Rite and Reason: The great Romantic poet William Wordsworth was probably one of the few modern artists of a secular cast of mind to attempt expression of a religious sensibility, writes Patsy McGarry.
In his poem Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13th, 1798, he explained why he felt such debt to that place. The abbey was founded by Cistercian monks in 1131 but in 1536 fell foul to Henry VIII's dissolution of monasteries.
Wordsworth wrote of experiencing there "a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man; a motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things". It was, he said, "the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul of all my moral being".
What he described would be called "God" by a religious person - that "reality" which a believer holds is fundamental to and imminent in all things, yet visible in none.
Today's secularist has no such sense, though not without his/her own "deity" - usually a belief in general principles/values, rationally determined and arrived at "laterally". To the secularist these principles/values are "sacred" too.
But to the believer God is sacred in an utterly different way. God is "vertical", overwhelming, awesome, incomprehensible. He is love. He is wrath. He is always. He is intuition, intelligence, imagination - all three combined.
In Ireland few of our young people have a religious sensibility anymore, but our older people do, particularly in rural areas. They would understand Wordsworth.
And we, the middle-aged Irish? Many of us have lost any religious sensibility we had and its sense of the sacred. Still most of us, having once possessed it, do comprehend it while looking back in amber at a yellowing past.
This newspaper recently quoted people at the Clonskeagh mosque in Dublin. Among them was Hassam Hashem, who said he gathered that Irish people could not understand the insult Muslims felt at the publication of cartoons of Muhammad.
He continued: "If you people have nothing sacred anymore, if you have nothing left and think you can insult something so sacred to a people, well good luck to you. We don't want to talk to you." Clearly he had given up on what he saw as an unbridgeable gulf. The Letters pages of this newspaper since can have given him little consolation.
Last Tuesday, for instance, Alan Shatter wrote of suicide bombers killing men, women and children in the name of Islam; the beheading of kidnap victims; the evocation of the name of Muhammad to justify 9/11 as well as the slaughter in Bali, Madrid, and London; none of which provoked mass demonstrations across the Muslim world. "Apparently publication of the cartoon is a greater insult to the Prophet than the murder of innocent men, women, and children in His name."
The mutual incomprehension illustrated by his words and those of Hassam Hashem has been reflected in commentary on the rage that has so fiercely swept through the Muslim world in recent days, and which still more Western newspapers have seen as incentive to publish the cartoons as an act of solidarity with those seen as under threat for standing by that sacred Western value - freedom of expression. The twain grow further apart.
Anyone with the remotest religious sense, or recollection of same, will see such gestures by Western publications as further gratuitous piling of insult on injury to the religious sensibilities of the people of Islam.
What is being further violated is not only their Prophet but their very sense of self.
That self is rooted in a relationship with Allah (God), as revealed to Muhammad, and to Whom even moderate Muslims pray five times a day. He shapes their entire lives, He to Whom they believe they owe all, in a hostile world.
Prayer - that raising up of the mind and heart to Allah/God - is central for the people of Islam. It is unselfconscious and totally integrated into their daily public and private lives in which, unlike the Western experience, they do not distinguish between the temporal and spiritual.
For an Irish person, the most remarkable characteristic of Islam is its similarity to an older Irish Catholicism. Anyone who can recall 1960s Ireland - which in some parts of the country continued well into the 1980s - will recognise the same simplicities; the same uncomplicated, not to say uncompromising, code, and an ever-present consciousness of God.
It prompted Irish people to drop everything at noon and 6pm to say the Angelus. It prompted greetings such as "God bless the work" to people in the fields or even "God bless the cow" to the man or woman milking.
We who are middle-aged and caught in the cusp of Ireland's generations could do our fellow Muslim citizens, and sincere believers generally, a service by helping our young and our secularists understand the religious sensibility and by impressing on them its right to respect.
We might also explain to them why the publishing of crude and offensive cartoons of Muhammad is idiocy and in nobody's interest.
The greater satire is in its portrayal as a defence of freedom of expression.
Patsy McGarry is Irish Times Religious Affairs Correspondent.