On a damp and dreary Sunday in July, I am irritated by the memory of the persons who decided I was a tool of the Devil, a limb of Satan or whatever other holy invective the Christian Taliban uses to describe persons and purposes they are unable to understand.
This is how the sad tale unfolds. When I was much younger, I discovered that I could locate underground pipes and wires by observing the patterned deflections of hand-held divining rods. Before long, I was discovering natural underground water sources. Then came a fairly long career of locating unmarked burials in, and around, the perimeters of pioneer cemeteries.
There are some ignorant people who consider the diviner's gift as witchcraft and some highly educated ones who dismiss it as just some more quaint folklore. Both opinions are wrong. Almost anyone who bothers to learn the techniques used in the practice can become a diviner, although not necessarily a skilful one.
In my hands, divining rods are very sensitive to the presence of mysteries below the surface of the earth. They work. I need no justification other than that. They discover underground intrusions which produce magnetic anomalies in the Earth's ambient field. The anomaly may be weaker or stronger than the larger field around it or of reversed polarity. What these anomalies represent cannot always be identified, but in a cemetery they are graves.
I have located the lost graves of adults and children at the requests of rural municipal councils and at the urging of people searching for the last resting places of loved ones. In one municipality which I leave nameless the councillors were sharply criticized for using tax funds to pay for the evil practices of a sinister fellow who was in league with the Devil.
This is unfair. My parents - an anti-saloon Methodist and a gentle Baptist - deposited me in a United Church Sunday School at the tender age of five. I have been a faithful supporter for almost 80 years. During that time, my church, although a welcoming one, has reserved no places in the pew for Beelzebub or any of his minions.
Religion is a cultural inheritance. What you are and can do is a genetic inheritance.
Divining is in my genes as it was in the genes of the English country gentleman of my clan whose archaeological researching probably destroyed more than it discovered. There is more than one variety of Christian. I am of the selective variety. Although I accept the Bible as the repository of great wisdom, I don't believe every word in it. After all, much of it is oral history which was put into printed words by a committee of Jewish scholars.
Each of us shares a portion of our genetic makeup with every other human being, living or dead, yet each one of us is individual. It is both common sense and good religion to discover and use every gift in our genetic inheritance. Sometimes I wonder if a divine entity invented human beings as playthings or whether human beings invented gods in an effort to know the unknowable. Any day now, I might find out.
