The Soulless Politics
CONFERENCE EXCERPT
by Veronica Brady
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 62
Spring/Summer 1998/1999

Introduction

The role of Values and Faith in the Body Politic

Veronica Brady
Veronica Brady is a Loreto nun and author of the recent South of My Days: a biography of Judith Wright. This is an edited version of her address, "Australian Spirituality: the role of values and faith in the body politic", given at Zadok's 1998 Biennial Conference.

WHEN ASKED TO EXPLORE the "role of values and faith in the body politic" I felt as if I had been asked to square the circle. Spirituality and politics is for most of in the Catholic or Protestant tradition, simply an oxymoron. But then I realised the title was not 'politics' but "the body politic", which has to do with community, what Hannah Arendt calls the "in-between" which forms between the individual and her fellow men and women (Men in Dark Times, Cape, 1970). Judaeo-Christian spirituality is, as Otger Steggink describes it, "the 'spark' that glows beneath all physical existence . . . [catching] fire in communication with the divine nucleus of experience," (Studies in Spirituality, 1991). It is not individualistic but communal since the name of God is love. It is also not something abstract since, as Christianity puts it, the Word was made flesh.

But if the answer lies in the Word there are still real problems with the flesh, our actual situation. The first problem, as our title suggests, has to do with values generally and social philosophy in particular. A simple example: the Minister for Communications accused the ABC (on Media Watch) of spending "too much time on social issues and not enough on economics".

To put it crudely: for this government the business of money making, keeping and spending seems more important than the wellbeing of people as a whole. But the pursuit of money alienates us from ourselves and from the living world around us. And community, what Arendt calls "the specific and usually irreplaceable in-between which should . . . [form] between the individual and his [her] fellow men [and women]" breaks down as we retreat and pursue self-interest, pleasure and power. The result, she says, is that the public realm loses "the power of illumination".

From a Christian perspective this is a profound loss because this power of illumination is not merely material but spiritual, by placing people in relationship with one another, it unites in them what is truly theirs, their common humanity. Mutual respect and trust is replaced by suspicion and cynicism. Politics ruled by the two-second grab becomes a realm of double-speak, of dishonest or at least insincere words. Our leaders claim to operate by principle but often in fact serve powerful interests. They pontificate on matters they have not really thought about, pretending to know everything about everything, but lacking the ability to listen.

There is a great pathos about this situation. Competition has made us lonely, unfeeling and anxious. Each of us pursues our own trajectory, like stars in cold space, governed (we are told) by the inexorable laws of economic necessity. The hero of Les Murray's recent verse novel, Freddy Neptune, the emotionally frozen muscle man who seems to choose nothing but to whom everything happens is perhaps typical.

Perhaps this has also affected religion itself. With its individualism, sense of urgency and cult of certainty, fundamentalism can be seen as an offshoot of the culture of performance, efficiency and productivity. Its preoccupation with literal meaning and fear of ambiguity echoes technology's promise of a total and transparent order.

We need to distinguish carefully between these kinds of gods, the projection of emotional, social, political and economic need, and the God who comes to us in Jesus. As Australians, we have vast resources implicit in our past history and culture, our displacement as migrants, the power of the land itself, the pain of our history and the possibilities of transformation offered by the Suffering Servant in our midst, the first peoples of this country.

Real Christianity is based on the mystery of God's love lived out in Jesus the poor man of Nazareth, who challenged the gods of this world in the name of the living God. That means that the human person is the centre of value and hope, since each of us is called to live in the Spirit of Jesus and in his powerless power to carry on the work of transforming creation. This an not an entirely foreign notion. In Australian culture there has traditionally been a 'hunger and thirst for justice'. But any migrant society is largely the creation of this hunger and thirst. In our case this was reflected in the idea of a 'fair go', and, however much it has been eclipsed in our public rhetoric and policy, I think that deep down it still has currency.

But it is an idea at the moment without foundation because, if it is to become a reality, it demands a feeling for people and indeed for the rest of creation absent from the present culture in which money is taken as the measure of value. To counter it we need to honour the realities of faith, which not only guarantee the worth of the person but it is faith which enables us to become a person in the proper sense of the word, someone who lives according to the inwardness of the heart, in tune with the spark of the divine.

To: Part 2