Dreamland Pilgrim

“The colour of truth is gray.”
André Gide (1869 – 1951)

SEVERAL MORNINGS AGO I stepped into my shower a Heathen. I washed myself, shampooed my hair, rinsed off the soap, and turned off the water. When I pulled the shower curtain back, I was still a Heathen (a clean one at least). Stepping down, I immediately appreciated that my bathroom floor was wet, very wet. Not just puddled, but under two inches of water, and this seemed to be rising. The Heathen paddled across to the bathroom door, up a slight step, and across the hallway. Every towel in the top of the wardrobe went onto the bathroom floor, along with the spare bathmats. Somehow, the Heathen won the battle; the dripping towels went into the laundry basket and then off to the washing machine in the kitchen.

The Heathen, which is to say the Writer, had dabbed at his wet body while flinging towels about, and was able to get dressed. On with the central heating to get the floor quite dry.

An experiment: A jug of water poured into the bathtub bubbled up through the space between the bathtub’s housing and the floor. Here was trouble.

I had cursed a blue streak, but calmed down enough to phone my landlord for advice. Unfortunately, he was out of town due to a family emergency. I figured I would wait a few days and make do with my bathroom sink and the hose from the shower, which could be used there.

When I was a boy, at my Nan’s home in Kent, and at my Mother’s family home in Lancashire, we did not have indoor plumbing. In the morning, Nan or my Auntie Maud would pour heated water from a ewer into a bowl on a washstand in my bedroom, and I would bathe in some fashion that way. The small child does not usually smell as much as someone does at my present age. Using my bathroom sink, I have washed myself incredibly thoroughly for the past few mornings. I had no complaints.

I shall tell the reader now, the first time I have told anyone, that my Mother, who lived most of her adult life in Bermuda in a house with good modern plumbing, never, ever, had a bath or a shower. She washed at the sink. Might she have been afraid of water? I never knew. In her last few years, she could not bear to be in a room with a closed door, and that included the bathroom. It was rather discomfiting. Her bathroom door faced across a hallway to the living room. One had to make excuses ... I think the dog needs a walk ... privacy should go both ways.

Was the Heathen, the non-believer, to be flung into the world of his grandparents and peculiar Mother, when it came to bathing in October 2011? For a few days it was interesting, gave me something to think about.

Yesterday, I had had enough. Was I getting all the shampoo out of my hair (the few strands remaining)? Could I be sure I was not malodorous? I was also missing the physical pleasure of a hellishly hot shower.

Then, last night, I dreamed that my Mother was telling me about a bolt in my bathtub drain. I doubt that my Mother had any knowledge of drains, taps or pipes or the nuts and bolts that hold them together. How did she get into my dream with the explanation that a bolt had fallen down my drain? I know so little of plumbing myself; I could not invent her words (could I?) I should point out that Mother passed away over 19 years ago, and has never appeared in my dreams with helpful hints.

I told a friend here in town about the bathtub drain, and he brought over two small washers. Told me he thought there would be a bolt somewhere below the drain and a screw passed through the washers would restore the drain. Well, the Heathen was not too much of a believer.

This evening, on my own, I shone a torch down the drain after lifting off the sieve plate, and way down I could see a metal ring with a ... wait for it ... bolt through the middle pointing up. It was awkwardly distant to be reached by fingers or pliers, but I had the sudden thought that a fishhook on a line might be lowered into the drain and the device below snared and pulled upwards. As if I had a fishhook and a line! However, after hunting through the many drawers and boxes in my flat, I found a long twist-tie with a thin metal centre coated in plastic. I bent the end to make a hook and lowered it into the darkness of the drain (impossible to manoeuvre a torch at the same time) and, praying “Please!” to no god in particular, pulled upwards. The hook had latched onto the bolt and its ring; it came up to the bottom of the bathtub. I quickly unscrewed the bolt, took off the corroded and worn washer on the end of it, dropped on the new washers, and screwed the bolt down again. This pulled everything tightly together.

The Heathen, with his dream, his Mother, his friend and (his luck?) had fixed the drain. He dared to run the tap for a good long time, and no water bubbled out from below the tub.

When I was younger (but older than I was at my Auntie Maud’s) I used to find religion, hints of God, in both major and minor events. The night sky might make me tremble and so might a few minutes of listening to sitar music. Words, especially, could turn me on. Words still turn me on, but they no longer seem to turn a god on. Not the way they did in the 1960s. I took drugs to try and find the way to God.

That said, I recently watched again, after a few decades, the television series “Cosmos” written and presented by Dr Carl Sagan. I recalled reading that Sagan, as he was dying of cancer, had pretty much decided that there was no God. When I read that, years ago, I was surprised. As a Heathen, watching the series from start to finish over a few nights, I had to ask myself how Sagan could have dismissed God while speaking of so many wonders in the Cosmos.

Haydn’s “The Creation” oratorio has the line: ‘The wonder of his works displays the firmament,’ which is pleasant to sing (which I did in school) and thrilling to hear. Happens that the original German does not make sense in English as commonly translated. It has to be ‘The firmament displays the wonder of his works’.

The works displayed so wonderfully by the firmament that Sagan wrote and spoke of had me thinking that maybe I had it wrong. Maybe there is a god, even a God.

“That the Mormons assume a right exclusively to the benefits of God will be a lasting witness against them, and the same will it be against Christians.”
Thanks to William Blake (1757 – 1827)

For me, I think the main difficulty with a belief in a deity is that people tend to create Him (or Her) in their own image. This exclusivity extends beyond the worship service, beyond the sacred image, beyond the promises attached to this or that god. The True God and his True Church (for there must be one, if just to collect tithes and offerings) can only succeed when all opposition is crushed. There was never a god that whispered to the prophets: “Tell the people to pray as they will, do as they would, be what they wish.”

At the present time, there is a run-up to the Presidential Elections in the USA. A year from now, Americans will elect a leader. One of the Republican candidates is a Christian, we are told, of the Evangelical bent. Another Republican front-runner is a Mormon. The Christians, the Bible Believers (dare I say Bashers?), are getting the word out that Mormonism is a cult, not Christian, and that a Mormon President would surely lead the country into the jaws of Hell. The Mormons, by the way, believe that when the American Constitution is “hanging by a thread” the Mormons will take over America (and eventually the world) and rule for the Mormon god(s). There will be a political kingdom of God.

A True Christian, and a True Mormon, cannot believe outside their particular Catechism.

JFK was elected President despite (we must assume) adhering to Roman Catholic doctrine, which differs from that of our Evangelical Christians almost as much as Mormonism. Except, so far as I know, the Pope was not pulling strings.

Mormons in their meetinghouses vote to sustain their church leaders by the sign of the raised hand. I have never, ever, seen a hand withheld, much less a hand raised in opposition, no matter how difficult a decision. Simply, the members vote for the candidates that the Church leaders tell them to.

Do not expect the voters in Utah to sing the praises of Barack Obama, the Democrat, or Rick Perry the Republican Christian. Utah Mormons (and those elsewhere) pushed The Osmonds to the top of the pops 30 years ago, and Brandon Flowers of The Killers is repaying his fan-base by backing the Mormon Republican Mitt Romney for President in 2012.

I would not back a Mormon candidate for high office because I know a little about Mormonism, and a good deal about what True Mormons are expected to believe and do. Mormons are expected to withhold information that might put their church and its leaders in a bad light, indeed, they can lie and it is quite all right. They do lie. I have lied for them and with them.

As I stood in my flooded bathroom the other morning, sending up the sort of prayer King Canute might have, that Noah might have, I did not really expect an answer. Dreaming of my Mother and the bolt in the bathtub drain was rather odd, and finding my answer in the dream was even odder. I am not going to found The Church of the Flood (that would be a very catchy name, of course) and get religion. I might put the clues together, admire the firmament, and feel comfortable with the casual thought that someone or something, billions of years ago, released everything into time and space, and that matter and energy flooded outwards in every direction. Did someone or something create the laws of nature, of physics? Perhaps they were inherited from an earlier incarnation. Let it roll.

The Heathen is enjoying his shower again. This is a rainy day outdoors too. Bless the drain that works!

