This is the text of a presentation given at the 'John Moriarty Celebration' in Killarney, May 29th 2010.
Those of you who knew John personally, and those who have read his work, will rightly suspect that there is some kind of deception at work here; at least a bit of devilment in my choice of title this morning. It might seem difficult to imagine a person who would seem less likely to make a pronouncement on economics as we understand it than John Moriarty.
Nevertheless it seems to me that John Moriarty has plenty to say to us in terms of our understanding of economy and how the understanding we now have forms and informs our place in the world.
The best way to start is by clarifying and expanding on the terms of reference. I am often surprised by how much mileage and depth John generates by invoking the origins of words, by taking them apart and by shining a torch around inside in an attempt to make them speak more richly in their contexts. In this spirit I set about interrogating the word ‘economy’ itself. I’d gamble that it has been one of the most frequently used words in Irish life – public and private – in the last few years especially, if not since the beginning of the State. From morning until night we are battered by the word economy and by the view of the world and understanding of reality that it entails. The economy is in trouble. The economy has crashed. The economy is stable. The economy is undergoing a period of growth. Statements such as these are uttered with a gravitas which seems like it wants to say something profound about the world yet somehow knows it cannot.
When we come then to define the very origins of the word economy it’ll come as no surprise to any of you if I say that, once again, the Greeks are to blame.
Not the modern Greeks this time, but the Ancient Greeks. Like so much of our culture, our modern word ‘economy’ comes from Ancient Greece. It’s a compound of two words: oikos and nomos. The literal translation of oiko-nomia is “household management” or “household rules”. “Oikos” is the word which the Greeks used to describe a house or a dwelling place, with “nomia” then being the part of the word which refers to the rules or management. It follows that the meaning of oiko-nomos is “household manager”. This is the word from which we get that most beloved and ubiquitous of creatures, the modern economist.
The word “oikos” described a private family house as we might understand it but also applied to small social groupings, what we in Ireland might call clans or social groups. The “rules of the house” then, the “oiko-nomia” were the rules around which the group cohered and stuck together.
It seems to me now that John spent his life exploring and interrogating the “house rules” of modern Western Culture: the foundational stories and images on which our civilisation is built. He asked of himself first, and his culture later and consequently: by what stories am I living my life? What stories ground and orientate the “house” of my being in the world. What stories are Western people telling themselves in private? What stories do they tell themselves in public? What stories do we live by and never dare to name?
“A people without a vision will perish” John seemed fond of quoting from the Book of Proverbs. Much of John’s life was devoted to developing what I will simply call a ‘clarity of vision’ – an honest naming and accepting of the immensities of his own personal experiences. He himself said that the ‘house rules’ of a society must first be grounded in a ‘vision of reality’. From your experience of reality and your understanding of that experience will flow the story, from which spring the rules of your house. So the fruit of the experience and vision is a story: the story which we individually and collectively tell ourselves in order to feel right with the world, to make sense of things. It is precisely the gift of John Moriarty to all of us that he had the courage, drive and dogged persistence to walk out on, to interrogate, and to more healthily re-inherit the ‘management rules’ of the now claustrophobic, murderous, and deadening ‘house’ that is Western humanity. Our modern house smells of the gas of Auschwitz. It smells of the hypnotised zombie-compliance of modern consumerism. It smells of our presumption that the world which we have made such a botch-job of domesticating primarily exists for our use and benefit. It smells, consequently, of ecological and spiritual havoc.
Our eyes, so poisoned by the stories which we have been telling ourselves, John Moriarty said, have become “tumours of economic seeing”. The person who experiences the world primarily as an economic proposition is very deep in soul trouble. John saw this attitude embedded in and sanctioned by texts so primary to our society as the Book of Genesis. He claimed that we had interpreted our “dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the heavens” as a kind of Divine carte blanche to do what we wanted with the Earth and its other creatures.
