Introduction Page 5
Spirituality and poetry come together in a simple gaze and in "word". Poetry is
a form of incarnation, of word enfleshed. It calls things into fuller existence
and, in a way, becomes that thing. The sculptured form of "Gum-Trees
Stripping" is the tree, even in the way the poem lies on the page. Once a gum-
tree is seen as a "fountain slowed in air", seen in ritual stripping, the perception
of all trees is forever changed.
Spirituality also tries to see what is really there and its natural expression is
poetry or music or art or story - the most revealing means of "saying" what is
"past the edge of reason." If poetry and other art forms address mystery their
approach is indirect, with a sidelong glance at what is absent. In art otherness
and differences are respected but oppositions and polarities need not be set up.
The challenge to spirituality and to theology in a postmodern age is to move
towards an understanding of the "divine" that does not see the "Wholly Other"
in dialectical, oppositional terms:
The challenge of postmodern theological reflection... is to refigure the
otherness of God as non-dialectical, non-oppositional difference Every
difference that defines itself in dialectical and oppositional terms is
inevitably the other of the same and therefore is reducible to the very
identity from which it struggles to distinguish itself.5
An exploration of spirituality in the poetry of Judith Wright will show how
"otherness" and "difference" are able to be celebrated in "non-dialectical, non-
oppositional" ways. It will move with a spirituality of the ordinary and
everyday, a spirituality of humanness in "the kind flesh, in love and in simple
sight". ("Night", C.P. p.49)
5 Mark C Taylor, “Postmodern Times” Keynote Address Proceedings of the 2nd Religion
Literature and the Arts Conference. Ed. Michael Griffith and James Tulip, (Sydney: RLA
Project 1995) pp 94-95.
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