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" Seek the truth and run from

those who claim to have found it "

after AndrΓ© Gide

Extreme Pilgrim

January 5th, 2008

If you missed this programme last night or if you’re not in the UK you can watch this documentary on the BBC site here.

A colourful Sussex vicar goes looking for enlightenment in Buddhism in the mountains of China.Well worth seeing for its candour and its insights into life in the Shaolin monastery and a more hidden community higher in the mountains, whose master practices Qi Gong on a roof perched on a cliff edge.

The film is only viewable for 6 days from today.

10 Responses to “Extreme Pilgrim”

  1. Yeah, I was gonna see if I could download it and make it available, ha ha, but I use a Mac and downloading is only possible by Windows machines running Vista. What a crock of fewmet (as they would say at the DHP). But that’s no comment on the show itself, which I haven’t viewed yet. Only on the Microsoft mastery of the universe…

  2. Jings – I slightly misread the Top Posts lists and thought that the previous listing and this listing were the same and that there was a single post called ‘My intention is to undress…The Extreme Pilgrim’.

    Hmm – thought someone else shared the same guilty secret as myself and had gone public πŸ˜€

    Actually – it’s a really interesting programme. Pity it’s only 3 episodes. Come on BBC – give us more spiritual programming πŸ˜€

  3. Hello Alison!
    I don’t entirely understand your comment!
    You can rest assured your guilty secret remains a secret (at least to this reader)!
    Do enlighten us or not as you wish!!

  4. Well, my guilty secret is that I think that the questing Vicar is rather attractive (btw I’m blushing even to admit to it on a blog LOL!), so you can imagine how surprised (nay – delighted!) I was to spot a posting that seemed to say ‘ My intention is to undress Extreme Pilgrim’!

    To raise the conversation back up from the gutter level, I have very much enjoyed this little series. However, I would have liked to find out just how he applies his new-found enlightenment parish in greenest England. Has he stayed off the fags, for example? Has he profoundly changed or did the ‘awakening’ leave him once he was back in his familiar territory?

    I would have liked to see him looking at Islam….and why not spend some time with a British alternative spirituality, such as Druidry?

    Actually, I feel a bit better now for having come out and admitted that I fancy the vicar πŸ˜€

  5. Aha! So that’s it! I’m sure you’re not alone. I must ask Stephanie how she feels! πŸ™‚
    I too am interested in if and how he has changed. Firle is just up the road. We might feel moved to sing hymns one Sunday!
    Incidentally your Freudian slip of running the two post titles together to imagine the vicar undressing is far from being a topic for the gutter. In my research for a Bief History of Nakedness I have discovered that I could fill a chapter on nude vicars. There are vicars stripping off for fundraising calendars (trying to get money to refurbish the organ no less!) small sects that worship in the nude, and so on… And I have a 600 page book on Christianity and Nudism to plough through in my research…

  6. He seems quite a pagan sort of chap, for a Vicar. I watched his other series….on BBC2….name escapes me, but it was about the religious history of Britain and the first episode was about the split between, basically, Celtic Christianity and the Roman stuff. Very interesting. If things had veered towards the Celtic strain, we would have had a very different sort of Christianity today!

    Would Stephanie confess to fancying a man of the cloth?! Wouldn’t that be rather letting the side down? πŸ™‚

  7. btw – for those who have missed out because of the BBC restrictions, apparently RDF Rights has acquired the international distribution rights to this programme.

    So, should be on a screen near you reasonably soon, I suspect πŸ™‚

    AX

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