John said that “to be is to be towards” things: to be in relationship with other people, other creatures and the world. And when the primary tone of that relationship, of that “being towards”, is economic then we are in big trouble. The story of ourselves told in economic terms – about controlling and manipulating things primarily for our own individual and collective use and benefit – is a story which has brought us up a cultural cul de sac. Our tumour-eyes now look at trees and see cubic feet of timber; look at animals and see meat; look at human beings and see a mere set of sociological data.
To look at something economically is, essentially, to bring it beneath our conceptual roof, to violate and eliminate its otherness and strangeness, to kill it in a way.
It seems to me, as I said, that in his writings and person John challenged the very foundation of our Western house rules, our store if foundational ideas. He was driven by a conviction which he states early on in Nostos that: “Only a great story can shelter us.” (p. 21) and that in our stories in the modern world – in that which should operate as fertile and rich soil for our “house rules” – we are no longer ‘great’ in the sheltering sense – we no longer have shelter. John writes in exhortation early in Nostos that: “In relation to the natural world our task is to emancipate our eyes and minds from cultural predetermination and prejudice. Where necessary, that means emancipating ourselves from the myths and metaphors that have become forms of our sensibility and categories of our understanding.” Introduction to Nostos, p. vi.
What we need then is the courage to walk out of the house. The courage to take the consequences, not to be bound by your sense of yourself as mediated by “household rules”, by “oiko-nomia.” What is needed now is a break from economic seeing. This break is not merely “taking a gap year”: it’s having the courage to risk the opening of a gap in your psyche. This break is not merely a career break: it is a risk of careering off the straight and narrow path in a way which might break you. This is not a ‘hero’s journey’ in order merely to divine better, fairer, economic models for human communities: it is a recognition that economic seeing itself is the sickness, a sickness from which we need healing from the roots upwards.
The great nostos which John wrote about, the great “journey to home” entails that we first must leave home. We must open the exit door of the familiar and walk out into the unnerving world. We must leave the house of Western culture. We must reassess how our fundamental ideas might be limiting, rather than expanding, our field of vision. This will not be easy. As he borrowed from and inherited the many great metaphors of other traditions which he encountered on his walkabout, John Moriarty “rescored” the song of Western man. There is a folk saying which goes like this: “A man who only has a hammer sees every problem as a nail”. Sensing that we had become trapped and grown stale in our diagnosis of the human condition, John interrogated the diagnoses of other traditions in order to see if they might fruitfully speak to him.
He went at the job with the mind of a first class philosopher, the sensibility of a great poet and the determination of a headstrong Kerryman.
As I wrote this talk, one particular phrase of John’s resounded with me more than the others. In one of his audio recordings John says that we are “junkies” to these ways of understanding the world: our relationship to the foundational principles of Western Culture is that of an addict to their addiction. We are, in a way so deep that it has totally blindsided us, addicted to seeing the world not as it is, but through the categories of Western learning.
What I want to do is to trace just one of the many great lifelines which run through John Moriarty’s work in relation to this problem. To recover from this fall into “economic seeing” and all that it entails, John said that we must individually and collectively experience a dis-illusioning. The “house” of Western Culture – with all its house rules – is in some sense an ‘illusion’: it is a murderous imposition on reality rather than a faithful mirror. The modern Western ideas with which we have become so comfortable are, in the final analysis projections onto the world rather than passionate and compassionate meditations on experience. We see the world not as it is, but as we are and want it to be.
The problem, as John told it to us, is this: we have mistaken the world as we see it through western eyes for the reality of the world in itself. In his audio talks entitled One Evening In Eden John tells a story about entering his kitchen on a dark night. On entering the dark kitchen he would be able to see, dimly, both what is in the kitchen, and, through the windows, what is outside the house. However, when he switched on the light the scene changed totally. Suddenly he could see perfectly well what was in the kitchen, in the ‘oikos’ we might say. However, when he turned to the window, where before he had been able to see the landscape of the world outside, he could now only see his reflection. John used this as an analogy for the psyche. Our illusion is that by perfecting and training our faculties of sense and intellect we are getting closer to a clear picture of the world. The reality is that it is only when we get free of such things that we can make any progress.
