Burnt Offering

I visited a "holy shrine" yesterday. Or rather, I drove a group of people to a place where they visited a "holy shrine". I waited in the car while they carried out their devotions.

I've put scare-quotes around "holy shrine" because a shrine is only holy to adherents of the particular faith who claim it as such. Not adhering to that particular faith myself, I can't really think of the place we visited as holy, although it was obvious my group of friends considered it so.

It's not important which faith my friends' devotions fall under, nor where the shrine in question actually is. All faiths, I believe, have special places to which a visit is recommended, for one purpose or another. The purpose, in this instance, was, as far as I understand it, to obtain a general 'uplifting of the spirit' rather than anything more specific, as is often the objective of a visit to somewhere like Lourdes, in the south of France, for example.

We arrived early and secured a parking space quite easily. Not long after my friends had left me to make their way to the shrine, things started to get rather busy. Long queues of traffic began to form as the pilgrims arrived in large numbers; quite possibly the result of an extensive advertising campaign over the previous month on many popular radio stations.

I had a bit of a Batman and Robin moment while I was observing the congested motor vehicles, inching their way forward, their occupants hoping for a parking spot close enough, to their intended destination, to avoid a pilgrimage of the pedestrian kind.

"Holy smoke!" I thought, seeing the growing cloud of poisonous exhaust fumes ascending towards the heavens.

_{Powered by Zoundry Raven}