You're Kidding Me, Right?

My i-photo program keeps crashing under the weight of my several hundred thousand photographs and so I'm currently deleting thousands ... and keep coming across shots I took for this blog for stories I never got around to writing.  

Here's one:

When we were on holiday in Melbourne all those months ago, we visited a great many churches and were bemused to find that the Protestant churches have been removing statues of saints and replacing them with these sorts of things:

Yup, instead of, say, a perfectly viable St Whoeveritis, you get a very annoying dripping-water chunk of badly carved granite or a piece of drift wood, petrified rock and part of an old tree trunk that is so very strange it's .... it's ... gosh, you'd have to make this a Rorschach's Test to decide what it is. 

After the expected reaction of "WTF?" the only thing that springs to mind is "WHY???" Yes, I get that this is all kinds of Zen but WHY???? Seriously, why would you do this?

I mean, these things invite questions, right?, and you don't go into a church or a temple or a wat or an ashram or ... or ... or a synagog or even a pagan-style tree-fringed sacred grove or whatever you choose as your personal sacred space to be asked questions.  You go in expecting to be given good solid answers.

Being me, I naturally hunted down some random priest in one of these "sacred spaces" and asked WTF?, wherein I was told in the most avuncular, gentle and kindly manner that it's offensive to people of other religions to have images of saints because they are automatically EXCLUDING. 

I kid you not.  This is what I was told. I could only shake my head and turn away to stop the very nice priest from seeing my look of combined sadness and derision.

I'd show you a photo of him only, you know, I don't want to single him out for what I want to say to the Protestant churches of Melbourne:  

For heaven's sake, it's a sodding CHURCH! Even going into one is automatically EXCLUDING! You even choose which one to enter by being EXCLUDING! And surely "those excluders" go into their church of choice with certain expectations, and that these are NOT being met by very annoying dripping-water chunk of badly carved granite thingies or pieces of drift wood, petrified rock and parts of an old tree trunks.

Look, seriously folks, the function of churches is to be a place where John and Jane Public can go to ask their deity of choice to not let them be squashed like a bug. And does this annoying dripping-water thingy does not invite that? No, not in the least.

What all this made me think of was how, when we were at Auckland Museum in the 80s, we were shocked to discover that they'd taken away the most magnificent and awe-inspiring white marble ancient Greek statues and replaced them with second-rate and half-rotten wooden Buddhas. When I tracked down some random Museum person to ask why, I was told, with the great hair-tossing and snooting of aloof contempt, it was because Greek mythology had nothing to do with NZ. And wasn't I greeted with a snort of derision when I asked "And Buddhism has a huge connection, how?"

So that's what I want to say to the Protestant churches of Melbourne: that they desperately need to stop being such sad and stupid tossers and get over this sodding need to be such dire religious apologists and realise that in situations like this it's entirely NOT inappropriate to just be themselves!