We must be dis-illusioned. We must walk out of the house of familiarity or we will, in all likelihood, bring it down on top of us. The “management rules” of our house must be radically redrawn in the course of an uncomfortable and unnerving ‘night journey’. This will not be easy as we are, to repeat John’s phrase, ‘junkies’ for this illusion.
And yet it is possible. Individually it is possible – and if individually, then we can hope it is collectively possible.
The story of John Moriarty is a story of walking out of the house, of being dis-illusioned, of willingly and unwillingly having his own personal “economy” of signposts and symbols shattered and shifted. It is a story of drawing and redrawing the questions. John’s is a story of suffering the questions. A story, to use a phrase of William James’s, of refusing to ‘prematurely closing [his] account with reality.’ You might, justifiably and in anger close your account with Anglo Irish Bank – but don’t prematurely close your account with reality.
For the next few minutes I want to follow John on his own particular walk out of the house, on his own journey of personal disillusioning.
The opening pages of John’s biography Nostos tell the quaint story of the child John Moriarty experiencing at an early age some of the issues which played out over the many years of his adult thought. It is Christmas night and John is looking forward to the arrival of Santa Claus:
Nevertheless it seems to me that John Moriarty has plenty to say to us in terms of our understanding of economy and how the understanding we now have forms and informs our place in the world.
The best way to start is by clarifying and expanding on the terms of reference. I am often surprised by how much mileage and depth John generates by invoking the origins of words, by taking them apart and by shining a torch around inside in an attempt to make them speak more richly in their contexts. In this spirit I set about interrogating the word ‘economy’ itself. I’d gamble that it has been one of the most frequently used words in Irish life – public and private – in the last few years especially, if not since the beginning of the State. From morning until night we are battered by the word economy and by the view of the world and understanding of reality that it entails. The economy is in trouble. The economy has crashed. The economy is stable. The economy is undergoing a period of growth. Statements such as these are uttered with a gravitas which seems like it wants to say something profound about the world yet somehow knows it cannot.
When we come then to define the very origins of the word economy it’ll come as no surprise to any of you if I say that, once again, the Greeks are to blame.
Not the modern Greeks this time, but the Ancient Greeks. Like so much of our culture, our modern word ‘economy’ comes from Ancient Greece. It’s a compound of two words: oikos and nomos. The literal translation of oiko-nomia is “household management” or “household rules”. “Oikos” is the word which the Greeks used to describe a house or a dwelling place, with “nomia” then being the part of the word which refers to the rules or management. It follows that the meaning of oiko-nomos is “household manager”. This is the word from which we get that most beloved and ubiquitous of creatures, the modern economist.
The word “oikos” described a private family house as we might understand it but also applied to small social groupings, what we in Ireland might call clans or social groups. The “rules of the house” then, the “oiko-nomia” were the rules around which the group cohered and stuck together.
It seems to me now that John spent his life exploring and interrogating the “house rules” of modern Western Culture: the foundational stories and images on which our civilisation is built. He asked of himself first, and his culture later and consequently: by what stories am I living my life? What stories ground and orientate the “house” of my being in the world. What stories are Western people telling themselves in private? What stories do they tell themselves in public? What stories do we live by and never dare to name?
“A people without a vision will perish” John seemed fond of quoting from the Book of Proverbs. Much of John’s life was devoted to developing what I will simply call a ‘clarity of vision’ – an honest naming and accepting of the immensities of his own personal experiences. He himself said that the ‘house rules’ of a society must first be grounded in a ‘vision of reality’. From your experience of reality and your understanding of that experience will flow the story, from which spring the rules of your house. So the fruit of the experience and vision is a story: the story which we individually and collectively tell ourselves in order to feel right with the world, to make sense of things. It is precisely the gift of John Moriarty to all of us that he had the courage, drive and dogged persistence to walk out on, to interrogate, and to more healthily re-inherit the ‘management rules’ of the now claustrophobic, murderous, and deadening ‘house’ that is Western humanity. Our modern house smells of the gas of Auschwitz. It smells of the hypnotised zombie-compliance of modern consumerism. It smells of our presumption that the world which we have made such a botch-job of domesticating primarily exists for our use and benefit. It smells, consequently, of ecological and spiritual havoc.
