I am here as a result of an invitation from Bill to address you, the congregation. I had presented a paper at a local festival and shared it with Bill. I felt that as I am not a Unitarian I did not have a right to speak here, but Bill assured me that non-Unitarians could also be Unitarians of a kind – a Fellowship who wished to remain outside but participate in the Unitarian Church. I would like to begin by thanking you for listening. Listening is the greatest gift we can give each other.
I have come here as a result of Joe’s involvement to show my respect for his right to participate in a congregation of his choice. It is not my first encounter with Unitarianism and I wonder what the connection is? My first job was in Rosse College on the corner of Earlsfort Terrace and St. Stephen’s Green and my boss was Alexander Sparkhall-Brown, a member of this church. He was a man of great influence and I still treasure a gift he gave me on my twenty-first birthday.
My address here today is an account of my personal journey in search of spiritual meaning in my life. This journey has taken me down many roads and I would like to share some of these with you. It is a journey that has taken me from the head to the heart, that it has enabled me to speak to you from the heart is important, because I have realised that I am a social being, in relation, in constant change and transformation. In the words of an African proverb ‘I am because you are’.
As a family we have always done things differently, pitching ourselves against the odds. We had different values, or so we thought. Yet here we were in the 1980’s in north county Dublin with a nice house, and all the trimmings of a comfortable settled life in suburbia.
But there was something missing. We were not quite sure what it was, but we knew what it was not. The material values that were embodied in the society around us were alien to us, we had to escape. So we went west, to Mayo, on a quest. This is where I discovered my spirituality.
We were drawn to the landscape, blanket bog, green valleys and undulating hillsides. We found ourselves living at the foot of Nephin in an old schoolhouse, a far cry from our middle class existence in Donabate. Why here, I thought, it was not the romance of moving west; it was something deeper, a call from the wild.
As a passive Catholic I had gone through all the rituals required of me as a mother – baptism, communion, confirmation. There was a rebellious streak in me that did not agree with this, yet I did not have the courage to resist. What would the family say? What would the neighbours say? Fear of criticism dictated the course of my life. On reflection I can see that fear dominated my life from my late teens until recently - fear created by my cultural upbringing in a society that did not allow freedom of thought. It was not directly anyone’s fault, invisible boundaries that controlled our lives.
Coming from a working class background my parents did what was best for me, sent me to boarding school. I remember thinking that Heaven was up there, Hell was down below and Purgatory had to be here, there was nowhere else. My image of religion was women bowing to men in frocks. After five years on bended knee I felt that I had completed my Purgatory. By the way, in the absence of boys in our boarding school, we were allowed to serve mass from outside the altar railings. So today is a special day for me speaking from the altar - another taboo broken.
Freedom would come with the end of school, or so I believed; but that was a lie. There is no freedom from guilt, from years of indoctrination, from giving over power to an intermediary who would intercede with God on my behalf. For me years of isolation followed; years of rejection; years that were given to parenting and survival, interspersed with adventure into a natural world that provided solace.
I have discovered the world of nature, the power of the spirit of the earth to console and dominate. My search led me to seek out truth in religion, philosophy, psychology and less conventional ‘ologies’ and ‘isms’. I have attended a baptism at Glencar Waterfall. I have sought out the fairies at Caherlestrane. I have communed with standing stones at Pollnabhron, Stonehenge and Carnac. I have learned of prana, chi and qi. I have discovered ley lines, labyrinths and pendulums.
Fritjov Capra introduced me to paradigm shifts, Gary Zucav to the Dancing Wu Li Masters; Scott-Peck brought me down the Road Less Travelled. I pilgrimmed to the Ganges; swam with dolphins on the River Shannon. I contemplated the Celestine Prohesies; searched out the Holy Grail in Rene le Chateau in Languedoc; sought out the Dalai Lama in Dharmasala and learned that I could create my own reality by living in the NOW.
The Enneagram gave me food for thought; the I-Ching tested my patience. Natural therapies solved my problems and the energies flowed. All these things were wonderful. They kept me busy for years. They captivated my interest and kept away my fears. The New Age tinkering with old age thought was all very interesting but did it bring me any closer to me, or to my quest for salvation?
I found a number of underlying philosophies converged to support a wholistic view of the world. However, this world view has not been integrated into the institutions of our society. Some institutions, for example, medicine, still embrace a world view based on the Cartesian-Newtonian mechanistic view. This view conceives of the universe as a gigantic mechanism, which, once started by God, maintains itself in motion, everything in its rightful place, everything performing its rightful function. God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world!
My travels taught me that very different views of the world are experienced by those living in the East from those living in the West. Coming to an understanding of this helped me to understand the fragmentation of our society.
I am drawn to the writings of Matthew Fox, Creation spiritualist, who asks this question ‘in our quest for wisdom and survival, does the human race require a new religious paradigm?’
He claims that The original cosmic mysticism of Christ has been suppressed by a patristic, moralistic and anthropocentric framework that has wreaked severe psychic damage by alienating human beings from the cosmos, the planet and each other. This alienation has manifested in child and sexual abuse, drug, alcohol and entertainment addiction, materialism and perhaps the most important of all, the matricide of Mother Earth.
A great deal has been written about the apparent parallels and common worldview of modern physics – quantum and relativity – and the eastern mysticism of Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism and Zen. It is argued that physics and mysticism are complementary approaches to the same reality. In my view we are currently experiencing a questioning of old models, old theories, and old perceptions and are faced with the problem of building a new frame of reference.
This new consciousness, combined with an amalgamation of east-west theories and philosophies, has begun to bring about a shift in thinking. One expression of this is the development of numerous healing centres along the West coast of Ireland. These centres, once spoken of in hushed tones, are now an accepted part of life.
Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? Throughout history, the questions are the same. People are seeking ‘enlightenment’. There is a restlessness and dissatisfaction with the status quo. But what is enlightenment? Is it the ‘realisation of the truth of Being’, ‘beyond words and symbols?’ as suggested by John White. According to Chinese Taoist Lao Tsu, ‘to know others is wisdom, to know oneself is enlightenment.
In his retreat lectures Anthony de Mello has equated enlightenment to spirituality.
Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They are born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up.
I believe that my role in life is to wake up, to become enlightened through spiritual practices. Through engaging with reiki, a form of spiritual healing power, I learned the power of an energy force that works through me in a way that is far beyond my power. I have been influenced by many people through their writings and in conversation, and I have come an understanding of spirituality which has satisfied my soul. It is an understanding that spirituality is within me, that there is a source of inspiration and power that propels me forward, to ensure that I do not give up the search. What I call this source is not really important, it may be a ‘he’ or a ‘she’ or just a thought. Listening to others is easy compared to listening to this inner self. Finding time to still the busy intellect that crowds out the source is a constant challenge.
But what of my Unitarian connections? To be or not to be, that is my question. I find myself in a dilemma, a paradox. Reason, tolerance and freedom are at the heart of Unitarianism and I subscribe to all three. But having attained my freedom from an institutional church I am not yet ready to join a congregation, however liberal it might be. I have no struggle with the principles of Unitarianism. My prejudices are more subtle in that they are embedded in the language of religion which represents a time past; a language that creates an emotional response which is deeply embodied in my being; an unreasonable response, perhaps, but nonetheless real. This is my burden. I have not yet attained freedom from my past.
Freedom-from does not always ensure freedom-to.

Pauline McDermott
Dublin Unitarian Church 29th May 2005