A JEST'S PROSPERITY

“If I revealed all that has been made known to me, scarcely a man on this stand would stay with me, and, Brethren, if I were to tell you all I know of the kingdom of God, I do know that you would rise up and kill me.”
“In your hands or that of any other person, so much power would, no doubt, be dangerous. I am the only man in the world whom it would be safe to trust with it. Remember, I am a prophet!”
Joseph Smith, Jr. (1805 – 1844)

I CAN REMEMBER THE BEGINNING almost to the hour of the day, easily the month and year. It is the ending that is unclear. It began exactly 38 years ago, and was over about 8 years ago, give or take a few years.

When people find out that I was a Mormon for over a quarter of a century, for most of my adult life, they often ask me how I managed to get involved in such a peculiar cult. How did a chain-smoking, drug-taking, manic-depressive and anxiety-ridden lad raised in the Church of England and on rock and roll end up singing “Come, Come, Ye Saints!” a couple of times a month, year after year?

Mormonism is, in 2011, a great deal easier to investigate in depth, thanks to the Internet, new revelations, confessions, books and personal testimonies. I dare say that a person aged 61 who has not developed dementia, and has had some experience of life, if just through conversation and correspondence and late-night television, is likely to question a great deal of what he is offered. Particularly when it sounds too good to be true. When I was 23 years old, in August 1973, I knew very little of the Church of the Latter-day Saints, except that Brigham Young had had a great many wives and over fifty children. I had not picked up that knowledge in Sunday school, but in conversation with my grandmother. It is worth noting that a recent publication of the LDS Church does not include the multiple wives and children of the Church Presidents. I dare say even the Third World nowadays, where the Mormons are seeking converts, might frown on Church history.

My grandmother had told me that when she was a little girl, which would be no later than the year 1910, if she and her siblings were naughty, my great-grandmother would tell them: “If you don’t behave, the Mormons will come and get you.”

My great-grandparents and their seven children lived near Burnley, Lancashire. Happens that in the years after 1830, when Joseph Smith Jr. founded the Mormon Church, missionaries were sent to Great Britain (and other countries in Europe) to convert white folks and get them to bring their families and funds to America, to gather to Smith’s Zion. Zion had to be reinvented several times as the Mormons, both homegrown and converted overseas, were hated and hounded, persecuted and driven out of street, town, state and finally the boundaries of the USA at that time.

Many of the English converts joined the Church in Lancashire, within but a few miles of the villages where my mother’s family lived. My great-grandmother’s threat of Mormons kidnapping boys and girls and taking them away to America was probably quite effective. I imagine missionaries in top hats, carrying strange scriptures and talking in unintelligible American tongues, would appear in and around Burnley. I have researched and studied my family history in considerable detail, especially the folks in the past 200 years, and, so far as I can tell, no member, naughty or nice, on my mother’s side in the North, or my father’s side in the Midlands and Southern Counties, ever converted to Mormonism in Britain, and none caught the ships in Liverpool and sailed away to the Promised Land to gather in Joseph Smith’s or Brigham Young’s latest City on a Hill.

We now know that Brigham Young (and other Church leaders) told the missionaries, lads in their teens, sent off to Britain and Europe, that they should convert attractive, young, unmarried women, who looked promising as child-bearers, in particular. Not as prospective wives for the young missionary converting them, for the girls must be set on the rough seas and dusty trails to Salt Lake City where they would discover they had joined a church that believed, above all things, godliness only comes with polygamy. Back in Britain, such practises would have been strenuously denied. The girls would be married to the elderly Brethren in positions of power in the Church who collected plural wives.

On trips to Utah, I have looked in telephone books and have noted that many surnames are typical of the people of the towns in the North of England. Men and boys over here also converted and followed the command to gather in America.

Among the converts in Scotland was an ancestor of a friend of mine whose family, in 1973, was still essentially LDS. James Campbell Livingston was born in Lanarkshire in December 1833. In 1849, young Livingston was baptized into the Mormon faith, and, in 1853, he left for America, by ship from Glasgow to Liverpool to New Orleans, over nine weeks at sea in all. He went up the Mississippi River to Nauvoo, the former Mormon city, where he met Joseph Smith’s widow, first wife, Emma. We now know that Joseph had at least 33 wives, most likely over 40. Joseph was fond of young girls who might be employed by Emma. Joseph would get a sudden revelation and the girl, one as young as 14, some already married, would be told that an angel with a flaming sword had threatened Joseph with death (!) if he did not marry the particular girl. James Livingston would not have known all this at that time, if ever in such detail, but when he arrived in Utah, he did take three wives and fathered 18 children. He was one of the quarrymen for the Salt Lake Temple where plural marriages took place. By the way, Emma Smith was not a fan of polygamy and always threw Joseph’s latest wives out, and Emma eventually claimed that Joseph had never practised spiritual wifery, despite her documented part in it. Lies beget lies.

In the summer of 1973, my LDS friend visited me while I was house- and pet-sitting in Bermuda. One day the two Mormon missionaries stationed in Bermuda stopped by on some errand to see my friend, and I met them long enough, as I recall, to nod my head. Elders Belnap and Mortensen came by again after my friend had gone off to the USA, and we chatted a bit. I chain-smoked and they told me in brief what they were doing in Bermuda. Self-supporting missionaries, two years in the field, working out of New York City. This interested me, the concept of lads younger than I was committed to a cause, even if I had no idea what exactly they believed in.

Could they come by another time and tell me about their church? Certainly. You don’t mind if I smoke, do you? It is not good for you. I know that.

It turned out that the missionaries had a very slick presentation kit, coloured pictures and charts that could be flipped over in a binder, and it did fascinate me. Apparently their Joseph Smith had been directed to some golden plates on which was engraved a book (of Mormon) which he translated using curious spectacles. The missionaries showed me paintings of Joseph sitting with his golden plates while his scribe wrote down the translation as Joseph gave it. Smith was not wearing his magical goggles, however, which I would like to have seen. The Urim and Thummim, they were called. There were no representations of Smith in one room with his face in his hat, in which was a peep-stone, or seer-stone, calling out his translation to someone out of sight, at a distance, and no golden plates. One now knows that this was the manner Smith supposedly dictated his Book, nobody besides Smith ever saw the golden plates uncovered, something was under a blanket at one time, but it was not revealed to any witness.

Smith’s visitations by gods and angels were recorded, re-recorded, and changed until he was murdered in 1844. Family and friends claimed different versions that had been related to them by the Prophet or amongst themselves. The stories became more and more convoluted and forced to fit the latest situation. The Angel Moroni, the keeper of the buried box containing the golden plates, was sometimes a white toad or salamander. Smith, like many people in that part of the world at that time, believed in folk magic. His line of work had been seeking buried treasure using a peep-stone. Treasure never found. Well, until the Book of Mormon.

If Elders Belnap and Mortensen had told me their Prophet translated by looking into a hat jammed on his face to keep out the light, there being a stone he had found while digging years before in the hat, on which words would appear, I would have thought it so much nonsense. Those missionaries would not have known all this either. In fact, I doubt that it is taught to potential converts in the huts of the South American and African countries where the Mormons are canvassing today. What pretty pictures do the Mormon Elders flip in their binders in 2011, say in the Philippines?

I did not feel immediately inclined to go to a church service with the Mormons, but I accepted an invitation to a “Family Home Evening” with some members of the Bermuda Branch of the Church. There were a fair number of people, all clean-cut, eating tacos and jell-o and drinking Kool-Aid, with prayers to start the gathering, bless the food, and to send everyone home safely. Everybody was rather nice.

This is what converted me. The toothy, smiling, happy faces. The abundant food.

Then the doctrine: Families are forever! That was an idea I rather liked as I had a few relatives I would be quite happy visiting in the afterlife. At some of the get-togethers there was one peculiar woman who had been having no end of miscarriages, but who firmly believed that she would be reunited with those children of hers and would raise them in the afterlife.

Without any reservations, I went through the course prepared for investigators and the missionaries told me to pray about it. Ask if it was true, Brother Eldridge. And I did, and got no reply. That was in the autumn of 1973. Nice parties, nice people, even if I had to smoke outside, God was silent. I should have listened to that silence! Belnap and Mortensen had mentioned that God and Jesus had bodies of flesh, had passions and parts. There was little mentioned concerning the key LDS doctrine that God once was a man, and that we men might become gods.