Our eyes, so poisoned by the stories which we have been telling ourselves, John Moriarty said, have become “tumours of economic seeing”. The person who experiences the world primarily as an economic proposition is very deep in soul trouble. John saw this attitude embedded in and sanctioned by texts so primary to our society as the Book of Genesis. He claimed that we had interpreted our “dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the heavens” as a kind of Divine carte blanche to do what we wanted with the Earth and its other creatures.
John said that “to be is to be towards” things: to be in relationship with other people, other creatures and the world. And when the primary tone of that relationship, of that “being towards”, is economic then we are in big trouble. The story of ourselves told in economic terms – about controlling and manipulating things primarily for our own individual and collective use and benefit – is a story which has brought us up a cultural cul de sac. Our tumour-eyes now look at trees and see cubic feet of timber; look at animals and see meat; look at human beings and see a mere set of sociological data.
To look at something economically is, essentially, to bring it beneath our conceptual roof, to violate and eliminate its otherness and strangeness, to kill it in a way.
It seems to me, as I said, that in his writings and person John challenged the very foundation of our Western house rules, our store if foundational ideas. He was driven by a conviction which he states early on in Nostos that: “Only a great story can shelter us.” (p. 21) and that in our stories in the modern world – in that which should operate as fertile and rich soil for our “house rules” – we are no longer ‘great’ in the sheltering sense – we no longer have shelter. John writes in exhortation early in Nostos that: “In relation to the natural world our task is to emancipate our eyes and minds from cultural predetermination and prejudice. Where necessary, that means emancipating ourselves from the myths and metaphors that have become forms of our sensibility and categories of our understanding.” Introduction to Nostos, p. vi.
What we need then is the courage to walk out of the house. The courage to take the consequences, not to be bound by your sense of yourself as mediated by “household rules”, by “oiko-nomia.” What is needed now is a break from economic seeing. This break is not merely “taking a gap year”: it’s having the courage to risk the opening of a gap in your psyche. This break is not merely a career break: it is a risk of careering off the straight and narrow path in a way which might break you. This is not a ‘hero’s journey’ in order merely to divine better, fairer, economic models for human communities: it is a recognition that economic seeing itself is the sickness, a sickness from which we need healing from the roots upwards.
The great nostos which John wrote about, the great “journey to home” entails that we first must leave home. We must open the exit door of the familiar and walk out into the unnerving world. We must leave the house of Western culture. We must reassess how our fundamental ideas might be limiting, rather than expanding, our field of vision. This will not be easy. As he borrowed from and inherited the many great metaphors of other traditions which he encountered on his walkabout, John Moriarty “rescored” the song of Western man. There is a folk saying which goes like this: “A man who only has a hammer sees every problem as a nail”. Sensing that we had become trapped and grown stale in our diagnosis of the human condition, John interrogated the diagnoses of other traditions in order to see if they might fruitfully speak to him.
He went at the job with the mind of a first class philosopher, the sensibility of a great poet and the determination of a headstrong Kerryman.
As I wrote this talk, one particular phrase of John’s resounded with me more than the others. In one of his audio recordings John says that we are “junkies” to these ways of understanding the world: our relationship to the foundational principles of Western Culture is that of an addict to their addiction. We are, in a way so deep that it has totally blindsided us, addicted to seeing the world not as it is, but through the categories of Western learning.
What I want to do is to trace just one of the many great lifelines which run through John Moriarty’s work in relation to this problem. To recover from this fall into “economic seeing” and all that it entails, John said that we must individually and collectively experience a dis-illusioning. The “house” of Western Culture – with all its house rules – is in some sense an ‘illusion’: it is a murderous imposition on reality rather than a faithful mirror. The modern Western ideas with which we have become so comfortable are, in the final analysis projections onto the world rather than passionate and compassionate meditations on experience. We see the world not as it is, but as we are and want it to be.
