COMMENT
Seven days from now, it will be a week later. It will also be Easter; Good Friday to be precise, a sombre day when the presses don't roll and the shops don't open and there's nary an ad on the telly.
There was a time when such things were the measure of our official creed. Today they simply serve as the faint echoes of a fading faith.
Commentators will tell you we are now a post-Christian or post-religious society. The first statement is true. The second is not. Sure, more people believe in lentils than Lent and Buddha may have the bishops on the run, but that's precisely the point.
Something we believed in may have gone but not our need to believe in something. Which is why in these past days the nation has had a huge faith lift and not just one - hundreds of them. All manner of creeds and mantras have blossomed in the field left fallow by the church.
In the process, something strange has happened. The state's got religion. Officially, we now believe all sorts of things.
Officially, we believe in evil spirits. Not just any old evil spirits, mind. Officially, it would seem we only believe in that especially nasty group of evil spirits who choose to inhabit Gummint offices and our embassies abroad.
Quite why these malign demons are drawn to such places is a mystery. It might be that they assume Gummint buildings are full of evil types with whom they can madly cavort. Or it might be they expect to find suites of offices crammed to the gunnels with young and susceptible policy analysts whom they can easily corrupt.
But it doesn't really matter why the evil spirits are there. What matters is that we believe they are. Officially. And we're very concerned about it. We must be because we dispatch kaumatua hither and yon to expel these phantoms and expunge their malevolent influence.
Whether our kaumatua get the chance to stand in a paddock and laugh at each other before they embark upon their perilous exorcisms is not clear. Perhaps they just sit on the floor with their thumbs in their ears enjoying a healing hum; with or without a medicinal irrigation of each nostril.
Because we believe in those things, too. We must do. A Government agency uses our money to pay the qualified therapists who provide such efficacious treatments.
So there you have it. Officially, we believe in exorcisms and nasal irrigation and the therapeutic value of the ancient hum. And there's more; much, much more, m'dears. Post-heavens, yes.
We also officially believe in mosques in state schools - well, one, anyway. And in hymns, provided they're waiata. We officially believe that some people have a greater spiritual connection to their land than others. We believe in hip-hop and social entrepreneurs and that miracles can be wrought when politicians cast our bread upon the waters.
(Well, actually, they cast our bread upon a fortunate few who travel over the waters, but you get the point.)
These things are all articles of faith. They are official beliefs officially expressed in pronouncement or practice or both.
And there's another, much larger object of awe and reverence which we now officially worship. It's long been said that nature abhors a vacuum. But in the realm of faith, it doesn't simply abhor the vacuum, it's filled it as well.
Officially, nature has become supernatural. Generally represented as benign, nurturing and glorious - but also frail, delicate and dangerously susceptible to the brutish advances of man - the environment has become our supreme spiritual force - a force constantly threatened by our sinful selves, a force which may, like God, eventually die if we don't repent and relent and mend our wicked ways.
It's astonishing how full of self-loathing and disgust we've become about such matters, largely because of constant hectoring and censure from the high priests of the Bio-Temple; a pursed-lipped bunch who make your average, hair-shirted, self-flagellating medieval monk look like a P-scoffing member of the Titirangi Orgy club.
Stone the crows (mainly because they're an introduced species), we've even set up our own Punish inquisition for those who don't believe in global warming. We take such heretics and hang them by their Kyotos until they are green.
Implicit in the teachings of the Eco-Priests is a stark truth: the world would be a better place without wicked, wanton, profligate people. The best thing we could do is extinct ourselves and let nature reign in glory. (But not until after the next election because they'd like you to vote for them first.)
For traditionalists perturbed by the new theologies there's a simple answer: find a way backwards and Bob's your same-sex step-parent. But there is no way back.
For a start, the organised churches have imploded, not least because the state has usurped their role as agents of compassion and aid. And also because our mystic crystal, New Age, baby-boom seculerics see no need for a U-turn on the road from Damascus; not while they can preach the new gospel: "Do unto others as we tell you to."
Even so, there's comfort to be taken from the myriad new faiths that now fill the daze of our lives. If nothing else, they prove the truth of G.K. Chesterton's shrewd adage: "When men cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing - they believe in anything."
Understand the truth of that and you pretty much understand why we are in the state we are in in Outer Roa today. And, hey, it's not even Easter.
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.