Life-and-Destruction                                                            Page 25

A spirituality of the "correspondences" of things differs from what was seen in

the recent past as "traditional" spirituality. God, understood as irreducibly

separate, was seen as requiring radical detachment from created things as a

condition of unity with Godself. James McAuley, who is acknowledged as one

of Australia's "religious poets" ²³, insists on the great gulf between God and the

human person:

May it be that the possibility of contact between the self and the truly

transcendent, with God, opens precisely where empirical contacts

fail?... (This does not mean) the abolition of the created self but

reaching the goal of a deliberate ascetic process of abandoning all

attachments, so as to arrive at a state of utter destitution from the point

of view of this world. There is then the possibility of an action, more or

less immediate and direct, of God on the soul - but entirely according to

God's free will and grace; for just as there is no question of abolishing

the created self, so there is no possibility of the soul reaching the divine

by means of anything it can do on its side, beyond trying to prepare

itself for a gift utterly beyond its merit or control. St John (of the

Cross) carefully insists that it is union, not identity, that is the

question. ²⁴

The spirituality found in the poetry of Judith Wright points towards union and

identity and difference being, seen in non-oppositional terms. The unity of mind

or soul with the material world which Judith Wright celebrates in "The Maker"

is an example of her understanding of Baudelaireian "correspondences":

My real interest... is the question of man in nature - man as part of

nature. The theory of correspondences that Baudelaire brought forward

- the question of nature as a symbol of one's experience has always

seemed to me to have a great deal in it." ²⁵

²³ Vincent Buckley has pointed out that "It is a great pity that no one has undertaken a study of changes in the history of the word ‘religious’"

    -Poetry and the Sacred (London: Chatto and Windus, 1968) p.4

²⁴ James McAuley, "A Small Testament" in James McAulev, Ed. Leonie Kramer (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988) p. 128     

²⁵ Brian Kiernan Considerations (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1977) Interview by John Thompson. p.73