The problem, as John told it to us, is this: we have mistaken the world as we see it through western eyes for the reality of the world in itself. In his audio talks entitled One Evening In Eden John tells a story about entering his kitchen on a dark night. On entering the dark kitchen he would be able to see, dimly, both what is in the kitchen, and, through the windows, what is outside the house. However, when he switched on the light the scene changed totally. Suddenly he could see perfectly well what was in the kitchen, in the ‘oikos’ we might say. However, when he turned to the window, where before he had been able to see the landscape of the world outside, he could now only see his reflection. John used this as an analogy for the psyche. Our illusion is that by perfecting and training our faculties of sense and intellect we are getting closer to a clear picture of the world. The reality is that it is only when we get free of such things that we can make any progress.
We must be dis-illusioned. We must walk out of the house of familiarity or we will, in all likelihood, bring it down on top of us. The “management rules” of our house must be radically redrawn in the course of an uncomfortable and unnerving ‘night journey’. This will not be easy as we are, to repeat John’s phrase, ‘junkies’ for this illusion.
And yet it is possible. Individually it is possible – and if individually, then we can hope it is collectively possible.
The story of John Moriarty is a story of walking out of the house, of being dis-illusioned, of willingly and unwillingly having his own personal “economy” of signposts and symbols shattered and shifted. It is a story of drawing and redrawing the questions. John’s is a story of suffering the questions. A story, to use a phrase of William James’s, of refusing to ‘prematurely closing [his] account with reality.’ You might, justifiably and in anger close your account with Anglo Irish Bank – but don’t prematurely close your account with reality.
For the next few minutes I want to follow John on his own particular walk out of the house, on his own journey of personal disillusioning.
The opening pages of John’s biography Nostos tell the quaint story of the child John Moriarty experiencing at an early age some of the issues which played out over the many years of his adult thought. It is Christmas night and John is looking forward to the arrival of Santa Claus:
“To me he would bring a game of Snakes and Ladders. And to Brenda and Phyllis he would bring dolls. And soon we would have supper and currant cake. There was no denying it, it was wonderful, and in a glow of fellow feeling with all our animals I went out and crossed the yard to the cowstall. Pushing open the door I looked in and at first I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing: no candles lighting in the windows, no holly, no crib, no expectation of kings or of angels, no sense of miracles. ... Devastated, I had to admit it was an ordinary night in the stall. ... Christmas didn’t happen in the outhouses, Christmas didn’t happen to the animals.” from Nostos
Reality disappoints his childish expectation. John is made to realise that the story in the house is not a story in the cow shed. That maybe the cow shed didn’t have a story and, worse still, that it seemed to be doing just fine without one. This, for John, was what he called his “fall into us and them feeling” – he no longer conceived of a “we”, but instead saw the animals as objects, as other. And when you see something as “other” than yourself it can be a double-edged sword. There is on one hand a ‘sacred otherness’. But there is also a ‘diminishing otherness’ which makes it possible for you to perceive another animal or persona as merely servant of your needs. In a very young and innocent way, John has paid a certain price for literally walking out of the house; he has suffered a dis-illusioning, however slight, which he will remember enough to recount in touching detail over half a century later.
The walk out of the house. The fall out of his story. The gentle disillusioning.
And then another, more profound and lasting disillusion. We pick up the story again when John is in his late teens. John, having grown up in and been nurtured by mid-twentieth-century Irish Catholicism and its worldview came dramatically into contact with Charles Darwin’s discoveries in the areas of biology and geology through Darwin’s writings. These writings seemed to be in irreconcilable collision and contradiction of much that John had, literally, held as Gospel:
“For about ten hours a day, for the past three days, Darwin was guiding me into disaster. ... Led there by Darwin, I had come in under these sedimentary miles and I didn’t know, looking up at them, that I would or could hold onto my mind. It occurred to me that I should read the passage to my father, but looking across at him I sensed that a gulf had opened between us.