I was challenged to stop smoking, and drinking alcohol and tea and coffee. The missionaries and the happy people probably had not known that Joseph Smith and his cronies drank wine in their temples in Ohio and Nauvoo. Joseph served it to his guests at his home. Tea and coffee were used and went with the Saints to Utah. All this after the Word of Wisdom.

In the autumn of 1973, Elder Mortensen finished the Bermuda portion of his mission and an Elder Love replaced him. In February of 1974, Elder Belnap left and Elder Burke arrived.

I do not think I am subject to revelations or great knowledge, but I knew, somehow, that Elder Carl Burke was an unusual fellow. I bumped into a fair number of LDS missionaries in my time, but Carl was a special friend from the get-go. In addition, it was Elder Carl Burke who baptized me on 1 August 1974. I had given up smoking, tea, and coffee to make the grade, and was attending services in the chapel used by the Saints in Bermuda. Once I was baptized, Carl was transferred back to New York City to complete his mission. In 1975, he returned to Bermuda as a civilian, and worked in a motor garage on the US NAS for a few months, staying with me part of that time.

I had a close friendship with Carl Burke and his family, and was devastated when he died suddenly some five years ago.

Despite anxiety disorder, I was attending and taking part in some LDS church services. I learned how to conduct meetings, to give talks, teach classes. All using the very basic information available to us.

Until June of 1978, it had been doctrine of the Mormon Church that people of colour, if they converted to Mormonism, could eventually have their skin magically lightened. However, they could not, if they were Negroes, be anything more than a basic member of the Church, and could hold no offices or enter Temples. With Church officials unable to tell which of their prospective converts in countries like Brazil might have a trace (even the smallest) of black blood, which would make them ineligible to be full Mormons, a revelation arrived saying everyone could come on in. Fundamentalist Mormons, who tend to remain true to Joseph Smith’s teachings regarding polygamy, race, and the ways of heaven and earth, disregarded the latest change in the unchangeable word of the Lord.

I have travelled to Utah a few times and enjoyed my time in large and small towns. I have held church positions here and there, and went in the Temple in St George, Utah, to receive my endowments, and picked up my sacred/secret Temple name that I must never reveal (it is Dan), and appreciated how fragile many of the Saints are in Utah. So many on tranquilizers, so many depressed, so many trying to be on top in Ponzi Schemes. Moreover, so many choosing ignorance so as not to upset the scheme of things, believing and doing what the Old Men in Salt Lake City command.

“I have a hard time with historians because they idolize the truth. The truth is not uplifting; it destroys. I could tell most of the secretaries in the church office building that they are ugly and fat. That would be the truth, but it would hurt and destroy them. Historians should tell only that part of the truth that is inspiring and uplifting.”
LDS Apostle Boyd K. Packer, when interviewing a prospective member of the BYU faculty in 1976.

About 8 years ago, we started getting books by members of the Mormon Church and others that have uncovered some rather startling and unpleasant Church history. It has seemed to me that the Mormons I have known over the past almost-forty years simply could not, did not, know most of what we are learning at such a pace now.

I wrote to the LDS authorities and asked them to remove my name from their records, utterly and completely. It was easier than I expected. At least I hope so. I received a letter saying it had been done, but any time I wanted to return I should contact them.

Mormons are somewhat fanatical about keeping their numbers up. They canvas for converts in the here and now and in the hereafter. You may not know that they do baptisms for the dead, which is why they are out copying records all over the world. You may be horrified to know that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun have been baptised, by proxy, in the font in a Temple basement so that they can chose whether to be Mormons, and to enable them to carry on and become gods.

It is not that I now believe Mormonism to be so much guff, and I do, but that I find no attachment to any God, Lord or Maker, any Creator, any Great Magician or Spoon-Bender. When I look out over the landscape on sunny days, or days like today (grey, a bit cloudy), I see the world as it is. I do not see it rolling forth out of time. If I have a feeling about it, it is the immediate warmth on my face, not the hot breath of gods on my body, or the Holy Spirit flaming up in my chest.

Do I regret my quarter-century in Mormonism? Not at all. I have learned a great deal, made some lovely friends, travelled about, and in reading the exposés have been entertained and my knowledge broadened. Somehow, fortunately, I do not feel to have been made a fool of.

For someone today, with access to libraries, bookshops, lecturers and the media, I can only say that you should not believe that Joseph Smith Jr. did what they told me he did when I was new to this, about 40 years ago. He has been shown to be something quite different. He and his followers changed their histories repeatedly, they changed their perfect books, and they changed their unchangeable gods.

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not.”
André Gide (1869 – 1951)

The ministering of angels might just be indigestion.

Ross Eldridge
8 May 2011

And on the Eighth Day ... They Wrote it Down

A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.
D. H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930)

ULTIMATE TRUTHS are those that we reject first of all. It is the Great Lies that one draws to one’s bosom and allows to burn there, a cold confusion, a universal counterfeit currency. I have seen young mothers whispering poisoned verses to their tiny, scarcely-formed children, held up to the crowd: “Tell them you know this [or that] is true.” Sometimes the little boy or little girl struggles and weeps, and refuses to speak, and must be put down to toddle back to its seat. There is wisdom. One hopes that the day or night will come when the child runs outside, stands below the sky, beneath creation, and listens not to its mother, but to all that it observes by eye, ear, taste or touch.

This week it has been reported that the Hubble Space Telescope is studying an enormous green blob in distant outer space. The news reports use words like “mysterious”, “bizarre”, “gigantic” and “strangely alive”, the panic headlines of a 1950s science fiction B-Movie.

The great green blob has a name: Hanny’s Voorwerp. The blob is the size of the Milky Way Galaxy, 650 million light years (each light year is six trillion miles, if you care) away from us, and it is giving birth to new stars as parts of the blob collapse and result in pressure enough to create stars. It’s mostly hydrogen gas swirling about from a close encounter with two galaxies, and is illuminated by a quasar, a bright object full of energy supplied by a black hole.

Ms Hanny van Arkel, a Dutch elementary school teacher, first spotted the phenomenon in 2007 while studying archived photographs. She says that the blob originally appeared to be a blue smudge; now it seems more like a vast green (wait for it!) dancing frog. If that worries you, take a deep breath, Ms Arkel has discovered that the frog not only has limbs, but eyes.

And there it is, creation observed over the past three or four years: A gaseous frog god named Hanny’s Voorwerp spewing stars, lit by a quasar powered by a black hole. If it had not been on the morning and evening news, one might have missed it. Worlds without end (or beginning). Amen.

Let’s talk about sexual creation. Hanny’s Voorwerp is a tale waiting to be told: grand green sex, but it is the business of the religious amongst us to sort that out; I just scribble on Post-it Notes and write a thousand or so words from time to time on what I might have seen or heard in the light or dark. I struggle free from my parent, and run outside in tears having not said: “I know this [or that] is true.”

The Ancient Egyptians were creative and inventive, and wrote things down. Their histories on the walls of their tombs and temples, and on papyrus scrolls that have survived the souvenir-hunting tourists and the uncomfortable, yet looting Victorian explorers, give varying versions of the creation of the Universe.

According to Egyptian tradition, the god Amun [also spelled Amen, Amon and Ammon] existed alone, all alone, in an aqueous sort of world before there were time and times. This First Being was described as an attractively-built, human-like male wearing a crown depicting a goat’s head. Amun’s symbol was the always randy, sexually insatiable ram. The eminent Victorian explorers, scientists and Egyptologists destroyed, damaged and hid references to the Amun creation cult. Here’s why.

Lonesome Amun created the universe sexually. He masturbated and ejaculated into his hand, drank his own semen and so impregnated himself. Following this monotheistic sexual act, Amun spat out Geb, the (male) Earth-God and Nut, the (female) Sky-Goddess, who then copulated heterosexually and produced the rest of the gods and their mortal offspring. That’s the way they saw it.

The Egyptian Pharaohs with their royal wives would re-enact Amun’s creation, the Pharaoh of the day would get inside a hollowed-out statue of Amun, including a hollow penis, and go to it.

You might find, in your research, that the First God was called Atum rather than Amun, and after ejaculating directly into his own mouth he spewed out Shu (male) and Tefnut (female), the rest of the story is the same.

