Louis MacNeice the Irish poet and playwright was born in 1907 in Brookhill Avenue in North Belfast. He was the son of Rev John MacNeice, Rector of Trinity Church in Clifton Street and later, Rector of Carrickfergus.

MacNeice was politically astute, but he steered clear of party politics believing that poetry could succeed where politics had failed. He is known to have said, ‘Writers should be not so much the mouthpiece of a community, but its conscience and its critical faculty.’

He knew his Belfast of the early 1900’s well; he described it as a politically divided city, ‘A city built upon mud, a dangerous, violent place set in the limbo of its semi-industrialised hinterland; between the mountains and the gantries.’

MacNeice grew up in a religious environment, that much we know, but there’s evidence that he saw though its hypocrisy at an early age, for when he was perhaps still in his twenties he wrote, ‘I was the Rector's son, born to the Anglican order, banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor.’

In one of his best known poems, Valediction, he makes an interesting observation of the people of Belfast, perhaps from his vantage point of the son of one of its pillars. To MacNeice, Belfast was, ‘...devout, profane and hard.’ I wasn’t around when he penned those words but I grew up in the same area of Belfast not twenty years later and I can recognise MacNeice’s Belfast in some of my old relatives; devout profane and hard. But can you be devout and profane at the same time? Yes, I think you can.

To be devout is to be devoted to the fulfilment of religious obligations. To be profane is to be marked by contempt for what is sacred.

Two discoveries I made some years ago changed my life forever. My first ‘Eureka!’ was the day I embraced the hard fact that the people who crucified the Master were neither criminals nor the perceived dregs of society, nor were they the cruel Roman soldiers. No, his elimination was masterminded by the religious leaders; the Chief Priest and the rulers of the Temple.

My second ‘Eureka!’ was the fact that the word ‘religion’ was invented by Marcus Tullius Cicero, philosopher, statesman, lawyer and politician of the first century BC. He invented the word to describe people who are ‘bound or tied to a monastic code.’ There’s the link, for wasn’t Jesus committed to the destruction of the Temple-bound activities of his contemporaries?

MacNeice’s religious background resembles what another philosopher, Max Weber called; ‘a polar night of icy darkness in which human individuals are trapped in an iron cage of rule-based control.’ MacNeice understood the connection well, for in another poem, I am not yet born; he prays,

‘O fill me with strength against those who would

make me a cog in a machine,

a thing with one face, a thing...’

I am convinced that if the ‘un-churched’ could see the true Jesus, the one who sets people free, who does not expect us to be cogs in a machine nor ties us to a monastic code, the world would be radicalised for him in a year. But hey, we know it won’t happen. Why? Because most of us are afraid of freedom.

 

You can contact me on www.adamharbinson.com