While there is a validity to these challenges, there is also something profoundly unsatisfying in defining a religion in terms of a combination of orthodoxy and orthopraxy. It seems rather like defining a person as a physical body and their daily routine. It misses something about the essential experience and meaning, and ultimately the purpose, of religion.

I watched a wonderful programme last night, Wonders of the Solar System, in which Professor Brian Cox (who is rapidly become the successor to Carl Sagan in his enthusiasm for presenting the wonders of nature and science with a real sense of awe in my opinion) witnessed the Northern Lights from the snowy wastes of arctic Norway. He had illustrated and explained the causes in terms of the magnetosphere and it’s interaction with the solar wind, and as he witnessed the effect he said that he had expected to see it coming down like a curtain of light from the sky. And it didn’t. He described it as seeming to rise into the sky likes spirits rising, flying to heaven. The scientist moved to see beyond the physics and explain the wonder in the language of metaphor.

Apparently, back in around the 14th/15th centuries, people were prepared to live, kill and die over theological differences. Differences such as whether the bread used in the mass stood for the body of Christ or whether it was the body of Christ, for example. Now, what is going on here? In the first instance, the bread is understood as a metaphor. In the second, it is understood as a concrete truth. Neuroscientists seem to tell us that different parts of the brain process metaphorical imagery vs concrete representation, so the difference is one of perception and cognition. A hypothesis I hope to develop in another post is that differing states of consciousness result in different limitations as to what can be known and differing ways in which it can be known, but certainly my experience in learning disability and mental health care plus my own experiments in altered states of consciousness confirm to my satisfaction that these two different ways of understanding the nature of the bread are in fact state dependent and probably require differing neurological processes. So Brian Cox was witness to a powerful natural phenomenon and was moved to a spiritual metaphor in order to explain his full response to it.

One of the other things that I learned as a nurse is that pathology is so much easier to define than health. Pathology can be understood in terms of the parts. It is a process that lends itself to a reductionist analysis. Health does not. To understand health one has to look to ecology… the internal ecology of the individual in relationships to the ecologies of the external world. Maybe, just maybe, that is what a religion tries to do… to map the ever shifting ecology of the experience of the sacred. To understand that the bread is both a representation of the body and the body itself, that the Aurora Borealis is both a shower of photons caused by solar wind being channeled by magnetic fields and a living animated spirit. To map the liminal states that take us to these deeper interactions with the world without excluding the alternative experience but to understand our experience as a limitation of the sacred itself.

On one level, it got me thinking that we do indeed continually maintain our reality, if only in sustaining and maintaining that sense of stability and continuity that defines our sanity. And if we do this on a personal level, through the development and unfolding of a continuous personal and mythic narrative, how more so do we do it on a community or social level… what rituals we enact, what proscribed and prescribed patterns of behaviour and what stories we tell and develop to create and maintain our consensus sanity?

One after the other, each ‘owner’ would then sing his stretch of the Ancestor’s footprints. Always in the correct sequence.

“To sing a verse out of order”, Flynn said sombrely, “was a crime. Usually meant the death penalty.”

“I can see that,” I said. “It’d be the musical equivalent of an earthquake.”

“Worse,” he scowled. “It would be to un-create the Creation.”

Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (p58)

More recently the issue of taboo came up on a forum that I participate in. Actually, this is an issue that has come up over the years on several forums I have been involved with, and again it gets me to thinking about this relationship between proscribed behaviour, narrative and the maintenance of the experience reality.

To me, a taboo is not an inherently religious issue, but it does seem to be an inherently deep psycho-spiritual one. As a culture, we tend to use the term to describe things that it are good to break in some sort of iconoclastic sense… “the last taboo” is always a media favourite… or we use to to describe comparatively trivial transgressions. But the real taboos… the actions that place the transgressor “beyond the pale”… are actions that unmake the world. The phrase, beyond the pale, would have meant beyond the stake, or outside of the fence… cast out of society, outlawed.

In engaging with our community there are rules, expectations. Some of these are so deeply enculturated that it is almost impossible to articulate them, as hard to perceive as the air that we breathe or the light that we see by. We have contracts, agreements that are unconsciously extended and accepted, between us, that require us to refrain from certain behaviours that would threaten that fabric of consensus stability. Those who break those contracts we have need to weave into our narratives as monsters, to place them outside, howling with the other demons threatening to destroy the world. In doing so though, I wonder what it is that we become in our attempts to deny the truth of our own monsterhood?

