Rachael Kohn: You mentioned Aboriginal spirituality and Celtic spirituality, those are two traditions in which the spiritual yearning has found expression in forms, and even in organisation, and in law. And yet spirituality is often defined, and in your book sometimes I encounter descriptions of spirituality that tend toward a formlessness. So is there a tension between, I mean clearly there’s a tension between this pre-theological yearning and its actual expression?David Tacey: Yes, and I think that’s important that we recognise that because it is as if a sense of spirit is re-emerging. I mean I actually do believe, academics say we’re in a post-modern society but I think what they haven’t yet realised and what I’m realising in relationship with my students, we’re also in a post-secular society. When people talk about the post-modern, they’re not aware that it also means after the death of God.
So that for instance we’ve got the philosopher Jacques Derrida now writing about the death of the death of God. So that we’re actually beyond the death of God now, into this new sense of spirit.
But you’re right, there is a difference between spirit which is formless and spirit which is formed. It’s almost as if society has undergone some cultural amnesia. Secular society has forgotten what religion means, has forgotten what it’s about. But we can’t actually forget spirit, because I think according to my definition of human nature, it’s inherent in us.
So that what we’re dealing with now, and particularly among the student body, spiritual yearnings that don’t have spiritual forms into which those yearnings can be readily placed, and that’s why students I think are suspicious of religions form. Some of them aren’t. I mean I get up to between 5% and 10% who really do want religious form, and some of them want it quite strongly, you might even say fanatically. But I’d say about somewhere between 80% and 90% of the students that I teach are very wary of form, because it’s as if they can feel spirit welling up in their lives and they don’t want to simply place a template on it immediately, they’re very concerned about allowing what is within to come out.
Rachael Kohn: David . . . in your book, you certainly do draw a strong opposition between spirituality and religion. Religion is tragic, old, choking on its own unwept tears, where spirituality is youthful, experimental, alive, risky, full of pain and exhilaration. . . .
David Tacey: . . . I’m not as suspicious of religious form as a lot of youth are, but I present you might say, a persona; I wouldn’t say it’s deliberately false, but it’s a deliberate persona to project to the students a sense that I too understand the limitations of form. I too understand that many, particularly of the Western religious forms, appear antiquated, out of date, lacking relationship with a society that’s experienced at least a half a dozen major revolutions in women’s revolution, sex revolution, race revolution, and a whole lot of other revolutions, civil rights, democracy, and to people coming out of the contemporary secular context, it’s as if religion looks like to some extent a dinosaur, antiquated. And yet at its heart, religion I think contains something which is eternally true, which actually never goes out of date.
So my task I guess, is to kind of meet the contemporary prejudices as you put it, half-way, and say Yes, these things do look terribly old-fashioned, they do look as if they’re irrelevant as so many of my students tell me religion’s irrelevant, and yet once they are awakened to the nature and direction of the spirit in them, they then begin to experience that that spirit seeks form, because I don’t think form is entirely just an imposition from above. I think spirit seeks form for its expression, so that for instance a student may enter the course feeling that spirit ‘bloweth where it listeth’, etc. and it’s best if we don’t have any religious structures.
But I would like to think that by the end of the course, they’re beginning to revise that prejudice and are beginning to see that spirit and form require each other, as a sort of marriage of spirit and form. Now form may need to be changed, and of course as we know, our Western religious traditions are not too keen on change. But youth, as you’ve suggested, are keen on change. So in other words there’s a grinding tension at the beginning between spirituality and religion, but as we deepen our understanding of spirituality we see that firstly it requires form and secondly that what looks initially as a dead religious system, has at its core, the same living spirituality. So it’s a matter of kind of, it’s a delicate process of building bridges between those two things.
Read the entire transcript of Hooked on Spirituality on the ABC National Radio programme The Spirit of Things with Rachael Kohn and guest David Tacey.
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