God Collar

by Marcus Brigstocke

  We chose to go on honeymoon to South Africa. We went on safari. In the presence of nature on that scale you feel humbled and quite quickly it begins to feel like a thing to believe in. There’s something comforting about realizing your place in nature and becoming aware that it could devour you if it chose to. This was a subject I had more enthusiasm for than my new wife, who found most of it bloody terrifying. South Africa and Botswana are truly amazing places. It’s hard to imagine God wishing to cover all that up with water and drown every living creature on it. I mean, He’d have had to be really seriously pissed off at somebody.

  My wife puts up with a lot. No more than most partners in a long-term relationship but enough for me to feel grateful that she hasn’t as yet kicked my head in or turfed me out. I have a selfish streak and can be boorish and sulky. I am rarely wrong and when I am there’s usually someone else to blame for the mistake. I refuse to engage in arguments most of the time but am intractable on many subjects. I’m staggeringly hairy (there’s no doubt about the evolution debate once you’ve seen my back). I am a big mouth and often a cynic and I don’t do dental hygiene to the extent that I probably should. I feel ashamed of these parts of myself whilst recognizing they are also part of what makes me interesting and funny. Our honeymoon was a mixed bag. Mostly it was divine and we had a lot of fun and saw a lot of wonderful things … but there was an incident.

  Having not spent any time in Africa before, I was unfamiliar with a ‘delicacy’ of the region called biltong. I’d eaten jerky and liked it but I’d never had biltong before. It’s dried bush meat, so in fact the term ‘delicacy’ is a massive overstatement. It’s chewy old meat made from dried antelope or buffalo or ostrich or similarly strong-flavoured beasts. I really took to the stuff and ate loads of it. What I didn’t realize is that when you eat biltong and then have a drink, the dried meat rehydrates and takes on its original size and shape. Essentially I re-formed an entire antelope in my stomach. I swear I could feel horns sticking out of my side too. Then I got the biltong farts. Now, under any other circumstances, I’d have been very happy with this hilarious result. I am a man, and a childish one at that, not to mention a comedian. Yes, I find blowing off funny. Had my brother been there, hilarity would have ensued all round and quite possibly some sort of league table. However, two days into your honeymoon, it’s not exactly what you’re looking for. When the bridal suite smells suspiciously of safari Bovril, it will test a new marriage.

  This situation might have been forgivable if opening a window hadn’t massively increased the chances of nocturnal visits from various creatures from the bush. I acknowledge that a more sincere apology and some committed clenching would have gone some way towards rectifying the rectal situation, but it got worse and it was too late to correct it as I’d failed to link the cause with the result and merrily went on gnawing away at various sun-dried beasties with the same appetite and enthusiasm as a vulture.

  We went on a dawn game drive to look at the animals. These set off at five o’clock in the morning. You wake early, dress in khaki (unless you’re from America, then it’s something bright and practical) and sneak into a drab vehicle as early as the sun permits in order to see the animals when they are really active. We were in an open-top jeep with a guide driver named Peter in the front, a young family in front of us and another couple in the rear who were either on honeymoon or had their faces stuck together in some sort of unfortunate incident at a glue factory. The roads are potholed and rough; they cut through the bush and over very wild terrain. We were being jiggled about like khaki ragdolls with binocular-shaped bruising forming on our chests. We went over a particularly large bump and a huge and unfortunate biltong-based blow-off fell out of me. No one heard it. The vehicle was open-topped and noisy enough. I’ve got away with that, I thought for the briefest of moments. The driver of our open-topped vehicle then brought it to a sudden halt and after two small sniffs and then one slow deep inhalation, he asked in his beautiful South African accent, ‘Can everybody smell that? That’s lion. You can tell because it’s very meaty. It’s quite fresh as well; they’ve been through here recently.’ At this point everybody in the jeep got up, fumbling with readied cameras, and joined Peter in his sniffing. ‘Yes, yes, I smell it. Come on, darling, up you get.’ And, ‘Get the camera, I think they’ve made a kill.’ Needless to say I was the only one still sitting, and the more I laughed, the more the biltong made its deadly presence felt. At one point Peter, after a particularly deep sniff, advised us: ‘Be careful, I think one of them might be injured.’ My poor wife eventually noticed my apparent lack of interest in the king of the beasts and the fact that my shoulders were vibrating with suppressed laughter. She soon figured out what had happened and she hit me so hard that another one came out. We were there for almost forty minutes. I still can’t look at the pictures without giggling and feeling a strange expanding gripe in my tummy. The whole thing would have been a lot funnier had it not been our honeymoon treat. I let my wife down. It’s only guilt, but I do it all the time and that’s hard to live with. By do it all the time I mean let her down, not stop an entire safari with my bum.

