Peter Owen Jones, the posh bandana'd vicar with more churches than regular parishioners, comes across in this series as soft, flaky and narcissistic. He really illustrates the extent to which, in the West, we think 'spirituality' means having the chance to maunder on about our issues. Nobody he meets on his journeys shows the slightest interest in this, however; what spirituality means to them is discipline. The disciplines are somewhat different, but all of them are equally too much for our hero. He says he wants to get away from over-intellectualising the divine but, typical Westerner, he attempts to do this at every turn. And the very notion of spending a month each 'being' a Sadhu, a Christian hermit, and a Shaolin monk is obviously a paradigm of our consumer spirituality.
But the faults of the presenter are not faults in the programme; actually his very inadequacy makes him a good representative of the viewer. He is, at least, genuinely open to what his experiences bring him, and he shows us ways of life which have been hugely influential in the world and filled a real need, but which we never see. I don't think you could watch this attentively without thinking about what spirituality does actually mean, or without being attracted by the peace present in each of the different traditions. That makes it a unique achievement in TV.
Certainly we are highly unlikely to see its like again. Liberal and relativistic though it seems, I doubt if this series could be made now: it takes Christianity as its base point, and it doesn't do a programme on Islam. Above all, the very idea that spirituality or religion are of interest for their own sake (rather than for the sake of multiculturalism) is foreign to modern commissioning editors. The 10 years since this was made represent an epoch in British TV-land; religion there now means only the superficial freak show of Sacred Wonders.
But the faults of the presenter are not faults in the programme; actually his very inadequacy makes him a good representative of the viewer. He is, at least, genuinely open to what his experiences bring him, and he shows us ways of life which have been hugely influential in the world and filled a real need, but which we never see. I don't think you could watch this attentively without thinking about what spirituality does actually mean, or without being attracted by the peace present in each of the different traditions. That makes it a unique achievement in TV.
Certainly we are highly unlikely to see its like again. Liberal and relativistic though it seems, I doubt if this series could be made now: it takes Christianity as its base point, and it doesn't do a programme on Islam. Above all, the very idea that spirituality or religion are of interest for their own sake (rather than for the sake of multiculturalism) is foreign to modern commissioning editors. The 10 years since this was made represent an epoch in British TV-land; religion there now means only the superficial freak show of Sacred Wonders.
