Michelle Newcomb, Assigned Readings #4

Michelle Newcomb

Religious Studies – Primal Religions

Assigned Readings #4

Communing with the Sacred

After watching aboriginal film the other day I was struck with the question of how I myself commune with the sacred?

Carmody and Carmody sate that the main difference between oral and literate religions is the way in which they commune with the sacred, that oral cultures practice through the “living word” and to “picture, hear, feel, even tatse and touch what was truly real.” For oral cultures, the process of the sacred is much more important than the final result and an excellent example of this can be found in the aboriginal cave drawings; generations and generations of drawings are on those walls and none of them serve any other purpose than when they were first drawn.

This caused some reflection on my part about how I commune with the sacred and after some time I arrived at the same conclusion of Carmody – that my religious experience was not personalized or imaginative, I was mainly focused on the end result and cling strongly to my religious texts.

I think, in this sense and in many others, I have much to learn fom oral religions. Without my religious texts I, too, can seek “direct encounters with the sacred” and experience religions as an act or a process rather than an achievement or the reaching of a final goal.