Journal of a Soul 38

A Passion for Equality

Frederick Douglass, around 1874

There are few things that move us as much as good oratory, and indeed we would go almost anywhere to hear a good orator speak.  The orators that come immediately to my own mind are, of course, luminaries such as Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, William Jefferson Clinton, Nelson Mandela and, of course, Barak Obama.  I would go anywhere to here them speak.  Indeed, I had the privilege to hear Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton and Barak Obama here in Dublin when they visited our great city over the last ten or so years.  Needless to say, I was truly moved.  To add a few females to this list Hillary Rodham Clinton springs immediately to mind as does Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  I have heard these two prominent international figures speak on our media outlets and can truly say they are accomplished public speakers. Our own two former presidents, Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese are also superb orators. You, no doubt can add your own favourites to this list.

Orators are never better than when they are speaking on the great issues of supreme human interest, namely human and civil rights, and about issues of the equality of all human beings no matter what their religion, race or colour. Words, coupled with passion and conviction can and do ring true.  However, we are not interested in hearing mere words, no matter how passionate, unless we know they are also coupled with deeds.  Otherwise, they ring exceedingly hollow. When we listen to great passionate speakers and know that they not alone believe what they say, but that they also do what they say we are truly moved, and moved in such a way as to do something positive or to work for a better world in our immediate surroundings.  We are here right at the heart of what it means to "do the truth", "to live the truth" or what is fundamentally meant by PRAXIS. And so hypocrisy is often immediately clear to an astute and sensitive listener.  We are right to turn away from such bogus oratory and mere rhetoric.  

I write about oratory, real oratory in that sense of linking in with the passion for justice which the speaker evokes in our hearts.  Obviously, good speakers can also evoke hatred in the hearts of his listeners as did the likes of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, but they were mere manipulators of base emotions, not evokers of a passion for justice and truth.  Real orators touch us deeply at a centre of truth, at a centre of compassion, not at a centre of base emotions like hatred and greed, power and conquest.  Sophistry, of course, is even worse, as it is the use of clever but false arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving.

Abraham Lincoln (1809 -1865) said much and did much, but his was never an idle or thoughtless oratory - no, it was oratory in the true sense that I have adumbrated above - his words came from his heart and from how he lived his life on a daily basis, with a conviction always to do his best and to follow the light of his conscience. I like the following words from this great man:

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.

Or take the words of our own Irish Catholic Liberator, Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847): "Nothing is politically right which is morally wrong."

Abe Lincoln

What put these thoughts on real oratory into my head was reading an article in a recent edition of The Irish Times on the great American orator Frederick Douglass (1818? - 1895), who has links with both Lincoln and O'Connell. The journalist Barry Roche recently wrote an interesting and illuminating article on Douglas in the Irish Times: Douglass was honoured in Waterford some days ago when a plaque was unveiled to mark a speech he gave in the city during a lecture tour of Ireland in 1845.   While here, the great orator met and befriended our great Catholic Liberator, and it appears that O'Connell influenced Douglass greatly especially with respect to the non-violent achievement of freedom for human beings of all colours and creeds.  Barry Roche quotes him in the above linked article, and it is worth re-quoting in full here:

“I am covered with the soft, grey fog of the Emerald Isle. I breathe, and lo! the chattel becomes a man. I gaze around in vain for one who will question my equal humanity, claim me as his slave, or offer me an insult,” he later wrote in My Bondage and My Freedom

President Obama has said that Douglass' Irish experience "defined him not as a colour but as a man."

Our Workaday World

Daniel O'Connell

All of the above is not worth a curse, unless it influences how I live and work on a daily basis, how I treat others, how welcoming I am of all the differences I meet in them. I am tasked as a Resource Teacher with treating all students, no matter what their ability, with equal dignity and respect.  Today, thankfully and wonderfully, indeed, Ireland is no longer mono-cultural or monochrome. Thankfully and wonderfully, it is multicultural and technicolour. Our country has been enriched by the influx of people of many nations since the growth and decline of the Celtic Tiger years.  This is a powerful cultural legacy which will serve only to enrich and strengthen our traditions.  There is much unity in diversity.  Their is no little discovery of what makes us different as Irish and what makes us all the same no matter what the colour of our skin or the shades of our beliefs are.  We need great orators in the sense that I have described them to inspire us to cherish and protect all life, human, animal and vegetable.  When the great orators of the future speak, and speak they must, their topics will be broader than human rights and human dignity.  Their subject will be, I believe, the very survival of our planet.  But that, alas, is a topic for another post.  Let us, in the meantime, ponder the words of the great orators of today and yesteryear and be inspired to work for justice in the world and the equality of all.

