Dancing with Dinosaurs: A Spirituality for the 21st Century by Mark Patrick Hederman
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Lousy Lizards

If you want a compelling argument why not to be or become a Christian, much less a Roman Catholic, this is your book. Alternatively, it is a case study in how not to write a book, why some books should never be published, and what readers of any stripe at all should burn as cultural obscenities. It is this alternative that allows me to overcome my embarrassment and review the thing

Mark Patrick Hederman is Abbot of the Benedictine Monastery of Glenstal, the largest monastery in Ireland. A churchman therefore of some repute. I came to this book because it seemed to connect vaguely with my interest in the ecclesiastical origins of the modern corporation.

I had some hope of insight relevant to my interest when I read on page 14 that "Churches, banks, and multinationals are some of the modern breed of dinosaurs." Certainly one might expect some criticism of the Church then, some morsel of insight how the dinosaur-like status of the Church came about and what might be done about it. As it turns out: Not a chance in hell.

Part 1 is a wandering empirical stream of consciousness filled with a variety of factual asides that have no apparent connection with each other or to an overall argument. These include, among other gems: the precise date of St Valentine's Roman martyrdom (14 February 270 AD plus or minus a few years); the levels in 2010 of Irish exports and tax rates; the patent expiry dates for several products of Pfizer Pharmaceuticals; the annual turnover of RyanAir; and the fact that a character named Corrigan in an Irish novel is based on the American priest Phillip Berrigan who was a civil rights activist of some considerable fame.

None of these random facts is apparently meant to mean anything further. Hederman does however dwell with particular non-sequiturial relish on aspects of the former New York World Trade Center. The reader may be edified to know: the tonnage of steel in the World Trade Center (176,000 tons, metric or long tonnes is not specified); that a Boeing 707 wouldn't have had enough mass or fuel capacity to cause the WTC to collapse; that the Boeing 767, which did crash into the building, went into service 19 years before the 9/11 tragedy; and that the Japanese architect of the WTC suffered from vertigo. What any of these observations and factual assertions have to do with dinosaurs, ancient or modern, or spiritual existence is left entirely to the reader's imagination.

Part 2 begins with a poem entitled Snake, presumably an allusion to the lizard-descendants of the dinosaurs, by D. H. Lawrence. The action in the poem involves the eponymous beast disappearing into a hole in a wall. There is no attempt to explain either the relevance of the poem or its connection to the rest of the chapter.

Snake-hatred however is clear. Hederman doesn't like snakes because they are 'horizontal' creatures which are somehow antithetical to the 'vertical' resurrection humanity is called to. The historical process of evolution proves his point: Is it not the case that our lizard-like ancestors crawled and yet we walk? QED: evolution is toward not just the vertical but the ultimate vertical of resurrection. Teilhard Chardin, perhaps, with a phallic Omega Point!

Hederman is a great believer in the theory of evolution. But for him evolution is not a random Darwinian process of genetic trial and error. Rather, "Evolution occurs according the direction or intentionality towards which humanity strains." Yes, folks, we will ourselves to move up the evolutionary ladder. We wish for hands, and claws disappear. We developed beyond our primitive one-part, reptilian brain because, well.... we wanted poetry! Our three-part brain is one of the most convincing proofs of the Holy Trinity and a model of how God interacts with himself.

I'm making none of this up. Hederman may have read Henri Bergson sometime in his life and decided that Bergson's élan vitale was just the thing he needed for his apologetics. So he reifies this mysterious force, makes it subject to human direction, and simultaneously links it to the Trinity. What a thinker.

Part 3, The Church as Dinosaur, renewed my hope for some sort of rationality. But once again I was cruelly disappointed. Hederman continues his reptilian theme with a sizeable snake-bashing extract from the book of Revelation. Again no connection is made to the remainder of the text which is an extended potted history of the Catholic Church.

One expects to see the promised ecclesial dinosaur described at some point in this history. Again, no joy. While the various historical contingencies of ecclesial development and the Church's occasional lapses into total corruption are lightly mentioned, we are assured that “infallibility is the dogma in Roman Catholic theology which ensures the progress of the dinosaur along the right path." In other words, the Church can congratulate itself that it has found the doctrine through which it can rest easy about its corruption, both individual and organisational. Dear old dinosaur.

Part 4: God as Dinosaur. Yet another poem with no exegesis or explanation. Lots of pious stuff about the God of Love, which ignores any mention of the insane divine tyrant of older biblical texts as well as the aggrandising hubris of Paul of Tarsus, the first Christian author.

Hederman does, though, make an unusually bold, one might say rash, claim: "Before the dawn of consciousness we have been projecting our fantasies onto that screen we call God." Rash because he appears to make a connection between that very tendency and his own statements of belief. But not to worry because Catholics are apparently immune from the otherwise universal flaw of projection, protected as they are by the marvellous doctrine of infallibility.

Not that Christianity hasn't made mistakes. Sure it has; and Hederman, no doubt, is among the first to cast a righteous stone. His stone is well-formed and well-aimed: The big mistake Christianity has made is not to have stuck with its biblical guns and rejected the temptations of rational thought, especially that developed during the Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas has a lot to answer for to Hederman, who apparently finds the ideal intellectual environment sometime around the death of Valentine (plus or minus a few years). I think Hederman would feel right at home amid the searching minds of evangelical West Texas.

Part 5: Some Dance Steps. Another unexplained poem, this one by Rainer Maria Rilke, leads off. But the narrative quickly returns to the, by this time, mortally-wounded serpent. We can get rid of its corpse as well as any residual serpent-in-us by believing in the doctrine of the Trinity. We dance with dinosaurs when we involve ourselves in the perichoresis, literally the dancing around each other, of the three persons of the Trinity.

Why we should want to dance with a dinosaur, or how cutting in to the Trinity is a spiritual achievement, have never been established anywhere in the text, but nonetheless both are presumed to be a good thing. The book actually has little to do with dinosaurs, either literal or figurative, secular or religious. And it has absolutely nothing to do with spirituality, that is, about the personal experience of transcendence. It's two obsessions are amateur herpetology and sterile religious formulas. If those turn you on, Hederman is your guy.

View all my reviews