LYTLE: Worshipping the Bow seems wet to me

“Through a simple phone call, anyone can connect to the Bow, experiencing its wisdom, secrets and songs, creating a unique opportunity to access and explore our relationship with this important body of water.”Or so reports Jen Hodgson about an arts group who inject pagan spiritual significance to a flowing body of water. Look, if you want to dance naked around campfires or hug trees in ecstatic frenzies to reconnect with something larger than yourself, then fill your boots. Just don’t use my money to do so — separation of church and state and all that.Is it true that I will gain eternal knowledge (secrets) from listening to the “songs of the Bow?" At my age I gain much more useful information by listening to my toilet as I pass last night’s glass of water. At least it tells me that things are still working — after a fashion.Placing a call to the Bow River in some gnostic attempt to gain knowledge has the same sterile and useless effect as watching porn to form relationships. The problem is that, once you get past the smarmy and altogether too predictable nonsense about river keeping and Gaia protection and avoiding the wrath of Mother Nature, you inevitably find another set of grifters using public (my) money to promote their attempts to regain what they lost when they chose to disconnect from the Maker of all things watery, woody and human.It bears repeating. If others want to do dumb things by anthropomorphising the little wooden dolls that they worship, that is entirely up to them. But let’s start calling this what it is… neo-paganism. Neo-paganism is the legitimate worldview of a pre-scientific society that fears the nature that is assumed to be superior to humanity. But note. It is a legitimate worldview when you don’t know any better. I must assume that these Broken City folks know better. A sterile listening to the Bow River via a telephone call isn’t going to pay the mortgage, heal the cancer or repair the relationships. None of this is to say that we shouldn’t respect the power of nature and steward our impacts on it. I have long enjoyed floating the Bow and blasting through the standing waves created around the bridge pylons. I have lain along its banks enjoying the sun which pried the water from the glaciers and now warms my body. But to give sentience to the river by attributing to it control over its own power or to seek wisdom in its “gurgling messages” is just silly. There is a difference you see, between enjoying nature and worshipping nature. We do well to remember that. Paradoxically, the more we worship nature the more our propensity to ruin that nature through willful ignorance of our own power to destroy. Better, in my view, to worship the God who made our natural world and who holds us to account for what we do with and to it. But that is just me. At least I am not looking for nor getting public money to press my case.This point was made most aggressively when Charlemagne of the Franks cut down the Saxon’s Irminsul or Tree of Life”. The tree supported the universe and was worshipped perhaps by naked Saxons dancing around it. I don’t know but I can imagine that when nothing happened to the immoderate and heretical, tree chopping Franks, the Saxons looked at the impotent stump and thought,“Hmmm… didn’t see that coming.”It matters what you worship. That is a simple word of advice. If you insist on the pagan worship of inanimate things then don’t use my money to do so. End of rant.