A Contiki tour of world religions
Sitting on the best seller lists for the past six months, Holy Cow is undoubtedly Australia’s best read ‘spiritual’ book at present. This real life story is a thought-provoking and entertaining roller-coaster ride into the spiritual mindset of a growing section of Sydney’s population.
Author Sarah McDonald, a former Triple J presenter, has a journalist’s cynical disdain for India’s religious passions. Forced to endure an ABC-funded tour of duty on the sub-continent with her partner, TV news reporter Jonathan Harley, she arrives convinced she will hate the place.
Her faith in atheism is shattered, however, when she is out one night and a naked Hindu sadhu rises from a graveyard smeared with human ashes, aims his pitchfork, and curses her.
She falls immediately ill with double pneumonia, and close to death’s door finds herself, “in a nightmare; I see dead bodies hanging from the ceiling, my lungs black and putrid on the outside of my body, my back impaled on a pitchfork, and there’s a big beast sitting heavy on my chest.
I’m gasping and retching and trying to push the thing off me but I’m blacking out and choking and gulping. The beast becomes the aghori sadhu, his trident has smeared my lungs and back, his bloodshot eyes are gnawing into my pain. I know he has done this to me.”
From a Christian perspective it is hard not to conclude that McDonald has had a powerful encounter with the principalities of darkness. The rest of the book becomes an attempt to explain and come to terms with this frightening encounter.
Told as a travel memoir, the book is a Contiki tour of the world’s religions. The whirlwind tour itinerary is designed to ensure the most colourful encounters and there is an over-representation of fringe cults and wacky western spins on indigenous Indian beliefs (eg: the ‘white’ Sikhs).
McDonald picks up a spiritual trinket from each stop along the way to satisfy her western-style consumer requirements. “From Buddhism the power to manage the mind, from Jainism the desire to make peace in all aspects of life, while Islam taught me to desire goodness and to let go of that which cannot be controlled…” etc, etc.
The locals’ own understanding of their beliefs is given short shrift, and there is more than a whiff of imperialistic appropriation, with McDonald’s ‘interpretation’ of the various religions dominating the narrative. Even the great monotheistic faiths are represented by their most esoteric manifestations (Jewish Kabbala, Islamic Sufism and Catholic Maryology) resulting in a shallow and unrepresentative picture of these faiths.
But it is hard to be too critical at this point, as McDonald constantly undermines herself with extremely funny, self-depreciating humour. This book is meant to be entertaining, and McDonald is not unaware of the dangers of romanticising the exotic ‘other’.
It is her analysis of Christianity that I found most intriguing. Educated at a Sydney private school, it appears the Protestantism of her childhood was dry and institutionalised.
“As I grew up I became increasingly appalled by the behaviour of the major Christian institutions,” she writes. “Their hypocrisy and sexism, their vast accumulation of wealth, and the egocentrism, anthropocentrism and superiority complex contained within their teachings upset me most.”
Her self-described ‘anger’ at Christianity sees her exploring all avenues bar the ‘faith of her forefathers’. It is not until her Catholic servants take visible offence at this, that McDonald reluctantly agrees to attend the ‘Our Lady of Velangani’ festival near Chennai. Her encounter with a vibrant Indian Catholicism leads McDonald to admit that Christianity isn’t dying as she previously suspected, but that its future lies in the Third World. It is there, she claims, you find ‘Christianity at its best – sharing, ritualistic, democratic, forgiving and female’.
You may not agree, but McDonald’s extraordinary journey will leave local Christians pondering many issues.
