Introduction: Secular Sacredness DAVID TACEY What we have received is the ordinary mail of the otherworld, wholly common, not postmarked divine. —les murray (1986)

At the end of his life, Jacques Derrida announced that he knelt down beside his bed and prayed every night. His atheistic followers felt bewildered and betrayed. Had they been deceived for so long? Had the master of postmodernism tricked them, and even himself? Some thought he was losing his marbles and dismissed his prayers as dementia. But Derrida was in full possession of his faculties. He said that as he aged, his childhood Jewish practices came back to him and he embraced them in a new way. After all his exploring, Derrida had arrived where he started, and knew the place for the first time. However, Derrida was not embracing any traditional religion, so the conservative religious might feel just as bewildered by his prayers. To his dying breath, Derrida referred to himself as an atheist, and his prayers were not directed to a theistic God or personal deity. Derrida was praying to the Unsayable, the Unspeakable, the Unknown. ‘ … the constancy of God in my life is called by other names’, he wrote in his essay, ‘Curcumfession: Fifty-Nine Periods and Periphrases’ (1993). For Derrida, the word God carried too much baggage and more theological weight than he could support. ‘God’ had become a too familiar, even 5   *  Forward

hackneyed, figure in religions, and perhaps that is why this God had to die. The domesticated and clichéd God had to disappear so we can re-envisage the sacred and reformulate our relationship with it. I think many Australians are following Derrida’s trajectory. Many of us grew up with, and later discarded, the religions of our parents or grandparents. They made no sense in a scientific, modern and rational world. But recently there seems to be a change of heart. Many ask: have we thrown out too much? Did the existential core of religion go out with the stale bathwater? In Latin, the word religion means ‘to bind back’, ‘to reconnect’, and many of us are doing exactly this today: binding ourselves back to the sacred. We strive to reconnect with nature and our environment, with our souls and with each other. Some are calling this newfound connectedness, ‘spirituality’, unaware that connectedness is, in fact, the meaning of the word religion. As Derrida put it in another essay, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone’ (1996) , the ‘re’ at the start of religion guarantees that a sense of the sacred will return, renew, revive: ‘Religion is what succeeds in returning’, he wrote. But much of this is not yet visible in our society, which is still caught up in the death of an old image of what is sacred, an old image of God. On the surface, modern democratic societies seem godless, devoid of a sense of the sacred, but beneath there is a different story. Historian of religions, Mircea Eliade wrote in, The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (1969), that ‘the sacred is not a stage in the history of consciousness, but an element in the structure of consciousness’. Humanity, he went on to say, cannot live in chaos and cannot stand meaninglessness. There is something in us which is more than human and demands expression. Even if the majority of Australians are no 6   *  Prayers of a Secular World

longer religious in the conventional sense, even if they are not members of churches, synagogues or temples, they have an innate compass that points to the existence of something beyond themselves. Today few are able to use God language with any confidence, but that is because, like Derrida, we are living in a period of transition, a period moving away from religiosity and toward a new sense of the sacred. The sacred appears to be ineradicable because it is part of our makeup, part of who we are. This is why atheists often end up affirming that there is ‘something there’ even though they refuse old God language. And, just as the sacred has changed in our time, so has the idea of prayer. Many are familiar with ‘petitionary prayer’, the kind of prayer where one asks God for things that will make our lives better. This imagines a God like Santa Claus, and this God died in Western culture a long time ago, well before Nietzsche declared ‘God is dead’ in his book, The Gay Science, in 1882. But there are many forms of prayer and, today, with our newfound relationship to the sacred, we can think about a ‘contemplative prayer’ where we ask the Unknown what we can do to improve the world. This idea of prayer invites us to be co-creators in an active, responsible partnership with the forces of ultimate reality. The sense of mystery is coming back, but we are not there yet. Serious literature on the return of mystery is emerging from France, Germany and the United States; the Antipodes, as if often the case, is lagging behind. While our Australian intellectual culture is still operating in an anti-religious mode, fighting off the old God and willing the death of religion, our arts culture is at the cutting edge of a new prayerful attitude. Poetry and art are by nature spiritual, and cannot function in a completely godless world. If God is dead, poets and artists must go in search of new images of the sacred. They are finding it in our respect for nature and environment, in our feeling for matter and life, in our understanding of suffering and mental health. The sacred is emerging in 7   *  Forward

