"Beyond Consolation": vital apologetics from John Waters I

I apologise, first, for the lack of recent posting. Various things have conspired to keep me away from the blog over recent weeks (not least sermons on 1 Peter). Also, for those of you who are tired of the morass of words that meet your gaze when you do log on; I am slowly working my way round blogger technology and the hope is that I'll be able to alter the setting for the blog feed. So: for those of you who have minimal interest in scientism, apologetics methods or otherwise, at some time in the near future, the morass of words will be more limited and you will be spared the full, lengthy articles! In the meantime, the recent apologetiXperiment seminar material has been posted below. More to come on postmodernism.

Well, it has been some time, but Beyond Consolation (or How We Became Too Clever for God...and Our Own Good) has finally been published! I picked my copy up from Hodges Figgis just the other day. This book, John Water's latest offering, makes for riveting (and enlightening) reading. To my mind, every thoughtful Christian concerned to understand contemporary Irish culture and its relation (and dogged oppostion) to Christian faith, ought to read this very timely book. Water's last book, Lapsed Agnostic offered a thrilling account of his journey from the traditional Catholicism of his youth to the atheism of his early-to-mid adulthood and back to (something like) the Catholic faith of his childhood. It made for touching and often poignant reading. But, more than that, Water's offers a clear-eyed, intelligent and riveting critique of Irish culture and the irrational, destructive currents of thought undergirding the present indeference toward "traditional" Christian faith and morals . Peppered throughout Lapsed Agnostic are reflections and insights Waters has gleaned from the work of Catholic theologian Luigi Giussani, founder of the Catholic Movement, "Communion ad Liberation".

Now, following on from the central theme of Lapsed Agnostic, John Waters has written an equally riveting work. Presently, I am working my way through chapter 8 so I do still have a sizeable chunk to go. Nonetheless, what I've read so far suggests to me that this may well be a contemporary work of landmark importance for Christian witness in contemporary Ireland (evangelicals take note!) Waters begins Beyond Consolation with a discussion of Nuala O'Faolain's final radio broadcast, in which she was interviewed by Marianne Finucane. In the face of death from terminal cancer, O'Faolain found no consolation in religious belief. She was terrfied of her impending death and surveyed in despair the short time of life left to her. This interview transfixed the Irish public. According to Waters, it marks one of the most important moments in Irish cultural history. As the back-cover of the book states:

"O'Faolain had many times been the sokesperson for her own generation of women seeking equality and liberation; but here, reviewing a culture she had inhabited and helped to ferment, she emerged as a voice of several generations of Irish people who had conjured up for themselves an abyss of unhope."

The interview with Nuala O'Faolain on national radio is Water's point of departure. What follows is a coruscating indictment of contemporary Irish culture in its subtle but oppressive efforts to stamp out the presence of traditional Christian faith in society at-large. This mainly takes the form of critical rebuttal of older, traditional Catholicism, the subtle mockery of the media toward religious belief and the patronsing attitude of a culture that sees Christ as a kind of consolation prize for those who are just not able to "keep up" with the tenor and strain of modern life. Even Seamus Heaney comes under the whip, somewhere around pp. 115, in the chapter entitled "The Poetics of Nothing" - I've yet to get on to it but it is clear Waters levels his passionate criticism at our nobel prize winning poet for his irrational dismissal of religious faith. Personally, I think it's high time the unquestioned views of our unofficial poet laureate are properly interrogated and challenged. Waters will do it gallantly, no doubt.

I've not the time to offer a full review so a few quotes to follow will suffice for now. It's important that I learn the art of brevity, in any case - I realise my posts can be a jot too long.

pp. 76: "...ours is a culture that sabbotages hope. It impies that hope is possible, and yet has removed from sght the only source of hope that exists beyond the baubles and sensations offered by the marketplace and the false promise of eternal youth rather than eternal life. A culture constructed over 2,000 years on the awareness of Christ has been reduced in forty years to a culture in which hope is defined merely by the prospect of some more of that which has already failed to satisfy, until, at a moment specific to each life, the whole thing becomes untenable, at which point the accumulated and postponed despair of a lifetime of false seeking enters in with a vengeance...The culture insistently tells us that, if we have been trying out these baubles and sensations and are not satisified, it is only because we have been doing things wrong...And becasue our societies are driven by these misapprehensions about freedom, and because of the fear we share that if our illusions are laid bare we shall have nothing to live for but death, we refuse to look at the absolute horizon of reality, which has come to signify nothing in our cultures but the edge of the abyss, occassionally glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. When, from time to time, perhaps at the funeral of a friend of in the presence of the blurt of despair of another, we are brought face-to-face with reality, we turn away in terror or bewilderment."

pp.77: "...In this culture, faith is doomed to the function of consolation for those who come to realise they cannot measure up to the ideal or anything like it. And something in the demeanour of the religious sensibility confirms that this is true. An embrace opens up which itself betrays the characteristics of disappointment, of resignation, of terror, of a kind of failure. Christ is offered as a consolation prize for those who cannot meet the standards of the culture. In other words, religious culture, in spite of itself, acquiesces in the marginalisation of religion...Perhaps the most urgent task of the coming time is to analyse how it has become possible to replace mankinds' seeking after the absolute meaning of reality with a narrower ambition (ie., wealth, pleasure, entertainment etc.) and yet to claim that this narrower ambition as more enlightened and progressive. Part of this excercise will be an examination of the logic calling itself 'reason' which enables this narrow vision of reality to remain plausible."

Powerful stuff. Ultimately, Waters questions the orthodoxy of our age, the assumption undergirding so much contemporary Western culture; the self-destructive belief that dismisses the infinite and eternal, and insists that this belief is itself evidence of a growing intelligence. When all is said and done, how reasonable is it, asks Waters, to believe in nothingness?

For a scrupulous, passionate, illuminating analysis of the nihilism and despair that runs like a thread through the collective psyche of modern Ireland, take up and read Beyond Consolation. You will never view contemporary Ireland in the same way again. This is vital apologetics.

Yours,

The Scribbling Apprentice