I was 16 years old and I was meant to be revising for the most important exams of my life but Lord of the rings simply couldn’t wait. In 1988 Tolkien’s epic story of various species and their response to the possibility of having ultimate power became about the most important thing in my life (I say ‘the possibility of having ultimate power’ because those worthy of having it wouldn’t use it and those who wanted it never managed to get hold of it).
The idea of deep relationships, a quest so important that the whole world depended on it and the challenge of independent choice was so consuming that I actually changed the way I spoke to myself in my head (imagining myself as one of the characters) and named my pen-knife Glamdring (after Gandalf’s sword).
If you are anything like me, which I suppose some of you must be, then you’ll know what it’s like to be so absorbed in a story that it begins to shape your thinking, your responses to others and your actions, even to the point where your very identity is slowly moulded by the world between the pages.
TV and film do the same thing but, by some unspoken measure of acceptability, it somehow seems rather less admissible to be absorbed by projected creations than it does by those in pen on paper.
The problem with reading my bible every day is that I keep thinking about it. The simple task of buying my contribution to the adoration team meal on Monday evening became a mission from God, the choice of wine and juice became a moral dilemma and I wondered if God might surprise me with his voice from the reduced section: “Why are you persecuting my people by not buying at a fair price? .. Take your shoes off, this is holy ground…. Go tell the checkout person that ‘I am’ met you in the frozen food aisle”. I know it seems bizarre but this is the kind of thing we are reading in the bible, and reading it everyday it can be quite absorbing. Could God really be in Tesco or TK Max?
The sheer scale of how odd this must be for somebody who has no particular belief in God hit me in the fruit and veg aisle; What on earth am I doing talking to God? Why on earth am I basing my life on these conversations? And how on earth can I lead others in a lifestyle and worldview that is simply built on communicating with an unseen supernatural, eternal being? What would the other people sharing the aisle with me think if they knew this was gong though my head?
Yet I do get absorbed by God and his plan for our lives, I am moulded by the stories and characters in the Bible as I take my place among the many who are responding to a relationship with Him. And what an adventure it is! What meaning and hope it brings to life! Not just mine, but potentially for the whole world; though I do very much sympathise with the atheist Richard Hitchens in his book ‘God is Not Great’ when he concludes that Religion does more harm than good, because in many ways it does, though I am entirely sure that it shouldn’t, and neither do we have to exacerbate the problem – we can live in a ‘more excellent way’ as 1 Corinthians 13 tells us.
And once again, almost as quickly as it left, inner peace, amidst the doubt and complexities of this world, can return unrivalled to inhabit the limitless stretches of my internal landscapes (I know it is the same ending as the last one, but something profound every week? I’ll bleed dry.)
Paul Ad