All We Need Is A Little Magic…And A Dog
Hello folks, Henry here. We have turned marriage into “The Brides Day.” By that we mean that on this day everything will be perfect. All the little details which go into making a large social occasion work smoothly are looked after, the groom is handsome, and the bride beyond beautiful in her new dress which she had to go to another city to purchase. All the stores had locally were rags. It is an incredible number of expectations, reinforced by bridal magazines and excitable friends. All we need is a little bit of magic. Sorry to burst anyone’s bubble, but something almost always goes off the rails and my experience has been that that is the part of the wedding that you remember years afterwards with a chuckle. Having said all this, I don’t know what to say about the wedding announced in this morning’s paper.
Datelined New Delhi the paper announces: “A man in southern India married a female dog in a traditional Hindu ceremony as an attempt to atone for stoning two other dogs to death…. After the stoning he became paralyzed in his hands and legs and lost hearing in one ear. An astrologer said the wedding was the only way he could cure the malaises. The paper did not say if his situation had improved.”
Notice the western cynicism in the last line of the quote. India has some great spiritual giants functioning as leaders in their communities. I question if this man’s astrologer is one of these.
The reason this sounds strange to our western ears is I think because we do not consciously believe in magic. We think that went out with the Middle Ages, yet we can have great healing faith in MRI’S, scans, injections of all kinds, our medical personnel, hospitals, and our western medical scientific industry. Our magic is simply of a different kind. So we can look down our noses at people who embrace a more “primitive” magic than ours. For myself I would like to know how he made out – if the magic worked for him.