The Egyptian priestly class was not the only one to act out the Creation Story. I myself have attended a session in a Mormon temple [in St George, Utah, if you care] which featured snakes and altars; Adamic-language chants; really strange, mysterious, bizarre clothing; signs and symbols (Mormon temples have been called the International House of Handshakes); lights and mirrors, washings and anointings. There are suns, moons and stars and many gods. This is called “Temple Work” and is considered to be surrogacy. One of the Mormon Holy Scriptures, The Book of Abraham from The Pearl of Great Price, was [Joseph Smith said] a translation from an Egyptian papyrus retrieved from the wrapping around a mummy in a travelling road-show. The Mormon Temple Ceremony is not quite as interesting as the Amun offerings would have been, but you are just as knackered after two hours of it.

We have scientists that postulate a creation from a Big Bang. From nothing to everything in almost no time at all (there being no time). This is akin to Amun, is it not? There are many religious folks who consider any form of science to be sinful. In fact, they consider anything outside the Christian Bible to be the work of the Devil. Never mind the Bible is convoluted, confused, contradictory and badly constructed. The latest translations have even destroyed the glorious language of the King James Version. Christian sects are at war with one another. A preacher threatens: “Tell them you know this [or that] is true. Or it’s hell for you!”

Run outside, boys and girls, and take your parents and grandparents. There are tadpoles falling from the heavens, and the sap is rising.

In Madness, Religion and Love Timing is Everything

If I revealed all that has been made known to me, scarcely a man on this stand would stay with me. And, Brethren, if I were to tell you all I know of the kingdom of God, I do know that you would rise up and kill me. Joseph Smith Jr.

THE FIRST BOOK I EVER OWNED was a small children’s hymnal from the bookshop in Canterbury Cathedral; my two grandmothers had gone there on a day trip. It was dedicated to me with both of their signatures - Nan Eldridge and Grandma Lancaster – and dated shortly before my third birthday. That book went into storage in Bermuda five years ago, in the bottom of an old shipping container, in a field that I believe has since flooded. I don’t expect to see it again. The memory, however, is fresh. I can still recall the rough paper and very simple illustrations with but touches of colouring; the United Kingdom may well still have had rationing of paper and printing supplies held over from the War years.

I was given two other books of a religious nature as soon as I could read; I was quite proficient by the age of five or six. The red and blue books had effusive Christian stories and testimonies, illustrated with photographs of famous paintings, rather than with all-new, dedicated artwork.

We sang “Jesus Loves Me” at pre-school, and once I was in primary school we sang from a Church of England songbook specially condensed from the large, heavy "Hymns Ancient and Modern" we used at church and Sunday School. At day school we sang responses and chants and prayers in the morning Assembly. Volume was everything: We were never praised or upbraided for our spiritual dedication and devotion, but if we failed to make a loud noise (joyful or otherwise) we were blasted by the Headmaster.

Church, Sunday School and day school were racially segregated. In case you don’t know, Jesus is a white English bloke who spoke and wrote Shakespearean English. This was confirmed to me a few years after I graduated from grammar school, perhaps by an unlikely source. Joseph Smith, the Mormon Founder and Prophet, saw not only Jesus, but God the Father, and they were both white and spoke perfect English in the style of the original King James Version of the Bible. The young Mormon Elders used flip-charts with gloriously coloured pictures of the wonderfully white Jesus.

The characters in the Book of Mormon tend to be represented as very handsome and muscular, in clothes that are a touch Arthurian. It’s all a bit gay. The Mormon Church’s illustrators may have been of that generation that went to gladiator films in the 1950s, and enjoyed “Camelot” secretly. I know it sounds a bit bizarre, but in Camelot...

Joseph Smith was in his early teens when he saw Jesus and God the Father while out praying in the woods. In 1820, where the boy lived, there were any number of religious revivals. Joseph said (years later) he had asked, in prayer, which of the churches in his neighbourhood might be the right one. Down came Jesus and God! “None of them!”

Three years later, Joseph had an angel beam into his bedroom one night. As the little farmhouse was crowded, I never quite understood how only Joseph saw and heard the Angel Moroni as he dropped through the ceiling.

Moroni told Joseph about some golden plates on which was inscribed a book written by Moroni’s father, Mormon, a warrior and prophet of olden days in the Americas. Apparently, Joseph was taken to see the plates which were buried in a stone box on a hillside in New York State.

Years later, Joseph gets to take the golden plates home and he translates some of them using a seer stone inside a hat. Looking into the hat at the stone, the words on the plates would appear. God does work in mysterious ways, of course!

More important, as Joseph Smith is translating the Book of Mormon, he has continued, steady visitations from angelic gentlemen that I, for one, knew from my earliest Bible stories. John the Baptist, Joseph Smith related, conferred an Aaronic or Lesser Priesthood on him. Later the New Testament apostles we know as Peter, James and John supervised the transfer to Joseph of the Higher Melchizedek Priesthood.

When the first Mormon temple is built in Kirtland, Ohio, any number of angels turn up. In fact, on the day of the dedication people outside of the temple saw angels walking along the rooftop.

Of course, the Mormons are more famous for polygamy, what Joseph Smith called Plural or Spiritual or Celestial Marriage. He denied having taken more wives than his first, Emma Hale. After Joseph had been assassinated in 1845, Emma also claimed that her husband had never had other wives than herself. The evidence to the contrary is exceptional. The Prophet wrote directives that he received from God, published as “Doctrines and Covenants”, and they clearly indicate that plural marriage is the only way one can become a candidate for godhood. Mormons believe, by the way, that men who do what the Prophet commands can become gods (with their many goddess-wives).

If Joseph Smith had over thirty wives, one would have expected a fair number of little Smiths apart from those he fathered with wife Emma. DNA tests have so far suggested that none of the women thought to have been Joseph’s spiritual wives had his children. A recent article does point out that Dr John C Bennett, M.D., may well have been the Polygamists’ Abortionist in the early 1840s when he was Joseph Smith’s Assistant Prophet. Bennett was such a sordid man, within and outside of the Mormon Church, and I’m wary of anything to do with him. Scruples he was certainly short of.

Many of Joseph’s so-called wives ended up married, sealed, to his successor, Brigham Young, and some had Brigham’s children.

It almost amuses me, as an outsider, to see the effort the present Mormon Church puts into supporting and opposing certain controversial social issues. In the early 1990s, while I was living in the south-west corner of Utah, the local Mormon chapels organized groups to regularly cross the state border into Nevada to spy on an “adult bookstore”. The church members claimed that Utahns were crossing over to visit the Pure Pleasure emporium for whatever might be going on there. The spies sent by God would note the license plates from Utah in the parking area outside the bookstore and attempt to name and shame. The Brethren in Salt Lake City claimed that this was not a church-sanctioned activity, this spying, but the rota lists were worked out in the Mormon meeting houses.

In recent years the Mormon Church has opposed, but claims not to have ordered active opposition to, same sex partnerships. I’m not exactly sure how the business of legalising anything gets done in the USA, there’s always a judge to send something back. Apparently, some states have legalised what the papers tend to call “Gay Marriage” and some states have not passed a law enabling it. Some states want laws absolutely prohibiting it. We have gay partnerships here in the UK, but I don’t know much about all that. I suppose if two men, or two women, want to be legally bound together, it’s their business. It does mean one has to consider children and various legal rights. I honestly think people should marry if they intend having a family, and a man and a woman seems like the best option. Should we be arguing with biology? But, more important, should one argue with love?

Did Joseph Smith love each and every one of his 33 wives? Did Brigham Young love each and every one of his 55 wives? Or is the business of spiritual wifery just that, a business? Can one indeed become a God with but a single wife? Has there been another revelation to change the unchangeable word of God? The Mormons did make a change to the Divine Rules and Regulations in 1978 when an influx of converts in Brazil and other South American countries could not be sorted clearly into white people (like Jesus and the Mormons) and black people who had been forbidden entry to the Mormon temples and to any office in the Church hierarchy. In 1978 the doors were opened to people of colour. More than a few white Mormons walked out in protest.