  Theologically and spiritually speaking, my wife and I are pretty much on the same page, I think. We believe in broadly the same things. There are some differences, of course. She enjoys a star sign whereas I’m a Taurus, which means I don’t really believe in that sort of thing. Earth sign, cynical, stubborn – reads books and thinks. She believes in ghosts. I’ve never seen one and am so enraged by the exploitative liars who make a living from upsetting recently bereaved families that I’m disposed against the whole notion of ghosts and spirits and all that nonsense. She believes in a sort of universal connectedness that I don’t really buy into. For example, if I phone her when she was just about to phone me, then we always have a couple of minutes of sheer unbelieving shock and awe at how unlikely a situation that is. She asks, ‘How weird is that? I mean really, how weird is that? I was just about to phone you. Amazing. How weird is that?’ I then have to resist the urge to smugly answer, ‘It’s moderately weird at best.’ I phone my wife a lot. We speak often. Several times a day I call her just to tell her I love her and I’m thinking about her and to ask about her day. I’m not telling you that to try to redeem myself from the pits of shame surrounding both the fact of the biltong incident and that I still clearly find it so very amusing. I love my wife and I call her to say so. I am genuinely baffled by those old comedians. You know the ones who used to come on stage and open their set with: ‘My wife’s so fat and miserable, she’s basically a bastard.’ Really? Do her a favour then. Go and bury your head somewhere, you dull insensitive prick. I phone my wife several times a day just to tell her I’m thinking about her, and several more times to ask where my things are. I phoned her once to ask where my phone was. That was a tense conversation. She didn’t know.

  It’s not that I beat myself up for being a crap husband or an inadequate father or a flawed human being, not exactly. I do feel bad about myself sometimes but in the scheme of things I see myself as somewhere in the middle of the human scale. It runs from 100 per cent arsehole all of the time up to 100 per cent Michael Palin most of the time. I’d like to think I occupy a space somewhere near the middle. I’m not extraordinary like Gandhi or Martin Luther King. (I’m entirely the wrong colour to save my people from that kind of oppression – so unfair!) Neither am I dreadful like Fred West or Liam Gallagher. I’m about average. I am a humanitarian. I love my family and friends. I am generous when it suits me, though never wholly anonymously. I am selfish and callous sometimes and funny and kind for the rest. But humans are flawed, sometimes very – look at Robert Kilroy Silk. Husbands are crap, fathers inadequate and life is a series of challenges met to the best of our ability with the skills and experiences we acquire as we grow older. The trick, it seems to me, is to try to learn from those experiences and use them not to punish ourselves but to better prepare ourselves for the next challenge. If you’ve mastered that, you’re a bette
r person than me. It’s hard not to become disheartened or bitter. I am a slow learner and often repeat the same mistake and fully expect a different result. (I believe that is the very definition of insanity.) It’s harder still to remember to stay open to new ideas as we grow older. That kind of conservatism is hard-wired into the human being. Your skin sags, your organs tire and one day you know for sure that music’s not as good as it used to be and that young people need some of whatever it was that made you unhappy as a child.

