roadside shrines
Posted by Brian Draper Fri, 01/04/2005 - 10:18am
I've been thinking a bit about roadside shrines recently, and their emergence as a cultural and religious phenomenon across the UK and the world. Why are more and more shrines cropping up alongside our roads? What does it tell us about popular spirituality today? About death and memorials? About our belief in the after life? About our relationship to the road, even?
There are plenty of useful sites dedicated to roadside shrines now, but at www.abc.net.au I found a really useful transcript of an Australian radio programme - including the short story of a woman who had the telegraph pole - into which her son crashed and died - uprooted and moved into her back garden...
‘Mark was a young man, 18, 19-year-old, it was just before Christmas, he’d been out to a Christmas party, he was coming home on his motorbike. He had been drinking, his mate had been drinking. And he took a bend in the road, skidded, and ran into a telegraph post. His passenger had been flung clear, but Mark underwent severe head injuries and died at the site.
The parents had been contacted and went up to the hospital. The mother actually hadn’t gone in to see the body because of the dramatic head injuries. The mother had been told by a grief counsellor that instead of seeing the body that maybe she should go out to the site and say goodbye to Mark. She went out, but when she got to the site there was already a cross there, which she found out later had been put there by some of Mark’s friends.
She then, a few days later, decided that she wanted to go back and put a cross there. She then created a little garden and she’d planted a tree. She generally wanted to go out twice a week to talk to Mark and to lay fresh flowers.
The electricity company decided to change their power poles, and she’d heard and she was a bit concerned because the cross was obviously on the power pole. And the electricity company said, no, that’s not a problem, we’ll cut it down and we’ll give you a section. And she was given a section and it was about 2-metres high. And she took it home and placed it in her garden, and she actually covered it in a vine.
So she took me outside and showed me the actual pole that Mark had actually died on. And it was, sort of, in the garden, so she said now, although she still went out to the site and that site was still very sacred, but nonetheless she still had, very much, Mark there in the home, which she found very comforting.’
There are plenty of useful sites dedicated to roadside shrines now, but at www.abc.net.au I found a really useful transcript of an Australian radio programme - including the short story of a woman who had the telegraph pole - into which her son crashed and died - uprooted and moved into her back garden...
‘Mark was a young man, 18, 19-year-old, it was just before Christmas, he’d been out to a Christmas party, he was coming home on his motorbike. He had been drinking, his mate had been drinking. And he took a bend in the road, skidded, and ran into a telegraph post. His passenger had been flung clear, but Mark underwent severe head injuries and died at the site.
The parents had been contacted and went up to the hospital. The mother actually hadn’t gone in to see the body because of the dramatic head injuries. The mother had been told by a grief counsellor that instead of seeing the body that maybe she should go out to the site and say goodbye to Mark. She went out, but when she got to the site there was already a cross there, which she found out later had been put there by some of Mark’s friends.
She then, a few days later, decided that she wanted to go back and put a cross there. She then created a little garden and she’d planted a tree. She generally wanted to go out twice a week to talk to Mark and to lay fresh flowers.
The electricity company decided to change their power poles, and she’d heard and she was a bit concerned because the cross was obviously on the power pole. And the electricity company said, no, that’s not a problem, we’ll cut it down and we’ll give you a section. And she was given a section and it was about 2-metres high. And she took it home and placed it in her garden, and she actually covered it in a vine.
So she took me outside and showed me the actual pole that Mark had actually died on. And it was, sort of, in the garden, so she said now, although she still went out to the site and that site was still very sacred, but nonetheless she still had, very much, Mark there in the home, which she found very comforting.’
