goodbye (Veritas).