One of the serendipitous tableaux
that is the life of an extreme Perceiving Person[1] is that
any book could randomly appear on your knee on a given day. Given that I should
be swotting frenetically for a “Negotiation Principles” examination it’s not
altogether surprising that I am choosing to read rather than work.
Procrastination is the thief of time, said
Edward Young, slightly less poetically than Robert Greene, who said
“procrastination in perils is but the mother of mishap.” Or might procrastination
be the gift of holy time?
(Yes I know I am writing rather
than reading at this very moment, but timey wimey and all that. Besides, as Sir
Philip Sydney emphasised, “The poet nothing affirmeth and therefore never
lieth,” a point that applies equally if unmeritoriously to bloggers).
Serendipity dwells in the choice of book that keeps me from my studies.
Serendipity dwells in the choice of book that keeps me from my studies.
For I was mooching around the
delightful Auckland suburb of Onehunga some months back when Alister McGrath’s The Twilight of Atheism fell into my
hands. Onehunga hides a magnificent bookshop, one that I first visited a
quarter of a century ago. “Hard to Find (but worth it when you get there)” is
the sort of name that would attract an extreme Myers-Brigg Perceiver, and it
did. When in the early ’90s I wondered in on the off-chance that I would find
the Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence,
I did. That serendipity combined to ensure that Hard to Find has been amongst
the holiest of holies of my book-browsing ever since.
So here I have been, reading the
incomparable McGrath (one of those writers some readers love to hate) but,
because I am an extreme P, methodically undertaking many more distractions as I do.
Some people methodically don’t
undertake distractions, but I find them to be as inseparable a verb-noun
combination as any the universe has offered. If, when studying for a
“Negotiation Principles” exam one failed to read McGrath, thereby omitting
opportunity to explore human propensities to watch basketballs and neglect
gorillas, thereafter composing a blog, how dull life would be!
And here I am, and yes,
basketballs and gorillas are a thing. Or things.
Because as I sat down to study I
inevitably elected, just briefly, to check my social media sites. There I
discovered an article entitled “Open-minded People have a Different Visual
Perception of Reality.”[2] I hope
that I’m pretty open minded, and anyway such knowledge would obviously benefit
negotiation principles, so I began to read. “Take up and read” is an
instruction humans should not disregard, as Augustine reminded us (as indeed does the Quran: "Read!" commands the Prophet. See Al-‘Alaq, 96:1).
However, half way through, the
author Olivia Goldhill cited the famous Selective Attention Test. In that test
viewers counting a number of basketball passes generally do not notice a
meandering gorilla.[3]
Given that the test has received 16,954,676 views[4] on
YouTube alone we can safely assume it has been reasonably influential. This
visitation, not my first, but the site’s 16,954,676th, set me
thinking about McGrath’s contentious thesis that Atheism is a much needed dog
that has had its day. Then I ignored the thought and meandered in a holy (I
hope) day dream.
Harry Chapin once sang, “There’s
no straight lines make up my life”; if it were me writing the song I would have
to go on to sing not his “all my life’s a circle” but something like “all my
life’s a squiggle drawn by a drunk slater finding its way across a blotting pad
after traipsing through ink.” The scansion is lousy and who these days would
know what ink and a blotter are?
My life’s journey is far
more like the drunken slater’s meandering than a circle drawn with a compass.
Remember compasses? Don’t take them on a plane as cabin baggage, though.
Chapin’s life, incidentally, was curtailed tragically early, a sadly small circle
if a circle. My lifeline more closely resembles a Tracey Emin artwork than a
pie chart. That’s life for a Perceiver extremis.
Compass? Where’s the compass? What compass?
(I probably wouldn’t advise
taking a Tracey Emin artwork through some international border security checks,
but that is for reasons other then those that curtail travel with
compasses).
As part of McGrath’s argument
that Atheism has had its necessary and corrective day, he makes it clear that institutional
Christianity has deserved pretty much all it got. Arrogant, oppressive, myopic:
the picture he paints of the increasingly marginalised Christian community is
less pretty even than Tracey Emin’s infamous bed.
Go on, Google it!
“Arrogant, oppressive,
myopic”: these are my words, but they match McGrath’s history of the Christian
witness that midwifed Atheism. His thesis is that Atheism, a jonny-come-lately
on the world religious scene, has fared no better, and possibly worse than
Christianity, hence the twilight.
But that’s not what slapped me across the procrastinating face as I watched the gorillas in the room. What slapped me firmly was that the alleged ecclesia of Christ is faithfully watching the basketball.
But that’s not what slapped me across the procrastinating face as I watched the gorillas in the room. What slapped me firmly was that the alleged ecclesia of Christ is faithfully watching the basketball.
When I was a kid at a relatively
terrifying Prep School a famous kiwi clergyman made annual visits. As far as I
know Keith Elliott VC only ever preached one sermon, but he preached it many
times. It went something like “Just as a sportsman [I doubt he was predisposed
to inclusive language] keeps his eye on the ball so you must keep your eye on
the bible.” I suppose, since I went on to be a biblical theologian, his words
must have had some impact.