all sorts of unlikely places, and ironically, it is coming up in the sciences as well. Darwin’s, Origin of the Species (1859) led to the sciences playing a key role in dismantling religious beliefs, but now it is the sciences which are ushering in a new sense of mystery. Today we are caught between the materialistic culture we have outgrown and a religious dispensation we can no longer embrace. This places us in an uncertain and awkward situation. One way forward is to revise what is meant by the word secular. Secular does not mean what many think. Secular comes from the Latin, secularis, which means ‘to make worldly’. In a world where everyone was a believer, secular did not imply hostility to God or religion, but referred to those who lived in the world. It was best understood not as anti-religious or atheistic, but religiously neutral, and this understanding made the separation of church and state possible. Secular also derives from saeculum, meaning ‘belonging to an age’. In this sense it denotes increased engagement in worldly rather than church matters, thus it is possible to have secular prayers. Only recently has the word secular implied hostility to religion and vituperative atheism. This may be the result of confusing the distinction between the words secular and secularism. Secularism is an ideology, a product of a materialist mentality and has been defined as ‘a worldly attitude or tendency, especially a system of political or social philosophy which rejects all forms of religious faith and worship’. While secular refers to that which is of the world, secularism sees God as dead and mystery as non-existent. This is the sense in which secular is often used in Australia, but it is not its original meaning. So we might say the term has been distorted by historical forces. But, I am more interested in the original meaning of secular, ‘to make worldly’. Many of us come from Abrahamic traditions which includes Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These traditions are not separate from the world, but of it. As we read in the gospel of John, ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only 8   *  Prayers of a Secular World

begotten son’. The idea that God and world are opposed, that the sacred is otherworldly and the profane only identified with this world, is an aberration. There is another aspect of the word secular that interests me: secularis derives from the Latin root sei, meaning ‘to scatter or sow’, and implies that the word secular also intimates the idea that the seeds of God are scattered in the world; sown into time, thus breaking down the dualism between spirit and matter, the transcendent and the imminent. William Blake referred to incarnation as ongoing and continuous, as did the thirteenth century mystic, Meister Eckhart. Through the ages there has been a sense that the sacred is flooding into creation, participating in it and fructifying life. There has been an understanding that the sacred longs to awaken matter, and philosophical speculation argues this process ought not be imagined in a supernatural way, as a spirit coming down from above, but that the sacred has always been inherent in the world. It simply needs to be received and made known. In the philosophy of religion, and in emergence theory in the biological and natural sciences, the idea that consciousness is foreign to matter has been overturned; that the spirit comes from above in miraculous ways is no longer credible. The ramifications of this shift from a spirit above to the sacred within are immense. It impacts on how we view salvation, consciousness and spirit. It impacts on our ideas of nature, sexuality, the body and on our moral and spiritual outlook. Instead of seeing this sacred secularity as a movement opposed to religion, some, like Charles Taylor in, A Secular Age (2007), see it as a movement within religion itself where the incarnational thrust into the world is carried a step further. As organised religions go into decline we are witnessing the emergence of a new kind of consciousness, a consciousness in which the sacred is perceived not as something supernatural, but as profoundly natural. The sacred is worldly 9   *  Forward

and we can speak of it as an affirmative force at the core of creation. No longer perceived as far above, the spirit is now seen as ultra-natural, or the deepest part of our created being. This coincides with an entirely new feeling for nature, which is much needed if we are to overcome the ecological emergency of our time. Nature is suffering because we have projected the sacred into the heavens and deemed the world godless. If nothing is sacred, then nothing matters; or, to put it another way, matter doesn’t matter. I don’t know if this new feeling for nature has arisen as a result of the ecological emergency, or whether they coincided with each other creating a synchronicity in theological and ecological awareness. Whatever the case, there is a shift in the way we understand the natural world which is felt at the popular level in a strong feeling for nature, and at the political level in activism and green politics. The ecological dimensions of this shift are far-reaching. In Key Writings (2004) Luce Irigaray referred to this shift in our awareness as ‘horizontal transcendence’, a turn toward the immanent. Harvey Cox speaks of ‘the current metamorphosis in religiousness as the rediscovery of the sacred in the immanent, the spiritual within the secular’, in The Future of Faith (2009). Instead of seeing the sacred as something separate from the ordinary and needing to be celebrated in holy buildings on special days, there is a sense that sacredness is now a dimension of the everyday. It is at this moment in history that the ancient spiritualty of Australia speaks to our post-colonial society. Aboriginal culture has never separated the sacred from the ordinary but finds it embedded in the everyday. In fact, the everyday is no longer ordinary if the sacred is present. The horizontal plane of the ordinary is shot through with transcendence. The transcendent doesn’t happen elsewhere, apart from the world, but is a dimension of the world. Poets have always known this, as Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it: ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of 10   *  Prayers of a Secular World

God’. And all of us need to think like poets to bring this awareness into our own lived experience.

DAVID TACEY is an independent scholar and public intellectual who has written extensively on spirituality, religion, youth experience and mental health. David grew up in central Australia alongside Aboriginal cultures, and has a life-long interest in indigenous issues. He is the author of fourteen books, including Edge of the Sacred, Re-Enchantment, and The Spirituality Revolution.

11   *  Forward