This week, I had the pleasure of joining in a Hindu ceremony in my local village in Bali. It was meant to start at 3pm, at 3pm I went out of my house and Grandma (not my Grandma, but she’s the Grandma of the homestay I live in and sure acts very grandmotherly towards me, giving me food without asking and so on) informed me that because of the rain, it likely wasn’t going to start for a while longer. But she helped me dress up, her grandson showed me to the temple, and I entered as the third person in attendance. The locals in attendance there were very impressed by my punctuality, since I arrived earlier than the rest of the village!
“Later, we go for a walk. You come also?” a woman there asked me.
“Sure,” I said.
“Whoah, really?” she asked, in disbelief that I would want to do such a thing.

I would see why later. I thought the ceremony was going to happen at the local temple, but instead the ceremony was the walking around. We walked in a huge procession, our group and another temple nearby who joined us. We walked a pre-set route, sometimes closing down the road (which I can imagine causing a big issue, given that this was about 4pm on a weekday and this is the major road in and out of Ubud), and stopped at other groups of people who had gathered outside other temples, where the priest would perform a ceremony for them. We did this, though it didn’t feel like it at the time, for about 3 hours: of walking and standing around while the ceremony took place.

Then we ended up back at the major temple, where all of us in the procession sat down and took place in the ceremony. I received some assistance from locals, but this was my second time at a ceremony, having attended one the first day I arrived, and so I was slowly getting familiar with the rituals. Afterwards, we all went home, Grandma gave me a mango and bananas from a package that I assume every family received (there were other food items in there too). I went out for dinner and saw lots of people still in their ritual dress, gone out for dinner (by this point I had taken mine off). It had the same energy as going to McDonald’s after a sports match.

One thing I’ve noticed about the religions in Indonesia is how good they are for connecting people. In Islam, because you have to pray five times a day, and one of those is likely to be the early morning one at the mosque, you are subtly forced into seeing the rest of the community and engaging with them. In Hinduism, from what I’ve seen so far, the community comes together frequently for prayers and ceremony, which forms the same purpose. Christianity, the dominant religion in the West, obviously has similar results with the Sunday mass. It’s not something I ever really considered before, but understanding religion not as a set of stories but as a means of bringing people together on shared values and having interaction between different members of society and allowing people to see each other, particularly in a pre-digital world, was obviously incredibly important. Religion is huge in Indonesia: you’re required to declare a religion on your identity card (drivers license equivalent). In Indonesian lessons, we’re encouraged to give a response of “Christian” if an Indonesian person asks about your religion, regardless of what you actually think. One woman at the ceremony asked me what religious ceremonies were like in Australia when I said I was going home for Christmas. How do I begin to explain that for most Australians I know, Christmas is a public holiday where we give and receive presents under a tree and have a huge lunch, not one where there’s a lot of religious significance still attached.

Most people my age I know are agnostic or atheist. I think this is partially a result of growing up in a world ruled by science and technology, where these things are prized and viewed as inherently incompatible with religion. Most people my age, for one example, will point to the Bible’s description of the world existing for only ten thousand years and compare that with what we geologically know about Earth and biologically know about humans and say that this invalidates the Bible. Recently, however, I’ve been rethinking my perspective on this. While I do think there are obviously parts of the Bible that don’t align with science, I wonder if this is really the point of the Bible in the first place. For a lot of Christians I know, the Bible isn’t literal: it’s a set of parables and guidance to reflect on living a good life. That means you can, perhaps paradoxically, recognise science and still recognise the spirituality of the Bible.

The Balinese gamelan is heavily mythologised in Bali. Each gamelan is considered to house a spirit, which means the instrument(s) are always treated with the utmost respect. You take shoes off before walking onto one, as a sign of respect. You never step over an instrument, just as how you would never step over someone sitting on the floor (or at least, would be very apologetic about it). A true non-believer would scoff at this: how can a spirit exist in an instrument? And yet, I can’t really explain it, but I do think maybe there is something within gamelan that makes playing and witnessing it a spiritual event. There’s a deep sense of connection with the other members of the ensemble, and you enter almost this trance-like state connecting you with everyone else in the room. It’s hard to describe without actually taking part in it. A true atheist would say that there’s some scientific explanation for this, somewhere: something to do with brains synchronising and whatnot. For me, it’s a lot easier to believe that there is a spirit inside the gamelan. What is so wrong with that?

I once went to a Q&A seminar about academia and Indigeneity. Someone with Indigenous heritage from Canada asked about a conflicting idea they had: their people said they had existed on their lands forever, having descended from the sun, but geologically he knew they had really come across on a land bridge from Europe thousands of years ago. How could he hold both of these things at the same time? Obviously his people had not been there forever. The (rather astute) response was (paraphrasing): “Dude, your people have been there for thousands of years. At what point do you draw the line on being somewhere forever?” Scientifically, his people may have come across a land-bridge. Spiritually, why shouldn’t they consider themselves as being there forever? What difference does it make?

As a result of all this, I’m coming to be quite soft on religion and spirituality. I think for most people these help maintain connection to life, provide space for reflection and journalling, and allow for greater understanding of purpose. Of course, there are still issues with many organised religions: power struggles, abuse of power and abuse more broadly, political influence, and so on. But I also think these are separate from the personal sense of spirituality and religion we all individually have. I think a Catholic does not necessarily support the Vatican; a Muslim does not necessarily want Shariah law. Ultimately, I think it’s about finding something that helps connect us to whatever sense of spirituality we have, and I think that’s something we should all be doing a bit more, regardless of religious belief.

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