Man on a mission
Above: Here he is in sadhu camp of Juna Akara Kumbh Mela in Allahabad in 2007
Above: Peter Owen-Jones
Above: Peter Owen-Jones on a sailing boat on the Nile
Above: Peter Owen Jones A punishing personal television programme
FIRLE is among the sleepiest and prettiest of Sussex villages. Best known as the home of the Gage family – after one of whom the greengage fruit is named – it lies outside Lewes and boasts a Georgian mansion (belonging to the Gages), a much-loved pub (The Ram), a cricket field and a nice little church. Inside the church you’ll usually find the local vicar, going about his daily business.
Pictures by Kate Eastman
But while his patch is an archetypal Sussex hamlet, he is in no way your standard parish priest. Yes, the Reverend Peter Owen-Jones’s day job involves looking after his local flock, pronouncing happy couples man and wife, leading prayers and the rest of it.
But Owen-Jones is also on a personal mission to break out of the conventions of the Church of England and draw on other more physically and mentally demanding world religions to help him get closer to God. It has led him to make a TV programme called Extreme Pilgrim , documenting his often punishing journeys in China, India as well as the Egyptian desert.
In the course of his travels, Owen-Jones learnt Shaolin Kung Fu, smoked intoxicating herbs with Indian holy men, lived alone in caves, contracted amoebic dysentery up a Himalayan mountain and more. The show is like a mix of Bruce Parry’s Tribe programme and a Michael Palin travelogue.
The shaggy-haired, roll-up smoking priest introduces it with typical determination: “What I’m looking for is a spirituality that is absent from western Christianity. A spirituality I know exists in the extremes of world religions. I hope to enter worlds where rulebook and doctrine are replaced by an individual relationship with God and where the attainment of enlightenment is won by hardship, privation and pain. I have to become an extreme pilgrim.”
It’s hardly what you expect from the vicar of Firle. Owen-Jones’ commitment to his cause is even more surprising when you discover that 16 years ago, he didn’t go to church and was working as an advertising executive in central London, having given up his mobile disco (‘The Mean Machine’), which he had run in the ’70s and his casual job as a farm labourer. Catching up with him on a blustery early-winter afternoon, it’s hard to know what to expect.
How did you go from the advertising industry to the church?
I think I’d been fighting against becoming a priest since I was a teenager and after ten or 12 years in advertising I started to lose that battle. Some very difficult questions began to emerge for me. I started going to church in my mid-20s without really knowing why and eventually I realised that I had to follow this calling. A calling is an extraordinary thing but from my own experience I can tell you it does happen. You just feel with all your mind, body and strength that this is what you have to do.
How did you start making TV programmes?
There was a programme about five years ago called The Power and the Glory, about a year in the life of the church. Because I’d written some books, somehow the BBC discovered me and asked me to do it. Towards the end of that year they asked if I’d ever considered presenting programmes. They brought me in for a screen test and gave me a job presenting a programme called The Battle for Britain’s Soul.
Your new programme Extreme Pilgrim raises questions about aspects of the Church of England. When did you start to feel that there were things out of place?
I’ve always felt strongly that the image of the church does not represent the faith of the church and there is a dissonance between those two points. For me, faith is about asking questions, not just accepting other people’s answers. I don’t like the word religion, because when faith becomes religion then it becomes about imposing answers on us all, and in a sense that’s dehumanising. Faith is about questioning what is this extraordinary thing called life, what is divine love and how are we to reflect or become that? Spouting Christian doctrine at people is immensely unhelpful.
During the making of the programme you experienced some of the rituals of Hinduism and Zen Buddhism, as well as Ascetic Christianity. Did you ever feel you had more connection with these faiths than you do with your own?
No, but I think there is so much common ground between the faiths. We really need to understand that these are complementary, not contradictory. I’ve always suspected that the way the guru system works for Hinduism would have been very much the pattern in which Christ would have lived. But to actually see it in operation, it becomes quite clear that that was the case. And when Christ talks about leaving family and going out to just follow God, what he’s talking about is the Buddhist notion of non-attachment to possessions or to being possessed by others.
In light of current problems in the world, when you conceived this programme did you deliberately set out to prove that different religions could work in harmony?
We didn’t set out to prove or disprove anything. We set out not knowing where we would end up. I think what we found, up in the Himalayas where I lived in the cave, was an extraordinary generosity of love, which is common – I would hope – to all religions. I wasn’t expecting that to be as pervasive as it was. There’s a problem with some religions that they seem to judge their success by the number of adherents to them, which tends to demonise those who aren’t part of their ways. We need to ask ourselves – is that healthy? Having experienced what I have, my answer is categorically No. To maintain isolated religious perspectives is becoming increasingly counter-productive.
