For quite a while now, I’ve been trying to embed a teeny-weensy sense of the sacred in the life of our family. Whilst she’d probably put it differently, supermum feels the same way. It comes from a sense of unease that we don’t properly appreciate the things we’ve been given and how fortunate we’ve been in life compared to other families.
On the other hand, I’m equally uneasy about the level of moral smugness and superiority that hovers just beyond any formal attempts to express ‘gratitude’. Also, I’m not talking about charity here. We have the direct debit with ‘Save The Children’, buy the Big Issue (which I feel guilty about not liking very much), recycle, sign petitions and go on the occasional protest march. I write to my MP about things that shock me and give money to beggars. All of this is perfectly Richard Dawkins friendly and doesn’t help. What I’m actually talking about is religion.
Now I’ve always seen my parent’s brand of Catholicism as something horrible and oppressive but as I’ve got older, I’ve begun to appreciate the stable centre it gave to lives which would otherwise have been very uncentred indeed. But returning to the church isn’t an option. For one thing, I don’t believe in an ‘interventionist God’ (I quote that line from Nick Cave an awful lot). For another, I don’t accept the bigotry, paedophilia and regressive politics that seems to go with mainstream Christianity. And I’ve zero interest in hair-shirted Presbyterianism. Quakers offer a reasonably attractive form of Christianity but there’s still that barrier of being personally redeemed by Christ. No thank you. Islam suffers from most of the issues that Christianity is dogged by (see bigotry, regressive politics etc) and I really would need a complete cultural refit to deal with Hinduism.
Meanwhile, full-on engagement with other religions that interest me has is complicated by the lack of any real scope for engaging with the family. Zen Buddhism isn’t really kid-focused and Richard and Linda Thomson have probably put me off Sufism for life. Also, supermum doesn’t do religion. It’s one of those blank spots in our relationship. Her family never had any religious involvement and she literally cannot comprehend an inner life as moulded by religion as mine has been. On the other hand, she gardens. She pays attention to the seasons. She wants to acknowledge that life is passing and things happen to us, good and bad.
This, then, leads us towards paganism. Being me, I’ve thrown myself headlong into exploring Anglo-Saxon heathenry. As a family, we’ve been poking gently at Goddess strands of paganism and encountered Starhawk, Diane Baker’s and Anne Hill’s source book for children and goddess traditions, Circle Round, which has many wonderful things in it but a fair leavening of material which makes me cringe. I’ve also been reading the rather more critical Ronald Hutton whose book Triumph of the Moon respectfully but thoroughly debunks much of the ‘ancient’ tradition surrounding Wicca and its ideologies (which has made trying to find anything we can do relating to Easter a bit of of trial, given the lack of substantial historical provenance of the goddess Eostre).
Now hang on a minute, you’re probably saying. If you’re so dead set against religion and don’t believe in God, how on earth can you so easily charge off into a world of irrational pantheism and animism?
Fair point. I suppose it comes down to seeing engaging with the sacred as a creative act. I don’t need the divine to have a concrete, verifiable existence to invite it into my life. As a writer, I do this every day with things that I evidently make up. Examining or reconstructing or recreating older/extinct/modern traditions provides a means of carving a space for stepping outside our everyday place in the world and thinking about it. Making sense of it. Or making sense of the lack of sense. We’re born, we live and we die, and the year round cycle paganism explores offers a way of creatively engaging with the mystery at the heart of this.
Hmm. That’s probably enough for now. Meanwhile, the Korean poet Ko Un notes:
Bitten by a mosquito
Thanks.
Wow, I’m still alive.
Scratch, scratch
