Wofully araide
My blode, man,
For thee ran,
It may not be naide:
My body blo and wanne,
Wofully araide.
Thus nakyd am I nailid, O man, for thy sake:
I love thee, then love me; why sleepist thou? Awake!
Remembir my tendir hart rote for thee brake,
With paines my veines constreyned to crake:
Thus toggid to and fro,
Thus wrappid all in wo,
Whereas never man was so
Entretid thus in most cruell wyse,
Was like a lombe offerd in sacrifice,
Wofully araide.
Of record thy good Lord I have beyn and schal bee;
I am thyn, thou artt myn, my brother I call thee;
Thee love I entirly – see whatt ys befall me:
Sore bytting, sore threting, too make thee, man, all free.
Why art thou unkynde?
Why hast nott mee in mynde?
Cum yett and thou schalt fynde
Myn endlys mercy and grace
See how a spere my hert did race
Wofully araide.
Wofully araide,
My blode, man,
For thee ran,
It may not be naide:
My body blo and wanne,
Wofully araide.
(Anon. possibly by John Skelton)
Now I don’t at all insist on this. [Footnote: to be clear, I have no idea whether anything exists which could usefully if inadequately be described as God. I have seen friends flinch when I have even mentioned the word, felt them think, ‘Wow, does he believe in God??? I thought he was, like, ok. What a weirdo!’ The ancient ban on graven images was perhaps a good idea – we can be hopelessly suggestible and literal-minded. If there be any such thing as God, plainly it is not a beardy old man zapping things with his fingers and grumbling that things have gone to the dogs. I follow Coleridge’s attempt at an explanation: ‘For God is a spirit, and must be worshipped in spirit,’ he writes, ‘… the Eternal and Omnipresent, in whom we live and move and have our Being [rather than] a Person, from whom we had our Being.’ God, if it exists at all, is not something which can be understood like an equation; it is to be absorbed intuitively, more like music. My use of pronouns is just a convention and convenience (like Mother Nature or Father Time).] But my immediate feeling at epiphany time was that our habitual failure to notice the marvels of reality (or rather ‘the reality of marvels’) was embarrassing and that their Creator – God, if it be She – would be bewildered. She has put on the most incredible show which we ignore so that we can listen to soap-operas (‘they are bound by The Archers’ – Isaiah 22.3). Re-reading the Gospels, I was struck by how often Jesus is baffled by the stolid density of his trusty disciples: ‘Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith? … Wherefore didst thou doubt? … How is it that ye do not understand? … Are ye yet also without understanding? … Where is your faith? … And he marvelled because of their unbelief.’ It is to the credit of the evangelists that they record the tellings-off they received for their stupidity. It also reveals a very human Jesus and, perhaps, the difficulties and frustrations you might expect a divine being to have dealing with ordinary, limited, conventional, flawed humans for whom a bloke, even a clever one, even a walking-on-water, dead-raising one, is a bloke.
It may be that my sense of God’s bewilderment that January morning was, in fact, just a shamed realisation of my own wrong-headedness, of the ‘sin’ that I unexpectedly identified in the last section and for which I wish I could find another name. ‘Transgression’, ‘trespass’ and ‘demerit’ are still too liturgical; ‘error’ and ‘flaw’ are too general; other words specify only commission or omission, but not both (though ‘laches’ is a good discovery). ‘Peccancy’ sounds too technical, ‘unbiddableness’ is just a bit too long. Perhaps I could try another language – ‘pechod’ from Welsh.
Our pechod, then – this going awry – very often arises because we are all too biddable to the social and cultural distractions around us (which is why I had been so blind to the reality of reality until my little epiphany). Sometimes we try to ‘fit in’ in our eagerness to be popular, sometimes we’re just so lazy we take whatever is offered to us. Either way, we often think what we are told to think, and feel what we are expected to feel. Most of what we absorb from the media is dishonest or, at best, unhonest, skewed by the tale-teller’s own interests. The first premise of Facebook is wanting to be ‘liked’, which is not a great incentive to truthfulness. The politicians, news editors, bloggers, even advertisers probably do not actively want to be dishonest (and they certainly don’t want to be exposed as such). All things being equal they would like to be transparent and true but things aren’t quite equal and, ultimately, they want our support – votes, ratings, hits, circulation, whatever – before anything else. We are the means to their ends of influence and wealth.
Ruskin is unimpressed by our flaccid biddability:
‘[Man’s] true life is like that of the lower organic beings, the independent force by which he moulds and governs external things; it is a force of assimilation which converts everything around him into food or into instruments and which, however humbly or obediently it may listen to or follow the guidance of superior intelligence, never forfeits its own authority as a judging principle, as a will capable either of obeying or rebelling. His false life … is that life of custom and accident in which many of us pass much of our time in the world; that life in which we do what we have not proposed, and speak what we do not mean, and assent to what we do not understand; that life which is overlaid by the weight of things external to it, and is moulded by them, instead of assimilating them.’
Each morning I become conscious again of all that surrounds me – the feel of the mattress and duvet, the sight of curtains and trees and sunlight, the sound of birdsong and Ipsy wanting breakfast and, as I get up and move around, new realities are continually pressed upon me – different views, rug becomes floorboard, the sound of the kettle and the traffic passing. A blizzard of sensory stimuli. Flickering leaves catch my eye……
…….so I ignore them and flip my laptop open to see what’s happening somewhere else. What a miserable rejection of my life that is! What a craven supposition that things are likely to be a bit dull here and that somewhere else they must be more interesting – on the other side of that screen, that hill, that rainbow. We push away ‘the strange, strong meat of reality’ (G.K. Chesterton) and graze on e-popcorn.