Journal of a Soul 2

Intense was the word that a good friend used to describe me when I was in my early twenties.  He added that he meant absolutely no criticism by that description.  Nor indeed did I take it as such.  And other synonyms for intense are passionate, powerful, profound, forceful, heartfelt and concentrated.  I'd still accept any of those adjectives as descriptive of my way of being in the world.

Having recently read much philosophy from the early Greeks right through to the contemporary Charles Taylor I am still enthused with a passion for wonder, with a desire to embrace life in its fullest measure.  From my readings in philosophy and literature I find a singular lack of intensity and passion in the world in general. That's why we need our religions (in the spiritual manifestation, not in the power manifestation, of those entities, I hasten to add is what I have in mind here), our theatres, our cinemas, our traditions and our literatures, and especially our music.

In the psalms we read that  "Deep calls to deep at the sound of Your waterfalls; All Your breakers and Your waves have rolled over me." (Psalm 42:7; New American Standard Bible, 1995)  I remember these words clearly since the time I was a young novice in the Augustinian Order many years ago.  Deep calling onto deep always moved me to the very foundations of my being.  A I sat there in the early mornings in the cool and incense-laden oratory, season in and season out, I remember touching depths within me that I certainly had never plumbed before.  Some past pupils who, with their dad, are expert potholers come to mind.  What is it in the human heart that wishes to push its being deeper and ever deeper.  These past pupils are now doing just that, and doing it physically, literally crawling on their bellies down and further down and further down still into the bowels of the very earth.  As I sat there all those years ago I felt that I was spiritually doing what these lads do physically, except that I was crawling down, down, down into the caverns of the heart, or of the soul, or of the spirit, or indeed of the Self.  And yes, I am using all these words here synonymously even though I am aware that there are differences between their connotations in various areas of study.  But for my personal purposes here they refer to my deep sense of my own being. 

And so, in short I am moved to new depths always.  I rejoice that as I age I am able to go deeper and am able to bear more pressure.  It's rather like diving deeper, as the deeper you get the more the water presses down on you.  And so, again, as I sit here listening to the haunting voice of the great Canadian singer Neil Young singing Old Man and my eyes are filled with tears as he brings me deeper with his words:

Old man look at my life,

I'm a lot like you were.

Old man look at my life,

I'm a lot like you were.

Old man look at my life,

Twenty four

and there's so much more

Live alone in a paradise

That makes me think of two.

Or again listening to the late great and wonderful Irish Folk singer Liam Clancy weaves the same wondrous effect on my soul. Try listening to his rendition of Those Were The Days on YouTube here:

Or again listen to the late great Jacques Brel singing his powerful rendition of Amsterdam which you can view hereunder:

Or again, I dove much deeper still when viewing Des Bishop's tribute to his late father Mike, RIP, in tonight's documentary on RTE 2.  You can view this in three parts on YouTube here:

And so all of these things serve to carry me deeper and deeper into self.  Whatever Self may be it is to be found only by pushing oneself to the limit.  Des Bishop, Jacques Brel and Liam Clancy all push themselves to the limit because the self is a reality of the limits and of the horizons.  Again many other metaphors can come to mind here.  The Self is a reality of the extremes, that's why the human soul is wont to go on pilgrimage.  Look at all those great mountaineers who seek to climb the highest mountains.  Bring to mind all those explorers of yesteryear who sought out the very limits of the world.  Think of those astronauts who seek to explore the wonder of space.  Call to mind the English Captain Robert Falcon Scott and the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, explorers of polar regions both.  Nothing but the pursuit of self, the pursuit of identity could carry them up to and beyond the threshold or portal of death.