God has been in the news a lot lately, the little rascal. Pardon me for breathing, but I reckon there’s too many saviors on his cross, or his Koran.
A few years ago, me and a good mate of mine, let’s call him Craigie, went to Peru on a spiritual journey. We had an apointment with a shaman called Don Antonio deep in the Amazon jungle.
On the way we sidetracked as tourists to Machu Piccu, which seems to be on everyone’s bucket list, and I don’t know why.
My abiding memory is of a tourist clambering on the Inca sacred altar and pulling funny faces for his friend’s camera.
And then someone asked the guide how they cut the grass.
The place is about as spiritual and moving as Disneyland on a wet Wednesday.
But afterwards our driver, Jose, said to us: Now I’ll take you somewhere special.
And he did.
I won’t tell you the name of the place, but there was no one else there. Possibly because there was nothing to see, nothing you could take a photograph of. It looked like a grassed over amphitheater.
But Jose assured us the Incas used to perform huge ceremonies there.
He performed one for us on a much smaller scale. He used a bunch of herbs and dry leaves and a lighter and he murmured a short prayer in Spanish.
And then he said: I used to be a womanizer and a drunk and I beat my wife. I didn’t believe in anything.
Then a friend brought me here, to this place, and reminded me of the old gods and the old ways and I started to believe again. And I don’t womanize any more, and I don’t drink and I am kind to my wife and my children.
And I thought of him this week when I watched those cowardly, ignorant, hate-filled bastards murder those journalists in Paris - oh, and a Moslem policeman - in cold blood.
… bismi-llāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm: in the name of God, the most Compassionate, the Most Merciful.
If you believe in something that’s more than us, then let it make you a better person, a kinder person, like Jose.
That’s the only thing worth believing in.
There’s god, religion and the whole thing right there, in a bunch of smouldering leaves and the mended heart of a once broken man.
Any other kind of God - the kind that would get offended by a cartoon, for instance - is probably not worth taking seriously.
