ABSTRACT
The last Saturday before Christmas an irate shopper bawled at me (after I had offered her an invitation to a church service), ‘It’s all this religion that spoils Christmas.’ The word ‘religion’ evokes strongly negative responses in many people who have no sense that it can be captivatingly enriching, contribute to wholeness of being, and bring about salvation. What people want, it seems, is to be holistic with no notion of holiness. If you add the word ‘tradition’ to ‘religion’ you get a very different reaction. The words evoke a wide range of sensory experiences: church bells; country parsons; graveyards; incense; damp, musty smells; archaic quaintness with an Agatha Christie quality; a way of life that time forgot; hymns no longer sung in assemblies; the mischievous innocence of choirboys; priests remote from sexuality and the world; black clothed, bearded, skullcapped Jewish men swaying in prayer before a wall-so the many images continue to spill over in an other-worldly anachronistic collage.