Whipsnade Tree Cathedral

Now, it cannot be denied that Christianity is the religion of a great many of my ancestors (and with a heritage rooted in Welsh mining communities, I suspect a strong streak of Methodism; though my great-great-great Grandfather, the Rev John Jarman, was a Baptist Minister). I will respect it for that, as well as for the value that I undeniably see it bring to peoples’ lives, for the communities it binds together and values and aspirations it inspires in many of its adherents.

In one of my conversations with our local Baptist Minister and his wife, I spoke of the protective and nurturing presence that had been with me since childhood, that I now know of as the living spirit of the community of my ancestors. The Minister’s wife asked me why I didn’t just accept that presence as Jesus, and back then the only answer I could come back with was “Because it isn’t”.

The difficulties I have in fitting with the community whose friendship I so enjoy are numerous. There are, of course, the common ones. I will not accept a religion that starts from the premise that the only way to salvation is through Jesus (I don’t accept the need for salvation for a start). Despite the inclusivity of Jesus’ message all churches, however hard they try, are exclusive. That one premise requires them to be.

The sermon I attended had two element that caused me problems. One was centred around the famous (though contested in terms of source) quote that starts “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”. It goes on to say “We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.”

I believe that we cannot NOT manifest the glory (if that is the right word) of existence in our existence. It is inherent in our being, even in our darkest times.

The second difficulty was similar, when a call was made for God to circle us; to keep us in love and to keep out the fear. I do not believe that we need nor benefit from that barrier. The wonder of the mystery of our being is manifest to me in both our fear and in our love, in our pain and in our joy.

But the biggest sticking point for me was the realisation, the sense, that I was in the presence of an invader religion. The stories were not my stories. The land that was held sacred, the Holy Land, was not my land but a land in a country far away with stories, however emotive, however “teaching” in their nature, that were rooted not in my sense of culture but in one that was alien to me. It doesn’t matter that I can find much to admire within the religion, its rituals and myths. These are not my stories. That is not my holy land.

Closer to my spirit are the stories we used to tell each other as children, of a devil in the church who would reveal himself if you carried out certain actions (I’ll tell you a story about that another time), the stories my ancestors told, Christian or otherwise, about local spirits. Closer to my land are the wells and hills that my ancestors revered, Christian or otherwise, and the spirits of those places that they approached in awe and fear and love.

The thing is, I am not an atheist… I seem to fall into that category that one thoughtful poster on a forum I frequent referred to as having a “radically more nuanced position than the doctrinaire, materialist-reductionist, stance you tend to find among your classic Bertrand Russell sort of atheists. And sometimes seems to converge, albeit not actually meet, with similarly nuanced beliefs about the nature of divinity held by many Pagan polytheists.”

As I have said before, my sensory relationship is with those I would choose to refer as the living community of the spirit of my ancestors. But within that relationship I am drawn to various non-human people who would certainly share qualities that I might recognise as being of “Godness”.

I also recognise a hierarchy of power and influence within the non-human and that can lead to a perception of some beings as Gods. In the discussions I’ve had with polytheists about the matter, having more “power” has often been one of the key characteristics of godhood.

Problem I have with that is that many people have power, both non-human and human, and we rarely (at least in the context of the culture I am embedded within) elevate human persons to Godhood in this stage of their existence, and it makes little sense to me to reserve godhood for non-human persons based on a hierarchical power relationship alone.

So what can I hold as being sufficient and/or necessary for defining status of Godhood? I had the pleasure of Heron on CF encouraging me to be a little more robust than I might otherwise have been in my thoughts on this matter whilst contributing a broadening perspective, and I realise that it is by no means a question with a simple answer. What is the nature of the Gods?

Somehow, it seems to boil down to the Gods having an intrinsic and fundamental involvement with aspects of our experience of reality that are in and of themselves intrinsic and fundamental. So to me, the spirit of a place may not be a god (though in some cases it may be… the cultural manifestation and significance of a place would have a real bearing on that), though it is a powerful person worthy of respect… but the spirit of time, the spirit of transition, the forces that cleave the world and create distinction. These would strike me as being very difficult to place in anything other than the “God” category.

I guess I’m just coming to understand that the answers are not going to be conceptually neat and clean If I was going to take a pop, I’d say that the nature of Gods is to sustain reality and our experience of reality. I would also say that it is in the nature of Gods not to sit in human boxes.