In our society ethical questions such as those to do with marriage, crime and punishment, the beginnings and endings of life and freedom of speech are often 'highway' issues. Protagonists establish in advance the right way to go, keep their foot down and their eyes on the road without noticing the terrain the highway traverses. Road signs indicating another destinations or alternative routes are ignored and towns by-passed. Certainty is gained; understanding of country is sacrificed.
Ethical reflection can also be done by taking the tourist route, preferably by bicycle. The signpost promises leisurely travel. In practice the route is demanding. The road plunges off the ridge, down creek valleys and up steep hills. Although it preserves cyclists from speeding cars it puts them at risk from inattentive drivers looking at the scenery. But drivers hurrying on business drivers inattentive to the road and to cyclists. But through calves, eyes and ears the country and the ways people live there do leave a fuller understanding both of land and of what it means to live there.
It is the difference between a thick and a thin experience. One looks for defined instructions, sharp boundaries between safe and risky and between the direct and the circuitous, quickness and firmness of judgment and a clear route to follow that cuts through possibility. It is about ending possibility in the interests of certainty.
The other is interested in exploration, in human complexity, in the way in which highways came to be where they are, the experience of exploring other paths and of other lives, in comparing routes. It is about conversation that explores possibility.
The Attachment, a selection of letters and email messages between writer, actress and adventurer Ailsa Piper with Sydney priest Tony Doherty is a fine advertisement for the tourist route. Its beginnings lay in Piper’s reading of a medieval practice in which pilgrims agreed to bear others’ sins on their walk, so freeing the sinners from their burden.
Piper, who has no church allegiance, was fascinated by the idea. She issued a public invitation to people to share with her burdens that she could bear them while walking on the Camino. She was astonished by the response, and later wrote a book about the project. Doherty, a Catholic priest, read it, found it illuminated his own pastoral experience, and dropped Piper an appreciative note. A regular exchange of emails followed, and developed into a friendship that generated this book of email messages.
The conversation touches on many topics: their upbringing, ancestry, and life experiences; their respective love of swimming and walking; their shared delight in reading and shared care in the use of words, appreciation of cooking, good food and conversation. It also explores their different responses to such issues as sexual abuse in the church, clerical celibacy, relationships, religious faith and death. Death could hardly be avoided; in the period covered in the book Doherty’s brother and Piper’s husband died.
The conversation between two serious and lively people is notable for its openness and playfulness. It is an account of conversion—not in the narrow sense of the dramatic switch of adherence and judgment at the behest of the other partner, but a shared conversion to a grateful appreciation of the richness and complexity of all reality and of the inadequacy of words to comprehend it.
"What is lacking is leisurely shared exploration of the complexity of the relationships involved in all these issues, the part that our personal experience plays both in shaping and in narrowing judgments."
It is a study in friendship. The tourist road they took clearly had its frustrations as well as its delights, but both were essential in the growth they made.
The quality of their conversation illuminates by contrast the highway approach to disputed issues prevalent in our society. Here there is a rush to judgment, to defend opinions strongly and to assault opposed views about Muslims, the Catholic Church, gay marriage, bankers, freedom of expression, the balance between freedom and responsibility, and about young people in trouble with the law or about the economy.
What is lacking is leisurely shared exploration of the complexity of the relationships involved in all these issues, the part that our personal experience plays both in shaping and in narrowing judgments, and recognition of the inadequacy of words and formulae to do justice to the mystery and interconnectedness of reality.
The Attachment is a hymn to detachment. This is usually understood as a lack of passion, but more properly it is the freedom arising out of wonder at the richness of reality that makes one free to resist the temptation to hasty judgment. It privileges exploration over repetition of recipes, engagement over dismissal, conversation over shouting, truth over certainty, reconciliation over exclusion, and reflection over barracking.
These are the qualities needed in public conversation about the issues that divide us and our society
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.