Revelation in the Market-place

The royal roads were cow paths

Seamus Heaney

It is early morning in the city. I am sitting on a park bench looking up at a walkway just outside central station. It has become almost a morning ritual. A stream of office workers, with their lunch packs and laptops, is beginning to emerge striding out with purposeful attitude ready to face, and indeed no doubt to manipulate as well, the world of commerce that forms the greater activity of our society. I want to see, enscribed on their faces, something of the purposeful society to which we all belong – at least physically. But I cannot see anything. My memory regresses back to my young days in Ireland when any time of day you could see a frowning or smiling face, or sometimes a sad face which bespoke a lifetime of drudgery or unforgiveness, faces enscribed with the reality of living. Here the faces are verging on the opaque, hidden behind an object which would set my father, now long dead, staring and wondering. Surely the world is gone mad, he would mutter, it is all the fault of these posh city people who don't know one end of a cow from the other. As for those things they stick up against their cheek and jaw ...

My father had only a primary education but he had an acute sense of hearing. He could hear the lowing of a cow in a distant field, wondering would his sleep be disturbed to-night to be present at the birth of a calf. Sometimes in the middle of spring he would come in from the fields, with excitement, to tell us he had just heard the first cuckoo or corncrake of the year. He was the monitor of the wonders of nature, knowing the annual ritual deep in the bones: the arrival of the swallows in April, the Hawthorn blossoms and fruits of May, the Blackberries we would talk about in July as being green when they were red, the first mushrooms of July, the first luscious ripened Blackberries of August or early September, waiting to be picked and staining both hands and teeth, all taking us into the great mysteries of the evolving year and our part in its sacredness.

I can remember too, the day and the hour, when it began to change. It was the first day of our new and first car, a light blue Ford Anglia. I can still remember the number: KIU 611. That morning my father and mother had tentatively set off, edging slowly out the backyard, for our local town three miles away to do some shopping. This was a journey, mostly monthly, which was often a battle, confonting the gales of the bog-road on the old bicycle. Now they arrived back, in posh comfort, parking the car under the old poplar tree, whose leaves rustled in the wind next to the water-pump. Afterwards there was a period of silence over a cup of tea. I sat waiting for the celebratory remaks of the new event, the new journey, then my father uttered, to everybody and nobody: I wonder what the Higgins will think of us now; we never stopped to say hello!

I know there are umpteen stories in the Fifth Avenues of our cities of rejoicing the day when the incumbents at last were set free from the drudgery and oppressiveness of some rural backwater. Indeed. The towering image of the Statue of Liberty on Hudson Bay being the great reminder for many – of a dizzy dream of longing within sight. But I ask myself now where is the fulfillment of the promised freedom? Did somebody or something cheat on us? Behind the neon glitter of Queen street it seems a new oppression, a new poverty, has emerged: its in the frenetic of economic determinism symbolised by the office blocks and the frenetic of mobile phones chatter and, most oppressive of all, our apparent lack of awareness of why we are as we are, unable to understand where the frenetic is coming from? We seem to have lost the nature of the belonging, the ritualism of life enhancing community and its assured permanence, without knowing anymore how to create and do it in the everyday. Is this a conditioning, a determinism, a residue of modernism greater than Freud ever imagined?

The crowds ebb a little as the morning rush-hour thins out under the rising sun. It is time to move and seek shelter from the blazing orb. Of such is Queensland where I now live. I retire to my favourite café to indulge in my 'first cup of drug' of the day. This is a ritual too, and true to form I ref lect on how strange we all are as people and a society; and wonder where we are going. We don't know, do we? Yet the whole of history should tell us: behind all the battles of body and mind, the great achievements, the heroic adventures, the mindless disasters, the criminality just around the corner, the unending searching of mobile phones, is a deep crying I want to belong.

Question: where do I belong? To whom or what do I belong?

What Kind of Belonging?

To a bog-man cities are strange places. Initially they can be escape hatches from small towns and rural backwaters offering unrestricted freedoms to be oneself. But there is an impending loneliness around the corner, I've found. Overtime the neon lights aquire a familiarity and sameness that is skin-deep. Where is mystery anymore? Even the mosaic sparkle of the night sky, a waiting wonder, is dimmed somewhat by the electric lights below with their neon-f lickers. Traisping the streets there are no gable-ends of house and home and their promise of belonging, no sheep dog at night lying in the middle of the road waiting for one's arrival home.

