Leunig Cartoons of the Spiritual Journey References: Michael Leunig, A Common Prayer, Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1990. Second edition: Melbourne: HarperCollins.

Leunig Cartoons of the Spiritual Journey

References: Michael Leunig, A Common Prayer, Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1990. Second edition: Melbourne: HarperCollins Religious, 1998; 1999.Michael Leunig, The Prayer Tree, Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1991. Second edition: Melbourne: HarperCollins Religious, 1998; 1999. The most recent collection of his spiritual cartoons and prayers is:Michael Leunig, When I Talk to You: A Cartoonist Talks to God (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2004).

Finding a Path to Re-Enchantment

Leunig’s work locates the spiritual life in a materialistic society which finds spirit and God irrational, impossible to understand, and even delusional.

Our society is in a ‘dark night of the soul’, seemingly devoid of religious interest, although Leunig sees the possibility of spiritual renewal everywhere, especially in nature.

Spirituality and Innocence

Leunig makes much use of a second naïveté or ‘adult innocence’ as a modality in which we might reconnect with spirit, and combat the corrosive effects of secular rationality. See Leunig, ‘Spirituality, Art and Innocence’ (Brisbane, 2015); this wonderful talk on the possibility of renewing spiritual life can be found at: http://www.leunig.com.au/ideas/spirituality-art-innocence

Leunig’s cartoon world is recognisably Christian, but with a difference: it has a kind post-Christian, ‘universal’ appeal that is able to speak to people of all backgrounds and faith traditions.

Recovering the Human Heart• Starting from scratch, and accepting disbelief as a first

premise, Leunig builds a cosmology which respects the needs of spirit. He affirms the existence of something in us but beyond us, which he refers to as ‘heart’. The deeper levels of the heart are capable of religious experience: sacre coeur. He believes if we activate the heart, and open to its potential, we might experience a re-enchantment of the world & our lives.

• Faith won’t work the way it used to; we need to rediscover faith through felt experience. In a secular world in which religious authorities are disregarded, one option is to develop a mystical interiority. Faith requires an inner life; it is ‘the still small voice’ that guides us.

Weber argued that the West has experienced Entzauberung der Welt, the ‘demagicalisation of the world’.  Leunig’s graveyard reminds us of T. S. Eliot’s, ‘The Waste Land’:   “What are the roots that clutch, what branches growOut of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know onlyA heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter.”

from T. S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’ (1922), in T. S. Eliot: Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), p. 63.

It is as if the duck is saying: ‘You are sitting in a graveyard of your making; the world beyond modernity is capable of renewing your life.’ In this spirit, the poet Rilke wrote:

 But for us existence is still enchanted; still in a hundred places the source. A play of pure powers, touched only by those who kneel and wonder. ‘Us’ refers to poets, for whom existence ‘is still enchanted’. There is a spiritual & environmental hope in Rilke, as in Leunig: although society seems spiritually exhausted and has lost its way, the natural world can provide possibilities of renewal.  Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus (1923), Pt. II, no. 10, ll.9-11.

Leunig’s work seeks to revive interest in prayer, in the perspectives that open up to the secular self when it adopts a reverential relation to the world. His work is subversive in that it reverses the values of secular society.  ‘I ask the reader to bear with the absurdity of the image and to remember that the search for the sublime may sometimes have a ridiculous beginning … The kneeling man knows, as everybody does, that a proud and upright man does not and cannot talk with a duck.’  Michael Leunig, A Common Prayer (Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1990), unpaginated.

The role of humour in developing a secular spirituality:

Leunig is introducing spiritual life into a highly secular society. This means he has to tread carefully. As a humourist, he needs his audience to laugh with him, not at him. The image of the duck is humble, disarming, everyday. If Leunig had arrived at a more conventional religious symbol, his audience might have laughed at him.

Without humour, a secular audience might dismiss his spirituality as pretentious or ‘unAustralian’. As long as he can get the audience to laugh with him, it will most likely not reject him as a God-botherer, or someone suffering from a ‘God delusion’ (Richard Dawkins).

• Leunig freely admits that his spiritual work involves risk. ‘I opened my heart to derision’, he wrote in When I Talk to You: A Cartoonist Talks to God.

• ‘The creation of my prayers has involved feelings of considerable vulnerability, because I understood that such things are readily and gladly misunderstood. They are my fumbling experiments and they mostly derive from a situation of deep personal struggle which was difficult, wonderful and radical.’

• Michael Leunig, When I Talk to You: A Cartoonist Talks to God (Sydney: HarperCollins,

2004), unpaginated.

Iris Murdoch wrote:

‘Tragedy, like religion, must break the ego, destroying the illusory whole of the unified self’. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Vintage, 1992), p. 104.

The Divided Self The person who needs to worship, and the person who wants to destroy worship, are two aspects of the same person. The modern individual is divided: there is a sensitive side that intuits the existence of spiritual forces, and a rational side that is dangerously reductive. It acts like a persecutory superego. One part of the mind wants to have us down on our knees, another part rejects this as foolishness. The rational part has, in our time, risen in stature and become hubristic, depriving us of spiritual life. In all religious traditions, such hubris precipitates a fall.

Rumi and Goethe

The poet Rumi wrote:

“One of you is an unbeliever, And one of you a believer. Two people are warring within this one entity. Who shall succeed?”

The poet Goethe wrote in Faust,

“Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast, And each one wrestles for the mastery there.”

• Leunig cartoons as an aid to religious education: • 1) he locates the spiritual journey in our time, in our place• 2) he gives poetic expression to paradoxical or mysterious elements of religion• 3) he plays up the apparent ‘foolishness’ of spirituality in a secular time• 4) in my experience, students respond to the humour and irony of his work• 5) his humour can make the big religious topics more accessible and

immediate: topics such as sacrifice, humility, trust, prayer, worship come alive • 6) his work can appear naïve but his depiction of spiritual life is complex and

sophisticated: the spiritual impulse comes from within, but so does the contrary impulse to destroy spirit; students like to think psychologically about religion, and thus have a natural affinity for Leunig’s work

• Leunig cartoons as an aid to religious education, continued … : • 7) spirituality is revealed as ‘negative capability’: the ‘ability to be in doubts,

uncertainties, mysteries without any irritable search after fact or reason’• 8) he teaches a ‘wise foolishness’, a stance which enlivens spirit but confounds the

mind• 9) religion is presented as enigmatic, experiential; not a system of abstract beliefs or a

series of propositions, but mysteries to be experienced first hand: the true meaning of religio

• 10) the heart is seen as the intelligent centre of religious experience, as it is in Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross; the eighteen-inch drop from the head to the heart; Leunig raises the question: where does the heart go to school?

• 11) religion is not merely something we do, but something done to us• 12) the irrepressible nature of the religious impulse, which will always express itself

Leunig’s work raises the question put by Iris Murdoch:

‘Must all religious people now be mystics?’ – from her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.