Buckle Up, Pilgrim
We're talkin' 'bout religion here
There’s a TV show I catch glimpses of, on Sundays. It’s called “Pilgrimage.” A bit like the S4C show Am Dro (Out And About), only this show has a bunch of people wandering about through the woods looking for some old holy site where some Saint took a dump behind some bushes and sprouted a crop of devotees, or discovered a bush of herb and burned the leaves and got visions of Heaven, or something.
Am Dro is about four Welsh speakers wandering about the Welsh countryside looking for some delightful spot like a mountain or a lake, something like that. There’s a lot of trail hiking, a lot of Welsh being spoken, and at the end of the trail everybody gets to enjoy a spot of free scran which the team leader had prepared in advance.
There is a clear and obvious difference between the shows. “Pilgrimage” is about people trying to find themselves by going to some place where they’ve never been (so how can they find what they’ve lost if they were never there to leave it behind?). Am Dro is people who already have found themselves, right where they are standing, just enjoying the most beautiful scenery on Earth.
Which brings us to the "“happy clappy spanky slappy” bit.
“Pilgrimage” has cut scenes where one of the pilgrims tries to explain what is, to them, inexplicable - the nature of their beliefs, which invariably boil down to a single male monotheistic Christian deity.
Those few times I’ve watched the cameras focusing on one person discussing their beliefs, I can’t help but note how much they’re kind of floundering, flapping around, their belief system a tangled mass of loose threads waving about in the aimless breeze.
It cemented a thought in my head, and I think I’ll write it down.
Gods and Monsters
It’s wonderful not to be The One With All The Answers. I don’t even pretend to be such a person, and I’ll tell you why later.
Thing is … there either is no Deity, or multiple Deities. No God, or pantheons of Gods.
But one thing I am pretty certain of is that the number of Gods in the world does not equal 1.
Within Or Without?
There are some folks out there who claim that God Is In The Rain, or see their Deity’s Almighty Hand in a flock of birds overhead, or in some site where a saint reputedly addressed some crowd (“Please don’t hang me! I come from God! I’m his PR rep! Worship me instead!“) or healed sick people who are all now dead anyway. But there is a problem to such pilgrimages.
Like looking for Your Own Personal Jesus, you’re wasting your time looking for something that is outside you. God isn’t out here, because here is where you find everybody else, and all the places where we live, and some places where no sane humans want to walk.
And don’t flock to those sad individuals who do claim to have Found Themselves, and who have God’s Personal Whatsapp Address and so they speak for Him and do what I tell you … because they really are all frauds.
No Gods Where No Human Has Gone Before
Curiously enough, by the way, I can guarantee that if there are no humans except for where you’re walking, you’ll only find God there if you brought your beliefs with you to that place. If you leave the spot, and put a camera there with an internet connection, you might find wildlife. A condor, a big cat. A bear. Small herbivores. No Gods.
So that leaves the image of the Gods you carry inside you. Most likely your image comes from what you were taught in Sunday School, or RE class, or what your parents pushed into your head. “There is a God. He looks like this - a beardy old man in a white robe, Santa Claus on his 364 days off, throwing lightning down on you if you’re naughty so BEHAVE!”
That, dear reader, is not God. It’s Zeus. It’s Odin.
You know, if you’re thinking of worshipping a deity, you could try Thor instead. Thor does that whole stormbringing thing, even when he looks like Chris Hemsworth.
Except here, where he doesn’t look like a Marvel movie actor.
You can’t go wrong with Thor. As deities go, he’s never depicted in the mythology as sleeping around with married women and fathering a multitude, or running around starting wars.
No, Thor is one of those lads you meet down the pub. The big lad who lives to work down the building site or the local builders’ merchants, and who’s good with a hammer. Or he might work as a qualified electrician.
You know that these Deities have a more solid foundation to them. Worship Idunn, because apples exist. Worship Odin, because wars exist. Worship Thor, because storms are real. Hells, worship Surtr because fire is very fucking real. Just ask the 200,000 displaced citizens of LA.
The point being, shows like this are looking in the wrong direction. You see people in these kinds of TV shows wandering about, seemingly desperate to find answers to the Big Questions - “Is this all that there is? Is there nothing more? Where is the meaning of life?” - and ultimately finding none, because it’s a TV show, and if you’re watching it from a thousand miles away, what meaning are you going to find, sat staring at a glass box listening to what other people are telling you?
There are still Big Questions to be answered. But they’re not the reason why you should go out and see the world. Your answers have to come from within. You find your own God. And if you do, say Hi to Her from me.
You could write a dozen books on this subject matter alone. 👍🏻💕