Was it hard to really immerse yourself in some of these worlds when you had a TV crew following you around?
I got to a point pretty quickly where I didn’t notice the crew any more. It wasn’t like being a real presenter where I would be always talking to the camera, there was no script. The crew were part of the experience but they weren’t driving it. We were very conscious of letting the experience drive us, rather than us setting anything up.
Which experiences stand out as highlights for you?
For me, the bits that stand out are all details, which are so very hard to get across on a TV programme – times when I was sitting on the side of the road in India and people would just come up and start talking. Or when we were in China, high in the mountains in the village, just sitting having a meal together and laughing.
Some of the things you went through look gruelling – the kung fu and the dysentery to name just two. What were the toughest parts?
I think the moments of illness were the worst – the toughest physically. But what I learned in India was that physical discomfort is something that plays itself out mentally. We can be as uncomfortable as we like, but it’s how we deal with that which will help or hinder us. I did get to some points where I burst into tears, but I think that was through exhaustion more than anything. I had to go into it saying My body is going to hurt, but I had to accept that and understand it.
Talking to Peter Owen-Jones, it’s hard not to admire his dedication to his learning and the open-minded, forward-thinking way in which he practises his faith. He’s intense in the way he speaks – intimidatingly so from time to time – and yet his subject matter is all-embracing and shot through with concern for the planet and the people who live on it. To the untrained observer, however, it may seem that he is operating on a different spiritual plain to much of the country, blazing a trail that others are yet to join him on. He seems to see this not as a problem, but as potential for the future.
Are people in the UK open to your ways of thinking about the Christian faith?
I think we live in an incredibly exciting time where cultural change and changes in perception tend to force the church to question how it is behaving and how it is relating to the world. We use phrases like multi-culturalism and multi-faith, but how can any of those things exist when you have sections of the community claiming that they have the single truth? The big question we have right now is how to make the best of this new world we live in. I don’t think Christians have the answer, or Buddhists or Muslims or Hindus. I think the answer is going to come from all of us.
You are someone for whom even being a priest does not get you as close to God as you want to be. Do you feel upset about the fact that so many people in this country have no faith at all?
No, not at all. I have great respect for the British people and I think this country has an incredible history of spirituality. It’s just that the spirituality of the British people now is not resonant with that of the church. A lot of New Age spirituality, for instance, is incredibly exciting, especially from an environmental perspective, and is doing a lot of things that the Christian church is not doing, and needs to be doing. I don’t look at the UK and think it’s going to the dogs, I think there are some immensely spiritual people.
Taking myself as an example of someone who doesn’t go to church and doesn’t feel the presence of a higher power, would you say I am somehow in trouble?
I think you should be going where your heart takes you and try not to lose touch of whatever your calling is. I think when you stop asking questions, that’s when you’re in trouble. People just need to ask themselves: Am I still asking questions? Have I fallen asleep? Am I living life in its fullness? I follow the Christian path, I absolutely love it, and the older I get the more exciting I find it to be. But I do that because it’s right for me. To say this is the way – the only way – is simply not going to work any more.
You’re far from the average person’s idea of a parish priest – in your show you admit to your vices, smoking and drinking. Is there anything else about you that would surprise us?
I think I do a lot of things that would surprise people but they have to remain private on principle! I see nothing wrong with enjoying a glass of wine or a pint of Harveys. These are delightful things. As long as they remain things we enjoy rather than things we need then that’s probably the right balance. They should never become devices to send us to sleep.
Do you find Sussex a nice place to return to after your adventures?
Sussex is a wonderful part of the world. I’ve never lived in a place in my life that I have loved so much and felt so utterly at home in. We are so lucky and blessed – I think – to be here. Yes our lives will fall apart at times, and yes we’ll have to struggle, but to do it in the context of this little corner of the planet is wonderful. Every morning when I get up I walk up Firle Beacon. I’ve been up it now 243 times – this morning was the 243rd time. I’m incredibly interested in butterflies and birds and it’s just an utter delight to be here.
With that, Peter Owen-Jones returns to his job serving the people of Firle, in his beloved adopted county. He’s already working on another TV programme, called Around the World in 80 Faiths, for broadcast later this year, as well as writing a book. It’s clear that this is a man with plenty to say about our world, and the ability to say it in multiple ways. You can’t help but get the feeling that if more people were to listen to him, and buy into his ways of thinking, our planet might just be a more peaceful place.
Extreme Pilgrim featured on BBC2 in January and ran for three weeks. This article featured in Sussex Life January 2008:
Click here to read and download January's Digital Edition for free
______________________________________
Subscribe to Sussex Life Now
01858 438832
______________________________________
What do you want to do next?