Except that they didn’t. I mean I
don’t mind keeping an eye on the bible; it's an inspirational collection of
writings. I’m even conservative enough to believe that by the miracle of
canonization it has value above all measure and above all other writings, at
least in formation of God-consciousness. But I don’t think reading it, and
certainly not merely “keeping an eye on it” has any magical worth (the story of
Tarore is a different matter).[5]
That’s not what Padre
Elliott meant. For what it’s worth, I suspect he was committing synecdoche,
neither a sin nor a virtue, and probably a bit much for a terrified ten year
old to grasp. Elliott and his synecdoche were harmless enough: it may well be
the only sermon I’ve remembered in my life (my own included). I did hear it
many times, though.
But, if my life’s a drunken
slater circle, it’s time to tack back (as Peter Burling might say) to where I
once was, and as a differently spelt Eliot might say, to “know the place for
the first time.”
Sadly Keith Elliott was
inadvertently and tragically wrong. McGrath’s historical observations ring
desolately true. Arrogant, oppressive, myopic. My words, not his, but a
condensation of his thesis. And as I observe the church I love today, I see
this endless mantra continue.
Arrogant, oppressive, myopic:
myopic above all. McGrath argues that the Christian leadership’s bigoted vision
“noised out” all holy space, all silence where the God of crucified love and
resurrected hope might dwell. Power and self-preservation usurped the place set
aside for the presence of the God who is love (atheists did no better for their
absent god, but here that’s not the point).
It all rings true, I’m afraid.
Cast my eyes down ecclesiastical corridors and I see too many men (mainly,
still) in purple shirts and pointy hats echoing the chants of a Trumpite,
soulless, myopic world. Make Christianity (or perhaps only Anglicanism) great
again. I see the hollow men, fixedly eyeing a small picture, a one-dimension
world of dry economic and procedural puritanism. I see the hollow men blotting
out the zany creative breath of God. Occasionally they are aided and abetted by
those who are frightened by life, those clinging tenaciously to dry bones of an
imagined halcyonic past.
Yet there, sporting,
dancing in the confused peripheries of the big picture, is the gorilla. And
let’s not get it wrong: a gorilla is greater than a bouncing basketball. Perhaps, though we don’t like gorillas? We
might instead adopt a cuter fury substitute, a wookiee or an ewok maybe? I
suggest though we learn to like gorillas too. Dian Fossey was no fool, and
gorillas may just have a message for us. But whatever. The ball bounces on, and
it’s not the point.
As we watch the bouncing
basketball the gorilla, ewok or wookiee of awe, mystery, beauty, compassion,
love, justice, welcome and embrace saunters unnoticed across the court and
through the room. As we obsess with detail, counting the ball-passes, the
wookiee of hope and meaning saunters between the players. In centuries past and
present ecclesiastical power-brokers kept their eyes firmly on various
substitutes for observation, while the mysteries of God passed by. God was not
in the earthquake or the wind or the fire or the bouncing ball. God was larger
than life, striding, dancing across the obsessives’ vision.
The ball-watchers stared and
stare obsessively at the pseudo-gospel of a dull ersatz god.
They watched and sadly watch
still, closely, compulsively following the bouncing basketball of due process,
correct interpretation, canonical obedience, liturgical propriety, “the way we
always did it.” They trudged and trudge still, drearily following myriad
shibboleths of meaninglessness, collapsing in a quagmire of layoffs,
downsizings, closed, locked churches and sold properties, shoring up the
shrivelling empires that inhabit their forethoughts and prop up their
fiefdoms.
And (McGrath hints) the triune
Spirit of God, of awe, mystery, beauty, compassion, love, justice, welcome and
embrace, the electric God of sunsets and of love and of all things wondrous and
beautiful, greater than death itself, greater than Grenfell fires or Manchester
Arena bombings: she moved and moves still, on and on and all but out of the
court where the ball, an empty bag of wind, keeps bouncing. The mad dancing
triune God moves on and the house she once tried to inhabit crumbles. The life
in the room becomes desiccated, like R. S. Thomas’s spider in a drying chalice,[6] or guano
stained by dark fluids in the chalice of unlife.
McGrath’ history tangentially suggests
that we are left to listen to echoing footfalls in two ways: we hear a trudge, or we hear a dance.
Ecclesiastical leadership (by and
large) has trudged drearily on, turning away the seekers, wondering why its
myriad properties, possessions, profiles and parishes have crumbled into guano. Sorry, Neil Finn, but history
repeats. Or maybe wearily perpetuates. I fear much ecclesiastical leadership is
watching basketball. Bounce. Bounce. Bounce. Repeat.
Enjoy, as they say in the pizza
trade.
But if we pause and listen the
footfalls may just be the serendipitous dance of fairies. In the downtime of
holy procrastination there is meaning to be found. Some of us might chance to
follow the dancing God, though she has all but left the room. There be wookiees
and ewoks that way, not to mention satyrs, fauns, dryads, hippocampi and
unicorns. Gorillas too (but only in the movie).
Sadly the dufflepuds will stay
with the bouncing basketball.
Bounce. Bounce. Bounce. Repeat.
By the mysteries of grace others
may find in procrastination no less than holy dreamtime; there the warm
footsteps of a dancing, triune God reverberate eternally. I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.
[5] See Moxon, David. “Tarore
and the Spread of the Gospel.” http://www.nzcms.org.nz/200-years/wp-content/uploads/Tarore.pdf,
Cowley, Joy. Tārore and Her Book.
Wellington: Bible Society of New Zealand. 2009, and/or my Entertaining Angels, 71-74.
