Theological Mistakes

This week Thanet Creative Writers had the writing prompt If I Invented My Own Religion. I wasn't going to attempt this writing challenge because if I can't be trusted with a time machine then I certainly shouldn't try to create a religion. Still, one important lesson the tutor of a creative writing class taught me was that you're not on oath when you write your autobiography. You don't have to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help you god. You can edit, improve things, emphasise here, blur things there. You shouldn't flat out lie, but you can tell the best version of the story. So bearing that in mind...

Some years ago while hiking in Brittany we came up out of a wood, on to a wide clearing with stones in the middle. As it was raised up on a hill top there was a magnificent view of miles of countryside ahead. I stopped and opened my mouth, not knowing what was going to come out. What came out was:

"This is a holy place."

As it turns out there had been a chapel there until the French Revolution, and before it was a chapel it was an older chapel, and before that was a Roman temple, which historians think was built on a pre-Roman Gaulish worship site. So I'm not the first to have had that reaction, having been beaten to it by at least two thousand years.

A year or two later I was in the Orkney Islands on the unhelpfully named island of Mainland. I didn't know it at the time but I was coming down with a bug. I did know, as I strolled along the beach, that everything was very strange and that I was not feeling normal. I came to a dead seagull, lying like a puff of feathers on the sand and had the strongest suspicion that it wanted to talk to me. Obviously it couldn't open the conversation, being dead, and I was damned if I was going to talk to a dead seagull, no matter what it had to say. I went back to the youth hostel and spent a very uncomfortable, restless and, since it was two days after midsummer, very bright night there, the incident rolling around in my head.

Made in a giant teacup by a wizard

The naturalistic explanation is that I am sensitive to this kind of stuff; my brain has access to a spiritual state of mind in which I am receptive to feelings of this sort. As another example there are a variety of foods and drinks that give me particularly vivid and lucid dreams. I'd had them the night before the hike in Brittany, after several glasses of local cidre fermier. (I had been completely sober the night before I went to Orkney as the bus left Inverness at some ungodly hour in the morning).

While thinking about this stuff for the piece you're reading, some of the towns Jehovah's Witnesses knocked on the door and asked me if I had considered the big questions in life. Not being on oath (still) I politely dismissed them, saying that I was working and concentrating on the small questions at that moment. I prefer, for the moment, to seek my own salvation and damnation in my own way. And it was then as I fumbled with my keys to lock the door that I knew - that I had the revelation - that I was going to write this piece.

So anyway, there's some of the raw material, the leftover scraps I'd find myself using for a religion were I to make the mistake of building one. A dead seagull that reveals nothing. A site on a hill that other people thought was holy. Cider, or chartreuse, or absinthe, or rice pudding with raisins. to give vision-dreams. And politely turning away adherents of other religions.