Religion at Burning Man: Exploring the Holiness That Unites Us

LOS ALTOS TOWN CRIER
By Rev. Malcolm C. Young

The massive structure at the heart of everything was the Burning Man, standing on a spaceship, inviting participants to imagine an encounter with a vastly different culture and how it might change our self-understanding.

NEVADA---Burning Man, the weeklong festival in the northern Nevada desert, is one of the largest religious rituals in the western world. We danced, created and destroyed things together. We talked, cried, yelled and sat in silence. We came to the holy desert from wildly different places, but even in our ecstasy and despair, mostly we were one – like the future city that John of Patmos calls the New Jerusalem. I talked about God with Vedic priestesses, Unitarians, yogis, Quakers, entheogen voyagers, Episcopalians, Hindus, Roman Catholics, shamans, atheists and Zen teachers. I met people there who hate Christianity, people who, often for good reasons, associate it with bigotry and condemnation. This year’s theme, “Cargo Cult,” refers to religions established in the Pacific theater during World War II, when islanders first experienced the tremendous wealth and material power of American soldiers. [link]