One hears from Mormons that angels continue to visit the Earth. Long-dead people also drop in. The veil is awfully thin. A rather fanatical Mormon who eventually went off his nut told me that at least one Mormon temple had a bedroom for Jesus to rest in when he was in town. The Mormons call each Temple “The House of the Lord” and my over-enthusiastic friend indicated that a house is a home.

Do I think Joseph Smith saw angels, Jesus, God the Father? Do I think Joseph saw the words written on the golden plates when he put a pebble in his hat and placed his face into the hat to keep all the light out so that he could see the text reflected on his seer stone? I’m not sure, because I know people who see and hear things that I do not. One might call people schizophrenic because of the voices they hear, the visions they have, and they might be psychics. In fact, schizophrenics are more believable than psychics, are they not? A schizophrenic is not likely to ask a hall full of people if anyone has a relative called Tom (or is it Ted?) who has passed over, as a psychic surely does. A schizophrenic will say he has been up all night talking to Moses, who is dictating a better translation of the Pentateuch. It might even be a work-in-progress in a jotter. Perhaps a schizophrenic is a genuine psychic.

Might Joseph Smith have been a schizophrenic as a psychic? If one strips away the fairly obvious nonsense, the copying, the sales talk, the expedient, there is the “problem” of Smith’s writing and lectures (he had most of what he preached written down, some of it is fantastic). Can a man really stare into a darkened hat and dictate a book? An ordinary man. Or is this all the work of what some might call a madman (and a current following of nearly fourteen millions)?

Are the Scientologists and the Moonies any madder than the Mormons?

Can we take as the Word of God anything that comes from a hat? Really? And where is that hat now? Where are the peep stones? Who is in contact? How?

Just Another Spatial Twist Continuum

Balk logic with acquaintance that you have
And practise rhetoric in your common talk;
Music and poesy use to quicken you;
The mathematics and the metaphysics,
Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you;
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en:
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.
William Shakespeare (The Taming of the Shrew. Act I, Scene I)

AFTER SEVERAL DAYS OF HEAVY RAIN, without let-up, we had a break yesterday. The day began with clear skies, a pale, frightened blue. However, one could see mists forming over the North Sea (by evening we were fogged in) and swirling around the keep at Warkworth Castle.

Warkworth Castle is awfully old, and tumbled-down, but still substantial. Shakespeare set a scene in Henry IV (Part 1) in the Castle. Warkworth was hardly new in the 14th Century in the days of Harry Hotspur (Sir Henry Percy) who may have been born there in the 1360s. (He may have been born in Alnwick Castle, a few miles inland, the other Percy homestead in this part of the world.)

With the break in the weather yesterday morning, I hitched up Cailean and we headed across town and sat out on the Amble Pier.

A full-bodied lady, not a young woman, in a sweat suit and scarf with a woolly hat under her hoodie approached us as we sat looking out at the Sea through the Harbour entrance.

“Is he friendly?”

“Well, yes. Just ignore the yapping, he feels it is his duty to protect me.”

Cailean is a talkative little fellow; miniature dachshunds tend to be chatty. He also likes to hop and put his front paws on one’s shin. A kindly reply (Aren’t you a lovely dog?) gets his tail wagging. A scratch around the ears gets his whole body wagging.

“Not as cold as it has been.”

“No, this is rather pleasant. Even with the breeze off the water.”

And I mentioned the days of rain. The English like to form queues and talk about the weather.

“This has been a brutal winter. Still, mustn’t complain.”

For some reason we mustn’t.

And I watched two ruddy-faced women packing up their fishing gear, industrial-size rods, not the hook-and-sinker hand-lines that I grew up with. The women looked alike, almost twins. With them was a younger girl, as pallid as they were red; washed-out, straggly blond hair, and, I’m thinking, the features one associates with Down’s syndrome. The girl was so very white that I wondered if she might be an albino. Rare genetic misfortune if so.

There were several members of a family, all albinos, at Hurricane High School in Utah back in the 1990s. That was a close-knit community, and one might expect oddities with families doubling back on themselves.

The girl on the Amble Pier was mumbling to herself. I’m hard of hearing thanks to decades of extremely loud music (I have felt too embarrassed to consider a hearing-aid, but my eyesight is crap too and I have difficulty reading the captioning on the telly, so I really should have my ears looked into). The girl didn’t seem threatening.

In July of 1968 I spent several weeks in London with my mother. One day we were sitting on a bench at Marble Arch and a woman appeared, screaming obscenities, which she soon directed at us. We’d stayed sitting while other people in the area got their skates on. This mad woman was, I suppose, quite mad. Nowadays we have tablets one can (and really should) take.

When I was in Lower 4 at Warwick Academy, our Physics master was a Welshman with a Spanish surname. Go figure. One day one of the few girls in the Physics class must have been grappling with some demon, perhaps her blob, and she took umbrage at something the teacher had said, had addressed to her. He may have asked her for a formula. (I still recall a few formulas relating to motion ... S = UT + ½ AT² ... though I couldn’t explain them.)

The girl, who would have been about 12 or 13, stood up and screamed abuse at our teacher. It was the first time I’d ever heard a girl swear, and she did it with considerable volume and variety. I wasn’t sure how Gabe (the teacher) could possibly do the disgusting things that Carol (the girl) suggested he do.

Carol disappeared then and there. She walked out of the Physics class and Lower 4. I think she was switched to a Commercial course and spent the next few years typing and doing shorthand. The Academic students rather looked down on the Commercial boys and girls. Commerce was for dummies.

My first job was in the accounting and finance department at AIG.

Gabe was not a very inspiring teacher of Physics. I have an unsettled grudge against him. At the end of a term, back in Lower 4, we had to sit an examination. When Gabe had marked the papers and brought the results to class, he was in a state of bloody-minded rage that was almost a match for Carol’s. Gabe said that all the pupils that had failed the examination would have to take it again. And it turned out that only one of us passed it. Me. And the vile man suddenly decided that I should stay after school and take it again too.

I wasn’t too fond of Physics after that. Certainly no fan of Gabe.

That said, Gabe and one other teacher were the only members of staff from Warwick Academy who attended the funeral of my step-mother who’d taught History at the school.

I’m sitting on the Amble Pier watching the mists forming in the Coquet Estuary to my left; Cailean is watching a piece of paper that has blown past us.

I have a GCE “O” Level in Physics, and I took Physics and Pure and Applied Mathematics at “A” Level, along with classes in Statistics and Engineering Drawing. I picked up an “A” Level in Biology too.

When I studied the mechanics of DNA, I think the scientists had the strands spiralling in the wrong direction. Cannot say that ruined my life, I didn’t come undone when I found out years later.

I’m reading a life of Alan Turing, his was possibly the greatest mathematical mind of the 20th Century, and there’s rather a lot of Physics to wade through. And Scientific Philosophy. And there’s no way one can measure how long a piece of string is. In fact, existence itself is dodgy at best. “What is?” We cannot really answer that, so how the devil can we deal with “What will be?”

“We were talking about the space between us all ...”

I've wondered why the Mormons don’t come knocking at our doors here, or gather in pairs in railway stations. Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going?

Saw a programme on the telly the other night, on Time. The presenter and his guests all had ideas about time. And space. Apparently, if aliens don’t invade us and carry us off into Captivity and make us build pyramids for their worlds, our sun is going to burn out in several billion years’ time. That would be the end of the Earth’s time, and our solar system. Galaxies will dissolve; the Universe will expand until the spaces are so vast that the stars seem to go out. The Big Crunch is not a definite.

At the end, perhaps, all time will exist simultaneously. Carol will shriek her vulgarities at Gabe. I shall squint through the fog at Warkworth Castle. Harry Hotspur will say his lines in the Globe Theatre. The Angel Moroni might even drop through Joseph Smith’s ceiling.

“Is he friendly?”

“The Angel Moroni?”

“No. Your little sausage dog.”

“Sorry. My mind was wandering a little. Yes, he’s quite friendly, just likes to yap a bit.”

How Green is Your Gethsemane?

Detail: Raising of Lazarus, Quidenham, Norfolk

WE'VE HAD A RAINY AFTERNOON here in Narnia, and Cailean is recovering (very well) from his leg injury, but still only having short walks, so I decided to watch some television. I don't watch the telly in the daytime very often unless there is some news story that demands attention (there might be a gay elephant in a Polish zoo, or PETA wanting the Pet Shop Boys to change their name to The Animal Rescue Shelter Boys, or the British Home Secretary being caught charging her husband's porn DVD rentals to the taxpayer) as the room tends to be too bright to comfortably watch the screen. However, on this grey-skied day the front room has been quite dark and I was able to get a nice, clear picture.