It is the first week of November. In the botanical gardens of Brisbane, of this land far distant from where my father was born, it is the lilac month of the Jacaranda, like myself a migrant. It is also the month of the kamakaze white butterf ly, emerging from god-knows-where, flitting everywhere but knowing nothing, it seems, about the tyranny of twenty-first century windscreen traffic. The Jacaranda f lowers the same time as the Silky Oak offering a wonderful spectacle of the intertwining of the two, the lilac of the former and the deep mandarin of the latter. In the city the grevillea, the silky oak, is conspicuous by its absence – the intertwining and intermingling only found away from the city, in some village or rural property. The air this morning is rather cool, coming up from the south-west.

I have come too early. Only later will the school-kids and Awakening teenagers come. These have become the chief focus of my interest and fascination. These are our future, I remind myself. The wind blows stronger. I shudder: is it from the extra chill or from a premonition, an inner ache about the future of our society? I need my first cup of drug.

Feeling better, after a second cup of drug, I go back out to my park seat. The enterpreneurs are gone to their offices, the college blazers and sport outfits begin to pour out. There is little noise beyond the hum of the traffic and the click of platform shoes on the pavements. Amazing how little physical encountering mistakingly happens, of people bumping into each other, because nobody is looking where they are going. Their interest, almost to a man and woman, seems focused on this precious commodity they hold in their hands. It seems like an ear-appendage protected by an enfolding palm.

Don't be judgemental, I tell myself, could this not be a sort of unification of young people as they focus on the huge problems of tomorrow because of my failure to present them with a better world and a better future?

The stream seems almost unending. Can it go on forever?

Don't be melodramatic, I whisper to myself, and a world probably not listening. I need another cup of drug.

No I don't, water will do.

I meander around; and as I do so, the day meanders around me again. In my ego concern am I any different to the owners of the battery of mobile phones out there? In all of us it seems ego, with its innumerable faces, is imprisoned in a cell of its own making. None of us seem to be aware of our servility to a presumption deep down, the tax-file number that encases the official social me. Do I measure up is the unexpressed question?

We call it identity.

Really it is society's version of me, to which, sadly, unwittingly I still say yes.

Question: do I measure up? Do I wonder whether other people think I measure up?

Ultimacy & Belonging

It is Monday morning. The crowds are coming out of central station in dribs and drabs, quite a few looking bedraggled and hungover. This is the Monday morning after the Grand Final of yesterday. It was a ding-dong battle between the Titans and the Warriors. A blue and white scarf of the Warriors remains draped over a f lagpole on the left hand side off central station as I look up. The match was a titantic struggle between two teams who truly lived up to their names, not an inch given on either side.

Plato comes to mind as my tired eyes blurr in the morning glare. His theory of 'idealism' seems apt in the here and now. Somebody else today, perhaps coming out of a different ontological bubble, would call it 'ultimacy'. The raw emotion engendered yesterday suggests the epitome of belonging, an 'us' and 'them' scenario.

Such ultimacy is the percevied or imagined intimacy of 'us' shining brightly against the hellish otherness of 'them'.

Of such has been and still is the textured nature of everyday human experience, a strange transcendence found in the stuff of society but rarely measured conceptually because the intellectual can never touch the felt-understanding of ultimacy.

There is an untold need in all of us for ultimacy, especially the ultimacy of belonging.

The gigantic struggle between the Titans and Warriors conceals as much as it reveals. At best it gives us a hint of who we are. Is the passion felt revealing something beyond itself? The whole idea of 'beyond' seems endemic to the human passion engendered. So much of our social activities such as media, entertainment, theatre, cinema, sport, fiction seem caught up in satisfying our needs in this regard. Our 'serious' activities, jobs, professions, research seem to be in a different world. Our multi-tasking seems a compromise between the two.

I retire again for another cup of drug, a felt belonging which it seems is as radical as breathing in all of us.

Question: where and how do I find ultimacy in my life?

