Saturday 17 December 2016

Sensible, Human Things

I came across the following quotation the other day. It comes from C. S. Lewis, writing about the atomic age:

The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things -- praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts -- not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.

In our age of rare wisdom and rarer good sense, this strikes me as a recipe for confirmed sanity. 

Our age of rare wisdom is also of course an age of ecclesiastical drama and chaos - the atomic bomb of the Franciscan papacy perhaps? The internet, moreover, seems to give us a front row view of the unfolding events, and hardly fails to distort them at the same time. The temptation to anxiety that grew after the events of Hiroshima finds a strange echo in the anxieties we now face in the Church. The revolution in Eucharistic discipline has its own potential for fission and perhaps even meltdown. Thus, the growing importance of Lewis's prescient recipe for sanity. 

When the crisis comes, let ift find us doing sensible and human things -- praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts.

We all have our own recipe for sanity, I'm sure. Parents of younger children, like me, sometimes doubt such sanity is attainable, but it is there, lurking among the meteoric movements that gravitate around us in various stages of entropy. As I write, we are all 'working hard' in our living room, writing with various implements or fingers on a range of receptive surfaces. Breakfast is a distant memory while lunch is a pleasant and imminent prospect. The sharp winter sun has been dampened with a half drawn curtain and for once there is quiet. I know it won't last - this happy and paradoxical mood of sane industry and repose. In fact, as I write, one child has just fallen into jealous paroxysms over a sibling's writing implement - and we're off again.

But there it was, for a few minutes. Amid the chaos of family life, and the digitally amplified anxieties that would crowd about us like Tolkien's Ringwraiths, there breaks through the cloud such moments of wise, sane domestic normality. Our default condition is not to be in a state of apocalyptic agitation. Or as Chesterton says somewhere, we are most ourselves when the fundamental thing in us is joy

The soundscape is important too, for me at least. If I'm in the car on my own, I confess it might be as wild as a little Noel Gallagher unplugged. If I'm at home, it's more likely to be a Schubert string quartet, with all the vast hinterland of Romantic sentiment and classical remembrance that suffuses the music of the Austrian genius.  And, like a musical motive that broods and struggles towards its liberation in some inspired cadence, sanity in a mad, mad world, or indeed in a mad, mad Church, is a work in progress. It is not available to us at the click of a button, an easy upgrade or a software update. It is the result of a manual process. Or, the result of a practice. Practice makes perfect. 

In this observation, there is some terrible truth about what contemporary patterns of living do to us; about how they draw us away from the sources of sanity and push our noses into the troughs of consumerism and social media. It's not that we don't need to buy things or communicate and network with people. But how these garnishes of sensible life become toxins in the enclosure of digital space!

Anyway, enough of the blog. I'm away to be sane elsewhere for half an hour. Rome won't fail to circulate more madness before the end of the weekend, and no doubt it will catch up with us somewhere in the newsfeed or the myriad forms of panic on social media. Still, let it find us being sane and, with any luck, half the world away. 





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