10 hours ago
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When I was a high schooler, it was the done thing to write the name of your favourite band on your school backpack, broadcasting your allegiances and through them assert your identity. Canvas bags were festooned with the lightning font of AC/DC and Led Zeppelin, lined up outside classrooms as far as the eye could see. And then there was my bag, with “Life is God” in big bubble writing along the flap, the smell of the permanent marker filling my head with the feeling of floating heavenwards on the wings of truth.
I was prepared to be scorned, spat upon, ridiculed. There was nothing I wanted more than to be persecuted, like the early Christians, in order to prove my devotion to God.
Devotion has its roots in the Latin, devovere, to vow. It goes beyond love, implying an active, passionate desire to prove one’s love. Swifties know what I mean.
Devotional practices extend back hundreds of years before pop stars began cashing in the human inclination to revere. Thirteenth-century Christian flagellants would whip each other to atone for sins and share in the suffering of Christ, their saviour.
Devotion can be a jealous kind of love. According to the Jewish Torah, Abraham was prepared to kill his own son Isaac when Y-w-h asked him to, stopping before the blade nicked Isaac’s skin only when Y-w-h spoke from the heavens and told him he had passed the test of love. Devotion to Christ, Allah, Shiva, Vishnu and a range of other gods has long been manipulated by powerful elites to motivate sectarian violence.
But devotional practices do not have to be violent. Well-known for its pantheon of divinities, Hinduism offers bhakti, the way of devotion, as one of the possible paths to moksha – liberation from the cycle of reincarnation. Popular bhakti sects follow Vishnu or Shiva and their various avatars, and followers engage in devotional practices such as yoga, self-purification, chanting and temple worship. A devotee expresses and develops her connection to her chosen avatar in the role of mother, father, brother, sister, daughter, lover.
Devotional practices are still core to world religions (and modern fan culture) because of, to quote Celine Dion, the “power of love”. Devotion brings together human emotion, story and intent, weaving ever stronger ties to group and godhead. Without devotion, religion becomes a dry intellectual exercise, inadequate to motivate people to acts of heroism or sacrifice. Hinduism has a tradition of jnana, a path to moksha via philosophical study and contemplation. But, as my 13-year old self intuitively knew, it’s hard to develop spiritual fervour for a philosophical construct. “Life is Hope in the Face of the Impossibility of Knowing For Sure if the Universe Has Purpose” just doesn’t fit on a backpack.
Even some schools of Buddhism, a famously non-materialist tradition, allow followers to cultivate devotion to figures such as Kuan Yin, a bodhisattva of compassion. Islamic Sufi poets such as Rumi, and Christian saints such as Gertrude the Great, or Teresa of Ávila, wrote devotional works about God as their divine lover. The Tao Te Ching makes no mention of a godhead, but that hasn’t stopped religious Taoists from deifying Lao Tzu, the text’s author.
On balance, I would have to say that religious devotional practices to a specific godhead are no longer for me. In the years since I let my backpack speak on my behalf, I have left behind institutional religions. I dislike the idea that there is a “being”, no matter how metaphorical, to whom I owe allegiance. I still bow to the awesomeness of nature and cosmic mystery. But ducking my head to a god feels, well, blasphemous.
I no longer wish I was an early Christian like Saint Peter, asking to be crucified upside-down, because I wasn’t good enough to die the way Jesus did. As a non-religious pastoral care practitioner, I sit with my co-workers for 10 minutes or so at the start of each day. We share a quiet, contemplative space, preparing ourselves to be present. Some of my co-workers are Christian; sometimes, they pray. I listen, part of me wishing I could feel what they feel. When they finish, I whisper along with them, “Amen.”
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Jackie Bailey is the author of The Eulogy, the winner of the 2023 NSW Premier’s literary multicultural award. When not writing, she works as a funeral celebrant and pastoral care practitioner, helping families navigate death and dying
