Grains of Sand

On Sunday the denomination’s ‘music man’ took our service and with his mixture of choir CD pieces and own playing used, and with a meditation over Vaughan Williams’s Thomas Tallis theme, where I slid the sliders up and down, I had my work cut out. My pre-made CDs also had back-ups if he didn’t play, so I was jumping tracks thorughout. He even did unsupported brief hymns for starting and benediction that I knew nothing about and I had not put on the board.

In amongst all that was a presentation that might be entitled seeing it all in the smallest item – like grains of sand. So religion – as indeed with his service – wasn’t about God or the like, but about attitude of mind. The religious mind is expansionary about what is, a sort of yes. It is like tourism that turns out less to be about where you go and more about your attitude.

This I once learnt from one of those TV philosophers. In my own experience, we used to travel to stay with friends in North Wales and we were on holiday. They used to come and stay with us and they were on holiday. To them, their tourist destination was just home, and to us Hull was home but to them different, even exotic, and add in the east coast and the river. You can go on holiday without going anywhere, if your mind is so capable of a shift of outlook.

This is thus how the God thing can be so irrelevant to a religious attitude. Well, can be – it might be that seeing the universe in grains of sand is a signal of transcendence. But then signals are signals and need not point anywhere. It is the response, the attitude, the sense of own being perhaps.

In the mundane is the sacred, not because there is a sacred, but because the mundane has it all. It is simply a way of viewing and responding.

Liberal and Thoughtful Website creator; critical examiner of social sciences and theology, religious liberal, ‘terror blogger’.