I switched the telly on and the between-programmes filler had a voice saying: "This being Good Friday, you'd expect to find a film featuring Jesus. We've got one…" And it was to be "The Greatest Story Ever Told", originally released in 1965.

I saw TGSET back in 1967. How is it that I recall that? Because it was the first movie I ever went to with a friend I met back in the late spring of 1967. And what did I remember about the film? That it was long, that Jesus had blue eyes (of course, and he always wrote in red ink, don't you know), and that the scene where Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead was extraordinarily moving, even to a teenager.

Somehow, over the past 42 years since seeing TGSET in the Rosebank Theatre in Bermuda (curiously, the Rosebank site is now a bank, complete with financial worries in 2009); I've actually not seen the film apart from the briefest of glimpses when it has run on the television.

Today I decided to stay with Channel 4 for their Jesus Feature … a bit for Old Time's Sake, a bit out of complacency … and I pulled a rug over my feet (and over the top of Cailean, who prefers to sleep under covers) and set the BT Vision Box (this is a broadband feature I subscribe to) so that the film would be recorded if I wanted to pause it and take a toilet break.

TGSET begins with the production information one might expect at the end, and everyone (and his dog) was in this film. The dog barked when Lazarus was raised and Sal Mineo went running through his dusty desert neighbourhood crying out: "Jesus has raised the dead!" I imagine the credits rolled early on because the viewers, after three hours of the film itself, might not have stayed to see who the grips were.

A great deal has happened in what might be termed my Spiritual Life over the past forty years. I suppose the major event would have been my conversion to Mormonism in the early 1970s. More recently I have wandered off into Outer Darkness. I have read a great many books with a spiritual or religious message or content, I have taught Sunday school, preached sermons, given a few obituaries and presided at my mother's funeral. I've had highs and lows to the extreme. Sometimes, at night, this year, I wake up (or I've been awake, unable to get to sleep) and I've said aloud: "Father, are you there?"

One of the Mormon General Authorities told his personal story of feeling disconnected from God and how he asked that question: "Are you there, Father?" And his Father, his God, did respond. Mine hasn't. If he does, I trust it will be gently, perhaps in a dream, rather than having a prophetic angel beam down through my ceiling in laser-lights and scaring the Bejesus out of me.

As it is, I remain in a state of disconnection. Waiting. Sometimes posing the question. Perhaps hoping. And why should I be caring at all? I guess it is because I have unfinished business with dead family and friends. I'd rather like to see my mother again, my father too, and to have the seven dogs and one cat of my life running around my feet. If just for a few minutes. Is that odd? Unusual? Am I human after all?

I was surprised at how curiously constructed TGSET is. The scenes are like so many moving paintings hung next to each other in some dusty (well, sandy) gallery. Backdrops are peculiar, almost unnatural at times (and I have lived in the wilderness of the desert in Southwest Utah), and features are overstated. It's very artistic. There is some effort to stick to Bible dialogue, even to the King James Version which is the only one I subscribe to (if it was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me), though the Pauline scriptures appeared as we neared the end, with Jesus preaching that Hope, Faith and Charity discourse which I think really does belong on Saint Paul's page.

John the Baptist performed a complete dunk. That pleased me from a Mormon point of view: I don't think people clambered down into the River Jordan (so deep and wide, alleluia) to get sprinkled. Baptism symbolises rebirth, and you've got to get right into it. If baptism is just a cross on the forehead or a splash of blessed water, why not just fill in a form on the Internet and get a certificate in the next post if you want a hard copy? Like those instant preacher certifications; start your own church. No. Get wet! Just like in TGSET.

The miracles (magic!) were understated in the film version, and that was probably a good idea before computer generated images. No throngs of angels overhead; no water into red, red wine; no bread and fishes for the masses; no mud in the eye for the blind man; no strolls on the Lake. The second most appealing miracle happens when someone touches Jesus' coat and cries out: "I'm healed!" We don't know what her problem was. Jesus just whispers: "Your faith made you whole." I don't think the Church of England, in which I was raised, really believes in Jesus' miracles (or in the Old Testament miracles and peculiar happenings with UFOs and the like) … preferring to just say that things happened in the spirit of a miracle. Perhaps the wine was there in the jugs all along, but nobody knew.

In TGSET, the Last Supper was laid out like the famous paintings. Do we really know that these folks sat along one side of a trestle table, not around something so as to be more intimate? There was no sign, in this film, of Mary Magdalene at the Last Supper, so Leonardo da Vinci's vision was ignored. Sorry about that, Dan Brown. At the Last Supper, bread was broken, wine was served. The Mormons performed a miracle with the water and the wine: Water is mandated at the Mormon sacrament, though they originally did use red, red wine. A word from the Prophet and it was changed to clear, clear water. Perhaps he feared the wrath of grapes; perhaps they just couldn't get enough of the good stuff.

Concerning Mary Magdalene: In TGSET Mary is cast as the prostitute. I think that if one carefully reads the gospels, there is no suggestion at all that Mary of Magdalene had been, or was, a prozzie. This unpleasant character flaw has become traditional (and convenient if you're looking for a name for laundries forcibly employing unwed mothers), as have many other Bible names, events and places. Can anyone give me the Bible verse which names the Three Kings? In fact, were there three of them?

To my delight, the raising of Lazarus was the highlight of the film almost 42 years after I was last much-moved by it. There's no hocus-pocus, no industrial light and magic, no secret prayer or handshake. Rather, Jesus in the entrance to Lazarus' tomb bidding the dead man to come forth, and then startled people in the crowd reacting when he does. And Sal Mineo running, running, running, the dog barking: "He has raised the dead!" I was very nearly overcome, and flung back to 1967. I'll probably telephone the friend I saw TGSET with back then with tonight and tell him all this.

I'm not sure that I believe the Bible to be a true history, or that the words are the unalterable word of God, or even that Jesus of Nazareth existed. The Old Testament is weirder than Harry Potter, but with more Mean Guys (starting with the LORD). Jesus is credited with any number of predictions and the only one that really holds up is that he came not to bring peace, but to bring a sword. And some monk might have dreamt that up when there were Romans hacking at people outside his hut.

There is an extraordinary book by James E Talmage called "Jesus the Christ" (first published in 1915, still available from Deseret Press) that explains what the New Testament accounts of Jesus are about. The whys and wherefores. Apart from an opening chapter that mentions Mormon doctrinal belief that there is a Pre-Existence and that Jesus, an individual separate from God the Father, existed there (along with you and me), the book is very nearly Mormon-free. The events are discussed, the parables explained, the story is placed in context. It is one of the finest books I have ever read. (And very readable.)

Another afternoon that I trust I've not frittered away. My thoughts after watching TGSET include wondering if Judas was, in some way, the hero of the story. He is certainly the scapegoat (everyone blames the scapegoat, as one wit put it). Without Judas' "betrayal" there would have been no crucifixion, no resurrection, no atonement, no eternal life for you and me (assuming we believe). The poor man had that terrible job to do. Imagine the love he felt for his Master, so great that he could play the part he did. Peter was prevaricating and lying, but Judas spoke the truth: "This is the man!"

The life of Judas might be the second greatest story ever told.

Gods in Ruins

Standing on the bare ground,
my head bathed by the blithe air,
and uplifted into infinite space,
all mean egotism vanishes.
I become a transparent eye-ball;
I am nothing; I see all;
the currents of the Universal Being
circulate through me;
I am part or particle of God.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature)

Better than a thousand hollow words
Is one word that brings peace.
Better than a thousand hollow verses
Is one verse that brings peace.
Better than a hundred hollow lines
Is one line of the law, bringing peace.
Gautama Buddha (The Dhammapada)

IT WAS OSCAR WILDE who wrote: In polite society, one does not talk about politics or religion. Of course Oscar made a name for himself doing just that, though he really succeeded by pointing out the petty foibles of mankind and by making light of them. Well, almost. A Woman of No Importance is seriously funny.