I got up and went out into the yard.
It was a wild night, the wind squalling from the west, and now, for the first time in my life, I found myself hanging in a kind of infinite isolation in infinite space, and there was nothing, nothing, nothing I could now, or ever, do about it. Providentially, I believe, giving my mind something normal to be normal with, I saw a piece of paper being blown across the yard. Instinctively, I followed it, across the lawn, across the wall, across the road, and it was only when a twisting gust of wind lifted it an carried it up over the hedge into Welsh’s field that I stopped, in one way stopped, because, years later, I was still following it in my mind.”
from NostosAnother walking out of the house. Another fall out of his story into unfamiliarity. An altogether deeper and nauseatingly disorienting disillusioning. In his own words John had ‘fallen out of his story’. He had become ‘man overboard’. He has had the comfort of the ‘house rules’ of his faith-based cosmology kicked from underneath him.
By his early thirties John had graduated with flying colours from UCD and – after enduring some turbulence between times – had secured a lecturing position in Manitoba, Canada, teaching the History of European Ideas. By all accounts he was successful, popular, and valued in the institution. Yet disquiet persisted and grew in him.
By the beginning of the 1970’s he records no longer believing in the subject matter he has charged with transmitting, as well as fearing the effects on himself of internalising the “house rules” of the Western canon often mandatory in pursuing an academic career. Once again the urge seemed to come on him to leave the house which he experienced to be limiting. There is a glorious, liberating sense of urgency in the passages in Nostos where John contemplates ‘jumping ship’ from a successful academic career into the unknowns of life in rural Ireland. Soon he had made up his mind to no longer be bound by the “house rules” of the university.
John writes:
“I had for a long time felt that I had come forward on much too narrow a front. Keep going, and I would surely end up as an intellectual: a walking, talking paradigm of the psychic topiary I had always resisted and feared. ... Three months before, travelling through the tremendous world where the Missouri has its headwaters, it struck me that I must seek my bush soul, my soul outside of society, my soul outside of civilisation with all its restrictions and its Lady Windermere’s fans, my soul reunited with the terror and wonder of the natural world. ... Like so many others, I came to the New World thinking of a future. That it gave me. But as well, it gave me a past, alternative to our European past, to go home with.” from Nostos
This move away from academia and Western Culture and John’s further move to, as he said “baptise himself out of Christianity” were attempts to enact on himself a deeper undoing of the illusions which he had acquiesced to in culture and education. Another leaving of the house: of the house of the university and the house of the Church. His great work Nostos is, in many senses a great record of his “wilderness years”: his years outside the fold and outside the shelter of Western Culture and the conventional expressions of Christian faith. In interview with Andy O’Mahony on RTE John said of his project: “I was wanting to recreate my mind again from pure sensation. To build it up like you’d build up a mosaic. A new mind is what I wanted. But the new mind would be founded not on concepts, not on myths, not on stories. It would be founded on sensations. On things I saw and things I heard.”
*
When, later, John fell back into sympathy with Christianity and indeed came to teach again for brief spells in Universities, it would be marked by the experience of this great disillusioning that he did it. In the same way as you might spend two or three years away from your home you see it differently on return – and you yourself would be different in it - John returned to Christianity, or rather to the person of Christ initially, with new eyes. John allowed his understanding of Christ’s passion especially to be coloured by his reading of myths from around the world: the Hindu parable of Narada, the Inuit story of Takanakapsuluk, the Indian story of the shoes for Maharaja among many others. He had been on a walkabout, collecting boat-like myths and stories from many cultures which he judged could be seaworthy on the most dangerous of waters.
As if to a native language, John returned to images of Christ, to a reimagining of his passion. Christ, for John, goes in his Passion through the ultimate disillusioning. In John’s vision of his passion and death, Christ plumbs the evolutionary depths of who we were and are. In his suffering all illusions are stripped away: our philosophical impositions on reality, our sociological categories, our empirical taken-for-granteds, our desires to control so symptomatic of the “economic” mindset – the psyche itself is torn. He inherits on Good Friday all that we inwardly and outwardly are as humans. He endures, like an awful wounding, the entirety and extremity of our humanity. It is then our task to cross this crossing with him, to be disillusioned out of our comfortable house rules: whether these are religious, familial, economic, academic or otherwise. This is the adventure of our immortality, the adventure of a new Christianity.