The Search for Community

Whence comes this passion of ultimacy, of eternity, that seeps through all of us?

It separates us too.

I am splayed out on my park bench. A young girl passes by walking slowly homeward, eyes lowered, smiling to herself. Her reverie isolates her from me. More surely if she were on another planet I feel her to be locked away in her memories and its singing echoes of ultimacy. Yet the rustle of her bangles and beads are only an earful away. I feel acutely the enormous distance between us. A flock of crows sweeps overhead. A little ant moves slowly but purposefully across the top of my bench. I feel lonely in my isolation and lack of direction. What hope can there be of creating community, the ultimate us, when individually we are so enclosed in ourselves?

But this enclosure is a clear indication of the incompleteness of 'me'; as yet I have not probed the wonder of my own subjectivity. I seem to have forgotten, or perhaps never realised, I am a descendent of Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo. It is only when this has happened, or is beginning to happen, that I can become a basic link in the ultimate community that Jesus wished and prayed for.

For so long now I have been searching for community to bridge the spiritual distance; but more and more that seems like a pipedream, a searching for heaven on earth. There is your ultimacy: there is my ultimacy – and the twain invariably don't meet. In the olden days we could gather around 'heaven' or 'God' but these days neither is acceptable – for different reasons. The concept of 'heaven' fails lamentably from a spiritual perspective in its self-centredness. The concept of God can only be described as a lame-duck term speaking to fewer and fewer, in fact almost devoid of any meaning spiritual or otherwise due to many reasons, specifically in recent times because of ecclesiastical scandals. The post-Vatican 11 bag of issues - mini-pseudorational theological and liturgical popularities - did not help; they were paraded by commentators and religious adherents as spiritual concerns – really a confusion of truth and make belief.

It is only an agreed spiritual ultimacy that can gather us round a universal maypole, an accepted common vision that can transcend our political and economic reductivity and renew our solidarity as a species in touch with its own essence.

Where and how can that happen?

I suspect the answer to this is still hidden in the mish-mash history of the market- place. Are we participants or victims? Have we a part to play in the evolution of our world, indeed of our species?

We can only be participants in all of this when we have awakened to the fact that our source of truth is hidden in our own hearts. Nobody can make that discovery for us. It is at the very core of the mystery of each of us.

Question: is ultimacy pie-in-the-sky? Has it any implication for my everyday living?

The Western Enlightenment

The story of evolution, a special part of the scientific story and the Western Enlightenment, is a mesmerising one. The existence and continual intermingling of a few precious items -water, light, oxygen, time – over the last four billion years has helped to create this planet that we have learned to call home. What a mystery! Our understanding of water, light and oxygen is still a continuum in the minds and hearts of our scientists, a continual exploration and manifestation of wonder. Of the four items mentioned above time is perhaps the most intriguing. It takes us into not only the strange quantification of its presence in the evolutionary story -why did each part of the story take the specific time it took- but even the stranger diverse understanding of time that has emerged in the human mind in its history. We were all born into linear time and its logical process of conditioning, a time which the scientists told us began with the Big Bang. This is now being questioned. Despite this we are all children of our history.

But we are also children of a certain transcendence provoked by our age. Through the achievements of our astronauts on their journeys into outer space and the scientific speculation of our astrophysists we have learnt to live and think in cosmic time as well. This has deep implications for our everyday living and speculation: what does it tell us about ourselves as humans, how does it influence our everyday living?

And then there was the Einstein contribution and its mystery of dethronement of time where it became a factor of a larger concept space-time.

In my own span of living we have become aware of the experience of psychological time curtsy of Krishnamurti.

Time is still steeped in mystery. To the question about the quantification of time in the evolutionary story the scientists tell us we still don't know. In the everyday we accept the linear concept of time as a given: our lives have a past, a present and a future. But when we enter the intricacies of the spiritual journey, the subject-matter of this book, the issue of time is far removed from any perceived logic. Our main focus is human experience; and our starting point in the here-and-now is a very nuanced and rich one.

Our procedure or methodology, wherever logic can lead us in the spiritual journey, is blanketed by the caveat of paradox. Not only is it an ever-present irritant of procedure but a possible mysterious ingredient of reality itself.