I'm no Oscar Wilde, and I should probably thank the gods for that. I wouldn't mind being a manic depressive William Blake or Virginia Woolf.

William Blake wrote about religion, of course, inasmuch as it is generally associated with God. It is probably fairer to say of Blake that he lived, wrote and created his pictures under the close influence of gods and angels and the Ancient of Days. Blake, apparently, felt that these otherworldly creatures were sending him messages that he felt compelled to pass along.

I once read that the farthest that William Blake ever travelled from the home in which he was born on 28 November 1757 (in Golden Square, Soho, London) was 59 miles. And one might argue that one who remained so close to home should refrain from commenting on national issues, much less international issues, even less on issues spanning the Cosmos. In 1757, I'm guessing a journey of 59 miles, if one had a horse-drawn vehicle and didn't meet a highwayman (Dick Turpin was, at least, dead by the time Blake was born), took a few days. One would overnight at some country inn with none of the charm we associate with such places in 2009.

In September 2008, one gentleman, Yves Rossy, from the Continent, crossed the English Channel, with some sort of jet-propelled wing strapped to his back, in a matter of minutes. Not as fast as Hitler's Doodlebugs, but someone will be working on a way to ride a rocket as I sit here typing, one can be assured.

Blake, of course, saw Chariots of Fire. Here's a mathematical problem for anyone interested in such things: If it takes Apollo about twelve hours to cross the sky in his chariot of fire, at the Equator, at mid-summer, what sort of speed are we talking? What horsepower? Even a non-mathematician such as I can appreciate that one must know at what height above the Earth (and must know the Earth is a sphere) the chariot is flying. Religions have depended on such facts and figures. Men have been excommunicated, men have died, good men, for suggesting the inexpedient.

It is remarkable that Popes, after consulting with their gods, have made pronouncements on things they really should not have, given that, quite often, they are proved incorrect within a fairly short time. Ask Nicolaus Copernicus! Copernicus was not the first heliocentric theorist, and his work lead to enlightenment, but he was denounced by the representatives of the One True God as being not only subversive, but immoral, and in opposition to Holy Scripture. Whew!

An issue that bothers some people, perhaps many, in particular in North America, is gay marriage. I should start this paragraph by mentioning that I am a proponent of family life, of a father and mother of different sexes, married wherever they might choose in some sort of legally binding ceremony. If children come along, I believe the best way to raise a child is in a two-parent heterosexual home. I think, I believe at least, that Nature is compelling on this matter. I do not have a stack of books, reports and statistics on biology, but it seems to me that we've evolved (yes, I believe in Evolution!) into what we've called, since 1947, the nuclear family unit. Actually, we may have been nuclear long before we had the bomb.

I do not think there should be a gay marriage option: a pair of husbands, or a pair of wives. I understand, from the very few articles I have come across, that approximately 90% of the population in the civilized world, at least, is pretty much heterosexual (straight), and I like the idea that this clearly natural order is respected. A homosexual world wouldn't last more than the current generation.

If the gay or lesbian couple cries: We only want what the straights have! I have to ask why marriage? If a man is born missing a limb and has a prosthesis attached, it is still artificial, and can be removed at the end of the day.

Pope Benedict XVI, the successor to the popes that parented the Inquisition and burned idolaters and unbelievers at the stake, and successor, I might add, to several popes who have apologised for disbelieving Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Copernicus back in the day, has recently said that homosexuality is a problem that must be dealt with, much like saving the rain forests from destruction. Benedict said that behaviour beyond traditional heterosexual relations was a destruction of God's work.

The pithy response goes: You don't play the game … Don't make the rules!

The Mormons jumped on the bandwagon - perhaps they provided the bandwagon - regarding Proposition 8 in the recent Californian elections. Together with the Roman Catholic Church, the Mormon leadership advised their membership to vote for Proposition 8, an amendment to the California State Constitution that would outlaw same-sex marriages.

One might recall that the foreigners who settled in America did so to escape unjust kings and religious persecution, even state religions.

Three things:

The Mormons make no secret (for a church full of secrets until recently with the advent of the Internet and whistleblowers) of their belief that the Roman Catholic Church is the Great Whore of Babylon. So it is most odd to find the Mormons and the Catholics in the same bed, even if it is on such a heterosexual matter.

The Mormon Church leaders, from their pulpits (I cannot speak for the Catholics), encouraged their flock to not only vote for Proposition 8, but to contribute financially to making it happen. To help buy the Election? I believe in the separation of politics and religion, except in an essay such as this one I'm writing, as I take a chance in polite society.

The Mormon leaders, from Joseph Smith onwards, have called for Mormon political power outside of the chapel walls. The traditional Christians of the Middle Ages had their Crusades. The Taliban are those seeking religious knowledge, but even they have corrupted this to become those seeking religious and political power. Could the peculiar garments of all be cut from the same cloth?

Nearly $75 million was spent by groups in favour and in opposition to Proposition 8. How many hungry, dehydrated children could be helped with that sort of money?

I believe this whole business should have been resolved as a matter-of-conscience vote. And the result not predicated on how many souls could be bought and sold.

Proposition 8 was passed, just, and it is now against constitutional law in California for same-sex couples to be married in the way heterosexual couples might be. And, when all is said and done, this is the result I believe in, but it should never have been, I believe, a matter for the churches. How many voters for and against actually attend church, actually pay their tithes and offerings?

The pronouncements by the Mormons and the Catholic hierarchy could only serve to divide people. The Pope's suggestion that homosexuality must be tackled, corrected, is very nearly an incitement to violence, isn't it? Pitch a brick at a fag. The Pope, speaking for God, said it was okay! The Mormons used to attach electrodes to the genitals of gay members of their church willing (or unwilling, perhaps fathers and mothers forced it on their sons) to be cured, and then showed them homoerotic pictures. Zap! Has Elder Boyd K. Packer apologised for that yet?

What next?

Gay rights. If homosexual and lesbian couples cannot have a marriage ceremony, with all that that entails, then they should be able to make some sort of very serious and legally binding commitment. A coupling, if you will. Gay rights: Freedom from oppression simple because of a preference they, apparently, are born with. Gay rights: The ability to be so much a part of society that eyebrows (much less swords) are not raised.

And, before I go, a request to some of my gay friends: Rethink these Gay Pride parades. They seem to be awfully vulgar by intent. It cannot do the cause any good. You hardly look like people who could raise a child who - nine times out of ten - has been born to turn out straight.

Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested: A man is a god in ruins. I think we can return to a more divine state if we just think things through before they get out of control, and note that over the centuries so many unalterable pronouncements have had to be retracted.

One word: LOVE

'Nuff said!

Explaining All That Is Mad

The Apple Universe

The Hazelnut Universe

The Multiple Hazelnut Universe

The Convenient Hazelnut Universe

And in pis he shewed me a lytil
thing pe quantite of a hasyl
nott. lying in pe pawme of
my hand as it had semed. and
it was rownde as eny ball.
I loked per upon wt pe eye of
my vnderstondyng. and I
pought what may pis be. and
it was answered generally thus.
It is all pat is mad.
Julian of Norwich (Showing of Love)

UNDERSTANDING, FOR ME, COMES SUDDENLY. I recall vividly the first time I truly understood gravity. I'll tell you the story.

Our physics laboratory at Warwick Academy had been created by dividing the former lunchroom (which was where we were supposed to eat if it was too rainy to go outside) into two rooms. The two rooms were unequal in size; the much larger space being devoted to the biology lab, the physics lab might have been twenty feet square. In order to reach the physics lab, one had to troop through the room in which a biology lesson might be in progress.

We had two tables, and two benches, without backs, on which to sit, rescued from the lunchroom's detritus, in the physics lab. The room had two small windows. Overhead, the usual fluorescent lights flickered. The master's desk and chair faced us, behind him a blackboard and, high above that, not easily reached, was a shelf. On the shelf, a few books and a number of plaster busts, each a little over a foot tall, of the great physicists (Galileo, Faraday, Maxwell, Planck, Einstein, and so on). I remember, also, a dusty set of scales. We never used them. The only hands-on lesson we ever had involved pouring blobs of liquid mercury into our palms and feeling the weight and magic of it. We'd let the metal slide from our hands back into its clay jar and go out and eat our sandwiches.