John would often quote the beginning of the Passion narrative in his talks on disillusioning and indeed in his books. In Latin it reads: “Et egressus est Jesus cum discipulis suis trans torrentem Cedron.” which translates as: “And Jesus went forth with his disciples over a torrent called the Kedron.” Jesus went forth, Jesus went out. He went out, he left the “house” of human structures; the meal; the scene of civility; of familiarity; in order to cross the Kedron and enter into his disillusioning passion.
Modern man has inherited and built for himself a labyrinth of murderous “house rules”. Possibly the most dangerous of these is observable in the fall of our perceptions of the world into a kind of humanity-centred utilitarian blindness. In May 2010, in the face of economic wreck, in the face of ecological havoc, we are challenged with what our next move will be.
Will we, having built this labyrinth that now traps us, make wings like the mythological Daedalus? Will we fly away from the mess and live, with the same set of flawed assumptions, to fight another day? Will we make a futile attempt to fly away from what we have made without looking squarely at ourselves, the makers, afraid of what we might find? That attitude bears all the hallmarks of the hubris of our current mindset. That’s one option: to ascend to the air, to fly, to escape and live to “economise” for another day.
No. Instead of setting our sights upwards, surely the answer is a journey in the other direction, a journey to the earth? One of the images which John used repeatedly in his work was of the Grand Canyon. Having visited it in his early thirties he was in awe at how its layered strata of rocks seemed to display one upon the other the many ages of the earth. He imagined then through this image the disillusioning passion of Jesus as a journey - metaphorically – to the bottom of the canyon. He imagined an immersion in the depths of history, in the depths of reality. The journey of humanity as Jesus pioneered it is a journey back to the earth, a journey to a full reckoning with what we are as a species. We will not be nourished on this journey by images and metaphors used to sanction human domination – whether that domination is of the earth around us or of the earth of our own interiority.
*
In a world so fixated on tabloid descriptions of human interiority, it is no surprise that John gained so many admirers by speaking candidly and openheartedly on the national airwaves not about economics but about his final leave-taking. His final leaving of the house of mortality. Having been diagnosed with triple-cancer he knew that he would soon be undergoing the ultimate leaving of the house of familiarity, and not totally of his own choice. Even though I had never met John, I couldn’t help but be moved by the sheer warmth of his words, the depth of feeling and sheer compassion from which they came. John seemed possessed of a quiet confidence that, beyond the exit door of death, there was more; that there was, in fact, Divine Ground.
When, in June 2008, I attended John’s first anniversary mass with my father, I had no idea that he himself would less than a year later be diagnosed with brain cancer. As he slipped away from me in the late summer of 2009, I began to listen back to those recordings of John on Liveline. I found myself often consoled and often challenged by his words. I must admit that sometimes I had to turn them off; they seemed to contain a peace and serenity in the face of illness which I found difficult to mirror.
To finish, I want to recount one more instance of John leaving a house, walking out a door in courage. This story comes to us in the form of an anecdote from a visitor of John’s during the time John was receiving chemotherapy. The visitor retells the story like this: “The chemotherapy is causing his wonderful shock of wild hair to fall out. He gathered a big ball of hair from the comb and threw it out the door of the house onto a bush. And then he looked at me and laughed. ‘Are you wondering what I am doing?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘Well, the chemo is causing my hair to fall out and last week I discovered that a wren is gathering up my discarded hair and making a nest out of it in my garden. I have begun the journey back to divine ground’.”
“I have a kind of Christian faith”, John said, “oh, death isn’t the end of the story. And my life in the universe isn’t the whole story. So the healing is finally greater than the illness. Death is a door through to something, to somewhere else.”