The unreliability of our focus on reality is shown by an experiment called the Selective Attention Test, described here by Suzanne O’Sullivan:
“An audience is asked to watch a video of six players passing two basketballs between them. Three players are dressed in black and pass a ball to each other. The other players are in white and they pass the second ball. The audience is asked to concentrate and count only the passes made by those in white. The audience is motivated. They want to win, to get the answer right, and so they concentrate. When the video comes to an end, the presenter asks the audience how many passes they have seen.
‘Fifteen!’ the audience cries in triumph, pleased with themselves and certain they are right.
‘And how many of you saw the gorilla?’ the presenter asks.
A small number of hands shoot up but most of the audience are just confused. What gorilla? What is he talking about?
The presenter plays the video again. This time the audience are not counting. They are wondering what trick has been played on them. This
time they can see it plain as day.
The players are roaming randomly around, deftly passing the ball as they had before, but there, right in amongst them, is a man dressed in a gorilla costume. He doesn’t try to hide, he stops in the middle of the frame to beat his chest before he walks away.”
As O’Sullivan concludes, ‘they have only seen what they cared to see and their minds erased the rest.’ She herself had taken the test: ‘What amazed me was not that I had blocked out something meaningless and trivial, only paying attention to the thing that interested me. I had seen the trivial and instead discarded something so flagrant and incongruous that it was a struggle for me to believe it was really there.’
How much is out there which we never see because we’re so focussed on the all-important work of counting balls? Is God out there in a gorilla suit beating His chest in justifiable frustration? Or holding up a placard reading ‘How is it that you do not understand?’ Christianity has long known about the Selective Attention Test. The doctrine of the necessity of faith was insisted on from the start. ‘For we walk by faith, not by sight.’ We see with our minds quite as much as with our eyes and, as Mark Twain observed, ‘You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus’. Those who have spent their lives obsessively watching know that seeing is a skill, and not a mechanism. [Footnote: the great astronomer Herschel: ‘Seeing is in some respects an art which must be learnt … An object is frequently not seen, from not knowing how to see it, rather than from any deficit in the organ of vision’ and the obsessive peregrine stalker J.A. Baker: ‘The hardest thing of all is to see what’s really there’ admit the difficulty, while Einstein: ‘It is the theory which decides what we can observe’ and the classicist Robin Waterfield: ‘Observation is not a neutral exercise; and the assessment of the result obtained from observation is liable to theoretical prejudice’ acknowledge the limits of objectivity.]
Is God something you can see if you look aright, and can’t see if you don’t? Is God an optical illusion? Or is godlessness an optical illusion? Do we see a vase – an object in a purely material universe? Or is it two faces – God speaking to us perhaps – and the space between, through which we communicate, a mirage of materialism?
In fact, the most persuasive argument I know for God’s existence is his invisibility. Flaubert put me on to this: ‘the artist must no more appear in his work than God does in nature.’ [Footnote: there may seem to be a contradiction between this claim and this self-referential piece of writing. But every book is subjective, however ‘definitive’ it may wish to appear. The personal elements in this book are intended as a constant reminder to the reader that this has been written by a flawed, limited individual with no especial authority; you can’t just graze the pages and ingest the message – you have to stop and consider for yourself. It is a suggestive work, rather than a declamatory one. If, meanwhile, I refer to Christianity more than to any other faith, it is because of the culture I was born into and know best. We all have to start from somewhere and one’s own doorstep seems the most honest place. I am sure that mutatis mutandis the same arguments could be made with reference to other faiths. There can be no love, no understanding, no hope without a perpetual mutatis mutandis. The same is true, of course, of the poems and pictures scattered throughout this. They are each, I hope, pertinent in some way, but they are also my pertinencies. Perhaps I should also produce a mutatis mutandis edition with no pictures but blank spaces for you to Pritt-stick in your own cultural touchstones. STA goes interactive.] If the Creation is an unending act of creativity, if all that is is art (and such a notion cannot be dismissed simply because we have recently invented machines and, intoxicated with our own cleverness, hence deduce that the universe must be a piece of machinery), the invisibility and ineffability of its maker should only be expected.
Seeing Him wouldn’t help anyway. As Auden pointed out, seeing God in all His glory at the Transfiguration ‘did not prevent them all [Peter, James and John] from forsaking Him when He was arrested, or Peter from denying that he had ever known Him’. The invisibility of God demands faith and that gives us the freedom to choose, to exercise the ‘will capable either of obeying or rebelling’ Ruskin demands. (It also means, of course, that faith will fluctuate, because it is a willed thing, dependent in part on our feelings.) Our minds have to be active, not merely acquiescent. Coleridge claims that God ‘could not be intellectually more evident without becoming morally less effective; without counteracting its own end by sacrificing the life of faith to the cold mechanism of a worthless because compulsory assent.’ The necessity for faith is proof against determinism. As the Selective Attention Test shows, we are active players in life, not merely mechanical receptors. We are responsible for our attitude to the universe, and can’t blame God, nature, science or our upbringing for our decisions.
I have drifted – let us say ramified – some way.
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