One day (it's always one day, isn't it?) the physics master, a Welshman with a fondness for the bottle and the art mistress, was scribbling out a diagram on the blackboard, an electrical circuit of some sort with rheostats and switches, and his chalk broke. It crumbled, actually, and fell onto the floor. The physics master muttered SHIT! and thumped the blackboard with his fist. That's when a bust, that of Sir Isaac Newton, fell off the overhead shelf, accelerating at 32.2 feet per second per second, onto the master's head. The master hit the floor like a sack of apples.

At that very moment, I fully understood gravity. Gravity is having dignity or sobriety of bearing. Clearly our physics master had neither.

I WAS BROUGHT UP A CHRISTIAN. I still have a Church of England hymn book for children, purchased in Canterbury Cathedral in 1952 by my two grandmothers (doing a little sightseeing), and sent to me back in Bermuda, where I might be raised amongst Heathens for all they knew. I was two at the time and couldn't read. I still cannot sing at the age of 59.

I attended the Anglican Church in Bermuda as a small child. It was racially segregated; I guess God thought that was a good thing, certainly his devout servants did, and they preached it. I have no doubt that the Vicar had black servants in his oversized rectory. The pale, frequently sweating, well-fed priest with his double chins and fat wife would not have mowed his own lawns either. God must have liked that set-up, and provided the money required to pay for it.

Curious as it may seem, I became a Mormon when I was not long out of my teens. I was attracted by the fellowship, the friendly nature of the members, the welcome and the abundant food. There was something else, something more important. I met somebody, a young LDS missionary from Utah (wherever that was), and the very moment I set eyes on him, I had an understanding. It was clear to me, it did not require further thought, I knew him from somewhere.

A little about Carl Burke, and this is not a completely invented story like the one about my physics master and the bust of Isaac Newton. [Or was that something I made up? A creator might be thought clever if nobody realises what his occupation is.] Carl was born about three years after I was, into a Mormon family in Utah (which I discovered was just beyond the peaks of the Rocky Mountains). His father, Bill, was a convert, originally from the American Midwest, I believe. Verna, Carl's mother, was the daughter or granddaughter of immigrants from Europe who had converted to the Church. The couple had two sons when they were getting on in years, and Carl was much younger than his brother.

I do not know what pressure was put on Carl to conform to Mormon ideals and beliefs, but he got into a good deal of trouble. He liked anything mechanical, fast cars were appealing, and he developed a taste, a longing, for alcohol and, particularly, drugs. It was the early 1970s and he wasn't the only one. I was never much for drink, though I didn't shy from it, I just didn't really enjoy it. It would never have occurred to me to drink at home alone. I liked drugs though. I made a career of abusing drugs.

Needless to say, Carl got caught. In 1972, the year my manic depressive illness began as severe anxiety and mild depression, Carl was nabbed breaking into a drugstore. I didn't know him then, he told me about it in 1974. It had looked as if Carl was going to be spending some time in jail: His behaviour was out of control, his health and addictions were at a crisis point, his emotions were shot to hell. And somebody pulled a miracle out of a hat. If Carl would go on a mission for the Mormon Church, under the particular and knowing supervision of a Mission President approved by the courts, and would behave, he would not be jailed or otherwise institutionalised.

Carl was sent off to the Eastern States Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in the care of Mission President David Lawrence McKay. David Lawrence McKay was no ordinary Mormon; his father was David O. McKay, the Ninth Prophet of the Church, from 1951 until 1970. David Lawrence McKay had read his father's sermons in General Conference from time to time. He knew everybody. He was connected. The Eastern States Mission was centred in a grand Mission Home on Fifth Avenue in New York City, and among Carl's duties was keeping track of Mission vehicles. He also travelled and tracted, wearing that uniform (white shirt, dark trousers, tie and knapsack, and the Elder Burke badge).

In February of 1974, Carl Burke was sent to Bermuda, then in the Eastern States Mission area, and the day he arrived his companion, Elder Steven Love, brought him around to meet me. I wasn't a Mormon then. And I shook Elder Carl Burke's hand (his handshake was not the crushing one some elders seemed to affect on the likes of me) and had this understanding, quite naturally, that he was an old friend.

Within weeks, Elder Burke was taken seriously ill and arrangements were made to get him back to New York City as soon as a replacement could pack his bags. And I knew that this wasn't the way things were supposed to be. Carl and I had not just become fast friends; we'd resumed, somehow, a friendship. Despite the activities of the Bermuda Branch leadership in preparing to ship Carl out, I decided to contact Mission President David Lawrence McKay (who I'd never met). I told President McKay the story: Elder Burke is an old friend, he has a real purpose in Bermuda, not least of all to change my life, and he's meant to be here. Be damned, but President McKay had to agree with me!

Carl Burke did change my life. He's even responsible for me uprooting myself from Bermuda three years ago and returning to England, my family's home country, where I've longed to be all the years I was away. Three years ago, in his early fifties, Carl died quite suddenly. He'd developed heart troubles, had been put on the waiting list for a transplant, and died. All within a very few months. His daughter, Gina, expecting her first child, contacted me a few hours after he'd passed. And I had to wonder where, when and how I might bump into my old friend, who'd been Carl Burke to my Ross Eldridge, again. I did think that I might go on something of a Mission of my own. Home to England.

THE REVEREND DR. PETER MULLEN, rector of the Anglican church of St. Michael's Cornhill and St. Sepulchre without Newgate in the City of London, made headlines recently by positing and posting, on his church blog, the following:

"Let us make it obligatory for homosexuals to have their backsides tattooed with the slogan SODOMY CAN SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH, and their chins with FELLATIO KILLS."

Dr. Mullen, the sort of doctor who doesn't really do anyone much good, was rapped over his knuckles, we're told. However, I don't think they took a Pectoral Cross to him, at best a Tippet.

I decided to look up Mullen's church blog, and found that the offending remarks had been purged. (St. John 15:2). However, by their fruits, and all that, I decided to look up some of Mullen's sermons. The Rector preaches regularly, and is Chaplain to the Stock Exchange (so he must be up to his Amice in prayer requests), and tackles many subjects as a very (very) conservative cleric.

One of Mullen's sermons was on science and religion, and he chose to tell the tale of the mystical nun, St. Julian of Norwich (1342 -1416), who had some sixteen "shewings" or revelations, visions, in about 1373. Mother Julian was deathly ill at the time, but recovered. She wrote up her experiences (as we all should, particularly if God appears to us, and he visited this nun), and rewrote them about twenty years later. Her spelling didn't improve, but that's the way it was when Richard II was King of England.

Reverend Dr. Peter Mullen preached that Mother Julian asked God, during one of his visits, how big the Universe was. Those nuns, eh? And, according to Mullen, God said nothing, but placed an apple in Mother Julian's hand. And Mullen went on to relate that recently when scientists, astrophysicists and so on, got together with Einstein's work (and that of others) on the table, they decided that all the matter in the Universe, when packed together, as it was at the moment just before the Big Bang, was the size of an … apple. Which kind of made Julian of Norwich look pretty good, or Stephen Hawking, or both. I imagine Mullen's flock were chuffed to hear that.

However, if you bother to get yourself a copy of Revelations of Divine Love, the account of Julian of Norwich, you'll find that God, when he popped round to see Mother Julian and answered her query about the size of the Universe, placed a hazelnut in her palm. Apples, hazelnuts, astrophysics. I think size matters, I really do.

The Reverend Dr. Peter Mullen was misleading his parishioners. If he knew what he was saying, which was inaccurate, and said it just to impress, the man needs to be defrocked. Be interesting to see if he has any tattoos under his skirts! Does one bad apple, one bad Christian apple, spoil the whole bunch? (Please excuse bunch as the collective of apples!) I have this understanding that it just might, given the pyramidal nature of religion.

Of course, I do not know if all the matter, when compacted, is as big as an apple, or as small as a hazelnut, and I'm not going to ask God about it because I'm not exactly sure about this God thing right now. I'm certainly not counting myself as a Christian, I believe in eternal matter, eternal life, but as reincarnation. I'm looking at Past Life Regression.

I have this peculiar understanding that we've been this way before. And that one must keep looking out for old friends. One may well, in fact, one must change. So, let's not be afraid of all that.