David Tacey

For me, the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh says it all:

And you perhaps take up religion bitterly
Which you laughed at in your youth,
Well not actually laughed
But it wasn't your kind of truth.

By the age of about 14 I had decided God was dead and religion was irrelevant to my life. I had had a belly full of it, given my strict religious upbringing, and to drop it all and rebel against it was a delicious freedom at the time. At university I fashionably referred to myself as an atheist, and happily wore this label for a number of years.

But gradually, I experienced the return of the repressed. Quite slowly at first, my religious view of the world, lost or dismissed during my precocious adolescence, began to come back. Atheism began to seem distasteful, and gradually I found myself attracted again to scripture, to prayer, to a personal relationship with the sacred.

The next question was what to do about this return of religious feeling. I explored the New Age spiritual movement for several years, but found it to be fairly glib and shallow, although I must say that certain aspects of it continue to attract me, especially the notion that the sacred is discovered in the inner self of the person, which was quite alien to traditional religion, where God was felt to be outside the self and away in the skies.

I became deeply involved in the Catholic Church in Australia, and for some time felt this to be my spiritual home. However, recently I have been banned from speaking to clergy in the Archdiocese of Melbourne, because I am seen to be unorthodox. This treatment has distanced me somewhat from the Church, and I am feeling that I need to go in search of adventure and new identity again. I think to be on a spiritual journey is of necessity to be involved in risk-taking and some pushing or extending of boundaries.

My books are really attempts at spiritual autobiography. My new book, "ReEnchantment" (2000), attempts to explore the views that I currently hold regarding religion and spirituality, and their place in the Australian social context. Remaking Men (1997) was an attempt to locate spiritual feeling in the experience of being male in today's post-feminist world. Edge of the Sacred (1995) was my first attempt to deal with existential questions and religious problems, and it is heavily based on my childhood experiences while growing up in Alice Springs, in central Australia. "Patrick White" (1988) was an academic book written to secure me a post in the university.

I am an academic at La Trobe University, but I find myself often at odds with academic culture, which in Australia is aggressively secular and materialistic. But I enjoy teaching students about culture and questions f meaning, and this year I am teaching a new subject called Spirituality and Rites of Passage, which is intended to inject a slightly more religious feeling into the secular academy.

Associate Professor David Tacey, January 2000.