  Essentially, I need to toughen up. I need to learn how to dial down my empathy or dial up my practical responses to the demands of my emotions. At present I feel a lot and do very little about it. When people are cruel or uncaring to each other, or when we choose to look the other way when even a glance in the right direction would show us people very close to ourselves suffering terribly, I struggle with it and feel a sense of despair hovering over my head. I can’t help but think this might be a feeling that God could help to disperse or enable me to philosophize about more effectively. Maybe with God in my corner I would be able to turn the middle-class hand-wringing guilt I feel into something more useful. It doesn’t make a scrap of difference to someone drowning in their bedroom in Bangladesh, or scratching for grains behind an aid truck in Ethiopia, or hiding from a tyrannical drunken partner in Peckham to know that I feel bad for them. It’s useless in real terms and yet most people empathize, sympathize and recognize the condition of our fellows without even trying to. We feel for each other, but we are usually powerless to do anything to help. It’s human, we can’t stop it, and for me it’s often close to unbearable. God must be more than just a callous murdering shit toying with his human project. He must be, because I’ve seen people who believe in him and they seem from the outside to be more at peace in their heads and in their hearts than I am. Did God do that? Or did they just stop asking the questions?

  15

  Saying Goodbye

  THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS FROM FAITH I THINK ARE beautiful and worth preserving. Religious music for a start. I find classical choral music extraordinary and moving … for the first few hymns, then I wonder why it all sounds the same and has to be so high in the register and creepy. Gospel at its best feels like a hurricane and the passion that inspires it has spread beyond the confines of singing in church. It’s everywhere in modern popular music and enriches everything it touches. The sound of a great gospel choir is so powerful that even the most arrhythmic white conservative can’t resist clapping on the downbeat and bouncing his knees up and down as if all he can hear is a buggered metronome. Even if lyrically it amounts to little more than harmonious repetition of how much God and Jesus are still really very popular down here on Earth, it feels like it must be saying something much bigger. Sincerity, passion and the power of the human voice to make us feel like we are more than ourselves are bound up in gospel music. I don’t believe in God but I hope someone somewhere continues to sing amazing songs to Him. As long as someone has a little light, I hope they continue to let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!

  Science and the natural world have not as far as I know inspired the same level of soaring musical expression as religious devotion. Love has, but it shares with God a mystical, ungraspable quality. The power of it moves us far beyond the realm of just feeling something. It devours us and before you know it you have lyrics like ‘If I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I’d like to do, is to save every day ’til eternity passes away, just to spend them with you’ from ‘Time In A Bottle’. There’s a line at the end of the musical Les Misérables: ‘To love another person is to see the face of God’. Maybe that’s it. Maybe love is the great power and that is all we need. I believe in love. I’ve felt it from and for other people. There’s plenty of experience that we can see, feel and be inspired by without the need to dedicate our art to the Lord but I’m very glad that people have done so none the less.

  It is impossible to imagine a world without religion (with apologies to John Lennon, I’ve tried and it certainly wasn’t easy). I am not convinced the world would be a better place without religion anyway. Although I’d be willing to try it. Who’s with me? Religion has permeated every aspect of the world we inhabit. It has been corrosive, divisive, constructive and unifying all at once. You couldn’t rip it from the world and make it never have existed. Even the most committed secular campaigners can see that its contribution has been of tremendous value. But at what cost? This is an urgent question and one that needs an answer. Religion has its past, good, bad, murdery, rapey, kindly and inspiring; but what is the future for a system of thought so resistant to change that even a new cover on a hymn book is enough to spark a civil war? Where can religion go from here?

  The world is changing fast. The only thing that can truly be described as consistent is that the pace of change is accelerating. The major faiths have a series of well-constructed anchors set deep into the bedrock of the past and the solid chains that keep them from moving forwards look as sturdy as they ever did. When one chain seems unlikely to resist the strain put upon it by the fast-flowing river of progress, another is ready to be relied upon. If any part of the raft of faith strains too much in the current, then it is divided and the strong bit stays where it is with as many people as possible encouraged to climb aboard and help prevent any drift in the direction of the unrelenting flow of progress. Even if it were possible to undo the chains that bind religion to an idealized and largely fictional past and set the faiths free to move with the current, I doubt they’d survive the many twists and turns in the rapids ahead. The river has Rock and Roll in it, drugs, booze, sex, TV, films, radio, literature, philosophy, democracy, journalism, the internet and whatever’s left of our libraries when the coalition government have finished attacking them for the small change it’ll save. It has scientists who are hungry for knowledge and for whom change and constant questioning and reappraisal are not obstacles or inconveniences but rather the fuel that drives them. The water is filled with people connected to each other not by the enduring fear of an eternity in Hell, but in a much more immediate sense by ISDN cables, firewire, satellites, dongles, dishes, USB ports, wi-fi and even dial-up if you’re with BT Broadband. Those are some large and unforgiving rapids for a vessel that hasn’t moved downstream for a couple of thousand years and is beginning to creak.

