-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 06 March 2004 22:57
Subject: Re: God and Religion? Religion and God?
Is it simply a conflation? I think the conflation is out there already, as
it is with sensual / sexual
I have been thinking on this thread and did join in, but managed to write
b-c through inattention
now's as good a time as any to say that I was thinking of this word
"spiritual" and wondering what one does - I have some antisocial
suggestions - about those who
start out with statements like "I am a very spiritual person"....
I am ahead of myself - I heard in recent weeks someone say on the radio "I
am a very religious person; well, more than that, I am a spiritual person"
somewhere in the bits of my memories which were populated and programmed in
my youth a shocked voice said "Strike her down, God"
but I also thought of "when people believe nothing then they will believe
anything" - who said that?
& by association Joyce's Portrait: Will you become a Protestant Stephen - I
said I had lost the faith, not myself respect
Surely all we can do with a term like religious is to apply it where someone
is seriously concerned about their relationship with God
R S Thomas, as Alison suggests, is a good example
Where it gets interesting for me is when the poets try to get round the
rules or argue with them or cease to think they apply. There's nothing so
boring as agreement with the
party line and thinking all's well.
It's the doubt and the quibbling that's much of the interest.
Fake spirituality just winds me up. I got caught up in an odd
conversation during the week about _Celtic ruins_ which lumped together the
celtic church baptistry near Madron and the merry maidens near Lamorna, both
near Lands End, UK; and enjoyed the smoke screen that went up when I
insisted that they are quite separate things historically, by millennia,
built by quite different peoples. Why did I spoil a comforting story?
The smoke screen was largely that there is so much we don't know, how can we
be sure they werent all celtic (celtic here means awfully clever, rather
nice, and like me and my friends, all at once) and that
putting flowers on old stones is a pretty spiritual act and might be what
our ancestors - given an invasion or two and a clearance or three - would
have done
There's a wise woman round abouts. She says she was drawn to the pagan
landscape - from Essex. She did a restart course (back to work) to get book
keeping etc, has a website and will cast spells in accordance with her own
voluntary code of conduct
If we were to speak of continuity of belief, I'd be less interested in
people inventing prettified magic and more interested in a story I have read
by report but not yet directly that there were letters to the west penwith
papers in the 1850s from employers complaining about the loss of labour on
May Day because people were going out of Penzance the 5 miles or so and
dancing round the ancient stones in accordance with tradition
all of which may be a long way removed from anything so maybe i'll go to bed
good night doubters every where, good night
L
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