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

Part 2

Spirituality is therefore not a matter of possession but of dispossession, of an encounter with the Other-the Beyond in the midst of our lives-and being called into that otherness. One name for the early Christians was "the people of the way". Significantly, this notion that we are a people on a journey is also part of our folk culture and that is why the concept of 'the battler', properly understood, is so important.

The central symbol of Christianity, the cross, reminds us that the history which really matters is not the story of the winners but of the losers. According to Jean-Baptiste Metz, it is essential to the story of freedom because the suffering of others, the defeated, oppressed and humiliated, reminds us how far we have yet to go. In this sense it is prophetic: "The imagination of future freedom is nourished from the memory of suffering, and freedom degenerates wherever those who suffer are treated more or less as a cliché and degraded to a faceless mass" (Faith and The Future, Orbis Books, 1995).

The pathos of our history, therefore, can be a dynamic force, not something to be rejected as 'the black arm-band school of history'. It echoes the pathos of the God whose particular concern is for the oppressed and humiliated, moving them towards liberation and reminding us that all social and political power must be discredited, as Metz rightly says, on the "extent to which it causes suffering". By its very nature, faith is thus a political force, an essential part of what used to be called 'the Australian dream' of a new, more decent, kind of society.

The power of the land points in the direction of faith, reminding us of our finitude and vulnerability. This awareness cracks open the certainties of contemporary culture, bringing us up before the sheer mystery of existence, towards what Martin Buber calls "moments of silent depth in which you look on the [real] world-order fully present . . . No content may be secured from them, but their power invades creation and [our] knowledge . . . beams of their power stream into the ordered world and dissolve it again and again".

It is in such moments that our life takes on a significance, meaning and dignity which has nothing to do with money, status or appearance. Wittgenstein wrote how we had "got on to slippery ground where there is no fiction [the fantasies of our society] ... [and so] we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need fiction. Back to the rough ground!"

This is the rough ground of faith, of the way things actually are and what it really means to be human. This means that we need to cherish the stain of scepticism, what someone has called 'the in-built bullshit detector' which runs through our culture, to reject the false gods of consumer society in the name of the ambiguous God whose sign is the Cross, the sign of collision between the divine and the merely human.

Expansion, not closure, is the mark of the true spirituality which is perhaps the only way out of the dead end facing us, out of sense of being trapped in an inexorable and irreversible process which threatens to destroy us and the world, the sense which lies only lightly concealed under the glittering surface of a 'good-time' culture. This "rough ground" of faith also takes us to a world in which words can become deeds. Empowered by grace, the gift of God breaking in on our closed world, we can break through lies and illusions and speak words of forgiveness and promise, words which at least begin to address the challenges of our history.

Arendt again talks of the "possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility . . . is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises."

They also return us to community, to the "in-between" between people because both asking forgiveness and making promises depend upon the presence and actions of others. Words are not bound by some given meaning; they are bound, as Elizabeth Newman describes it, and "stabilised by our promises, and unbound or 'destabilised' by our acts of forgiveness before others"(Cross Currents, Spring 1998). In a world in which our words seem to have become oppressive, deceptive and hegemonic this offers a way out of the violence, domination and sense of fatedness which afflicts us.

It is possible therefore for the Millennium to represent a new beginning. We can find a new paradigm to replace the one so manifestly breaking down and out of kilter with reality, a paradigm which faith as I have defined it may help to create. To the hard heads and hearts of our present society this may seem foolish, romantic even. But if that epithet means 'out of touch with reality', then my contention is that it fits them better. The return of theology into our current systems of thought and action may offer the only way out.

To state it more clearly, this time in the words of Geoffrey Hartman, "pure secularism is simply another religion, its ghosts or god will appear at some point". Hartman draws attention to Walter Benjamin's parable of the little hunchback sitting inside a puppet who plays and wins chess games against all his opponents: "The romantic or religions passion, in all its calculating if displaced strength may be the hump [we] cannot shake off. Wizened, shrunken, crippled though it may be, we know there is a power there, if only because we show it instinctive fear and keep it outof sight".

To: Perspectives Issue 62

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.