  You can’t change history. You can lie about it and misrepresent it. Certainly, you can convince a great many people that things that did happen didn’t and things that didn’t did. That’s why Bush and Blair still appear in public with smiles on their faces. If the three major religious texts were subjected to the same scrutiny as most other books relied upon to instruct our children in their education, they’d have been handed to the school janitor to be hidden in the back of a cupboard along with stories about Golliwogs and asbestos shorts for fat kids. The fact of religion and its place in our story should be respected where that is appropriate. Where it’s not, a sincere attempt at truth and justice should be striven towards with courage and humility as its guiding principles. As to religion’s future, the Tarot cards I always rely on in these matters suggest the road ahead is not an easy one. The age of communication is setting hearts and minds ablaze in parts of the world where even a secretive muttering of the word ‘change’ is enough to win you a free S+M session with no safe word.

  If religion were to alter itself or begin to take a backseat in the affairs of men and women, what might be worth preserving? Desmond Tutu, I would hope. Architecture, art, music, sculpture and literature, of course. Only a cultural vandal or a fool (or member of an opposing theological system) would seek to destroy any of those things or to downplay the contribution some aspects of religion have made to our culture. But what else? Ritual is important to us. We are pattern-seeking and draw comfort from the familiar. That is not to say that tradition for its own sake is worth preserving. There have been thousands of corrupt and silly ideas manacled to notions of tradition and on they go because, well, they’ve alwa
ys been there so we’d probably better not bugger about with them. Every new guardsman (a short period of service in the career of many soldiers) gets a brand new bearskin hat. Each one requires the death of a bear. A dead bear provides an impractical, pointless, funny-looking, traditional hat. Bearskin that would do well keeping a bear warm in Canada’s winter, but perched on the head of a soldier makes them pass out and be ignored by the Queen in London’s summer. Traditional and stupid.

  Religion plays a vital role in community. We need each other, we need contact, fellowship and to know we are not totally alone. That’s why people go to Ikea. We don’t need tea lights, we need each other … and meatballs. The church, mosque and temple bring people together. What they do when they assemble may not meet with everyone’s approval, but the act of assembly is important. We work long hours, travel further from home and communicate remotely around the world. Many of our children have a telly in their bedroom and the idea of eating or talking together is tolerated only at Christmas, with plenty of alcohol to make it bearable and always on the understanding that there will be presents. Christmas – it’s all about the getting. This is not so in religious communities. They spend time with each other and there is support and friendship facilitated by the commonality of belief. Sure, they have their problems, like hiding sex crimes, beatings, gossip, administering medieval justice and teenagers not being allowed out after 8 p.m. for fear they might meet someone with genitals, but these religious assemblies fulfil a fundamental human need to share time with other people.

  The Natural History Museum in London also brings people together. They stand in awe before the wondrous collection of exhibits seeking to further our understanding of the world we share, and eat a slice of their rather good cafeteria carrot cake. But is it communion? In a sense I think it is. It’s good to know that other people want to understand like I do, even if the other people are a school party whose main interest is to see who can nick the biggest rubber from the gift shop or sneak round the back of the Triceratops for a fag and a snog. But it’s unstructured compared with religious assembly and no one would notice if you didn’t turn up. Even if you pre-book you’d be very surprised to get a call from a museum saying, ‘Some of us noticed you didn’t make it to the Mammals of Africa wing this morning and we wanted to check you were OK …’ There are many other places where we get together – swingers’ parties, public swimming pools and Marks & Spencer’s to name but three – but with the exception of organized clubs and societies, which go some way towards genuine community, none of these places meets the quality of coming together like religion does. Perhaps this doesn’t matter and we’ll evolve (we do that, you know) into beings who are less dependent on other beings. Maybe we will but, at the risk of sounding needy, I don’t want to. I like you guys. Let’s all meet up. ‘Who’s with me?’ Seriously though, who is?