Steve, of Bude...

Looking at the map the nearest we got to Bude was a toilet stop-cum-pilgrimage at Tescos in Launceston - reputedly the supermarket of choice for Tori Amos, but what are the chances?? Didn't do any pubs / folk in' at all this time; back in 2009 I remember a pleasant evening at a singaround in Bideford...

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So many cults. So many claims that contradict each other.

Objectivism is a problem for so subjective a thing as religion. Whilst we might revel and draw strength and succour from the amazing fictions of Arthur C. Clarke and Dr. Who, there is, as yet, no one who insists these things are in any way true to the point of wholesale massacre of heretics or suicide bombings or the simple conviction that whilst they are saved, those of a different mind are damned for all eternity, much less actively propagating ignorance, AIDS, misogyny, homophobia, institutionalised child abuse or else making saints out of evil old cows who routinely withheld painkillers from those in her care so they might better experience the love of Jesus.

This is but another signifier on the impossibility of an all powerful supernatural omniscient God. Though I don't doubt that somewhere in the infinite multi dimensional quantum possibilities of the cosmos resides a being of such advancement and complexity that I can no more contemplate their essence than the slugs in our Lancashire kitchen can conceive of Tori Amos doing her weekly shop at Tescos in Launceston. I doubt, however, such a being would be a) supernatural or b) at all bothered with the goings on here on Planet Oith any more than Tori Amos is bothered about our slugs.

For the most part though, I reckon LIFE is a matter of perfect ordinariness. Indeed, it's the very ordinariness of life that makes us seek the divine. If, as Carl Sagan believed, life is a cosmic inevitability then the lot of any sentient civilisation must lie in the mundane. Light years away, as I write this, an alien intelligence will be contemplating eternity whilst stuck waiting for a space in the supermarket carpark of some rural backwater hoping to catch a glimpse of Godlike Genius going about their everyday business. To some of us, it doesn't get more sacred than that - the special treasures of subjective ordinariness that might transfigure the objective commonplace into something truly numinous.

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On our way down to Devon we stopped of at Worcester (very exotic fort us!) where I headed for the cathedral and my wife headed for the shops. Half an hour later, she rang me to say she'd found something very special in Oxfam and could't wait to give it to me. I don't have the words to impart the joy I felt at so perfectly ordinary a juxtaposition (much less that I'd been after a copy for years) so here's the picture I took on her Nokia Lumina so I might upload it to Facebook and share my happiness with the world:

Numinous Exultation! 6th September 2014

Each to their own, but we're all in this thing together. There is nothing more sacred than that.