Weeding

If you move home, as I did several times during the wilderness years, you always try to sort your stuff out, and think you have virtually nothing anyway. In fact you end up taking half empty packets and bottles, plastic kitchenware that you may need someday, books that you have already read but can't part with and knick-knacks, even though you have none.
When I was preparing to come to Canada, I had to be absolutely ruthless, the ultimate weed. I left with two suitcases and Austen and Sue stored five small boxes of books in their loft, and these were the irreplaceable ones, French poetry and mediaeval texts. It took filter after filter to arrive at what I finally kept.
It is difficult to part with junk sometimes, it was even for a dyed-in-the-wool weeder like me, but by God it was cleansing.

Today, the third day of Christmas, is the feast of St. John the Divine, aka, John the Evangelist.
In Britain, Religious Education is still a compulsory part of the curriculum to the age of 16. The nature of it has changed however, when I was at school it was all about the history of the Bible lands. We had a book called 'Patriarchs, Judges and Kings'. Today it is all comparative, the kids learn about different religions. I think the lot of the RE teacher is akin to martyrdom, only modern languages teachers are more reviled by pupils and bigotted parents.
The teaching of RE in British schools is to underpin our knowledge of our law, our history and our literature, but does it turn out a nation of Bible thumpers? Well, I honestly believe not. Of course we have them, no doubt about that, but not in your face all the time. The Queen and the Royal Family are seen going to church, but she doesn't see the need to constantly and publicly re-affirm her faith. I feel that mostly in Britain, people's faith or lack of it is their own, although, John the Divine notwithstanding, as everywhere, beware the word 'Evangelical'.
And back to St. John. He was, we are told, the youngest of the Apostles, which was just as well, because he lived to a ripe old age, and was finally exiled to some island where he penned his own Gospel and the Book of Revelations. St. John's Gospel is considered to be different from the others, the synoptic Gospels and therefore has some status as an independent account.
St John is frequently pictured with a cup with a serpent emerging and one story tells of how he was made to drink poison but survived. My thoughts on this are that he most likely drank something with a punch in it before writing Revelations.

My own experience of mind altering substances is in fact nil. I offer this not as some show of self-righteousness, but as an oddity. Having been at school in the sixties, lived in both Portsmouth and BC and having a number of good friends who partake, I can't really believe it myself. I've read Lewis Carroll, and marvelled at his vision, carried around constantly a copy of Baudelaire's 'Fleurs du Mal' and yet still.... I was once prescribed a very strong painkiller when I had a kidney infection, which induced a state of euphoria, but visions had I none.

I suppose really that one person's weeds are another's flowers, we pluck out what we can live without and we can use another kind of weed to enrich or destroy our lives. In the end, as with almost everything, it's a matter of perception.