First, the case for the defence. During the long summer holidays, many struggle to keep their children occupied with wholesome family-friendly entertainment. The idea that an otherwise under-used building, such as a cathedral, might offer a cheap day out for a bit of old-fashioned fun is hardly a bad thing. And if that means people stop seeing this ancient building, and the faith it exists to promote, as some distant and snooty throw-back, then all the better.
Setting up a crazy golf course in the nave of Rochester cathedral is all about inclusive access and generosity of welcome. And those who decry the idea are elitist snobs whose treasured sense of musty ecclesiastical silence certainly hasn’t proved to be box-office for ordinary people. After all, weren’t cathedrals originally also meeting places of market-place chaos and light-hearted ribaldry. A Christianity that takes seriously the incarnation has no need of protecting the sacred from the profane. Cathedrals should stop taking themselves so seriously. Throw open the doors. Give people a little of what they want.
I don’t buy it. And before I say why, perhaps I should make a small confession. I am golf obsessed. Perhaps this is a function of age, but whereas it might have once been true that I thought about sex two or three times a minute — or whatever that celebrated figure — I am now much more likely to imagine myself clipping a seven iron cleanly off the turf and watching it sail in my mind’s eye in a pleasing parabola towards the green.
I hit a seven iron almost exactly 150 yards. And I have more than once sat in evensong at St Paul’s — a little bored — and imagined myself launching a ball from the great West doors, calculating distance, up the length of the nave, watching it soar up towards the whispering gallery before falling gently into the choir. Could I really catch the ball cleanly off that polished marble surface? Could I get away with doing it without breaking something, getting caught? I thought about this a lot. And yes, I know, I was supposed to be praying.
But that’s the thing about the imagination. It is often all about flights of fancy, as it were. The mind goes where it will, considering impossible possibilities, weighing the options of things that tend to be precluded as nonsense by the sort of drab utilitarian thinking that keeps our imagination dead.
And among the craziest of things: you can begin to imagine the possibility of God. Cathedrals are spaces where this crazy thought is possible. Where God can begin to come alive in the space created by stone and air, and bread and wine.
Human beings often hate emptiness, silence, boredom. In silence we are forced to do without multiple distractions that protect us from the knowledge of our own finitude, our own mortality. Just as hunger makes us aware of our need for food, silence makes us aware of our own existential dependence. And for many of us, this dependence comes to be translated as our need for God. Cathedrals must be places where we are invited to step out of our everyday distractions, where an imaginative portal is opened up for the dawn from on high to break upon us.
There is a clear parallel here with the way too many parents want to fill up the ‘diaries’ of their children during the summer holidays, instead of letting them be bored, and through boredom squeezing out of them the sort of rich imaginative creativity that opens up far more exciting worlds and adventures.
Yes, I suppose you do detect a certain Swallows and Amazons nostalgia here. Because I do believe there is more excitement to be had with a stick and a ball, with building dens and dams, with day-dreaming and making up crazy games, than can be discovered in any of those pre-formatted simulacrums of the imagination as provided by the easy entertainment of the iPad and the X-box. And by the way, the imagination is free.
But we have developed this extraordinary sense that boredom is some sort of moral failing. The philosopher Lars Svendsen – author of a Philosophy of Boredom – makes the interesting argument that the idea of boredom being a moral failing is something that comes about with modernity. That in having replaced a belief in God with a belief in the self as the ultimate source of meaning, modern boredom is a bit like a loss of faith in the self’s ability to generate its own meaning. It is almost as if bored people have let themselves down. This is modernity’s equivalent to loss of faith.
The church must insist upon an earlier understanding – the nobility of boredom, like the nobility of the monk’s boredom in his cell, his waiting on God. Because, just as radio is better than television because the pictures are better, so, too, a monk can inhabit more worlds from the privacy of his cell than the constantly managed mind ever can. The entertainment industry can be a spur to the imagination. It can also be its enemy, doing the imagining for us. Stunting our own. Thus dulling the revolutionary or religious thought that this world could be absolutely and completely different to the way it is.
Crazy golf in the nave is not, strictly speaking, a desecration of the holy. The holy has no need of our protection; still less the protection of pompous priests and bossy vergers. But a space for silence and the possibility of prayer does need careful ring-fencing. Where else in our noisy culture is one able deliberately to sit quietly and contemplate the meaning of our existence?
Silence and boredom have become the enemies of a culture corrupted by a version of economic organisation that seeks to conscript everything we do into a form of consumption and profit-focused entertainment. The church must stand against all this. Offer an alternative. In an age where even libraries have become learning centres full of computers and the low throb of one’s neighbour’s ear phones, in church we should continue to make silence and boredom our friends.
For here we can experience whole new worlds, alternative versions of reality, sometimes wildly, shockingly transgressive, much crazier than crazy golf, sometimes life changing in their seriousness. For, among other things, these are the spaces in which we might experience the possibility of God.
That wonderful priest and curmudgeon R S Thomas put it best:
But the silence in the mind
is when we live best, within
listening distance of the silence
we call God.
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Subscribe“As Greeks have noted, the positive EU response to Poland’s militarised border management came far more swiftly and unanimously than when Greece faced the same tactics last year, after Erdogan bussed thousands of migrants to the border in the first — but surely not the last— open deployment of human misery as a weapon against Europe. No doubt, both Lukashenko and Putin are easier for the EU to rail against than Erdogan, who German leaders especially are still fearful to confront.”
The Greeks should have been supported far more quickly and unambiguously last year. I don’t think anyone other than the idiots in Brussels thinks otherwise. It just takes idealistic dreamers a long time to face up to a new reality.
This incident has the potential to get nasty, but the Poles have to hang tough and the EU needs to support them unanimously – regardless of any other arguments which are going on in the background.
Allowing these migrants through will:
a) amount to condoning the use of vulnerable people as weapons;
b) indirectly help to fund smugglers and the Belarussian government who are alleged to be making a mint off this new “tourism”;
c) polish off the last bit of trust the people in the EU had that there is any type of control going on over migration;
d) make legal immigrants feel like absolute fools for having taken the legal route (and having to deal with the no doubt significant hurdles on the way).
There is no pleasant way out of this situation but the truth is that we’re living in a different, harsher world now and this means having to make tough, unpleasant choices.
Lazarus’s noble sentiments enshrined on the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” are fine sentiments for a sparsely populated continent in an age before the construction of the Welfare State to indulge in.
Unfortunately, modern European states are based on the assumption that the state will protect the standard of living of the citizens and provide a safety net of benefits that in theory has been paid for by the citizens of those states. An enormous influx of migrants upsets the whole basis of these assumptions.
We in Europe may be the lucky holders of a winning lottery ticket compared to those who have been born in less happy lands but unless we defend our borders that lottery ticket will be much diminished in value.
Good point.
I’d add that at the time they put up the Statue of Liberty and then sticking that poem on it, mass immigration was not working out so well for the original indigenous inhabitants. It’s always been a bit strange to me when people cite the United States as an example on the benefits of mass immigration, I mean, sure, if you ignore the obvious.
No one should ever cite the US as an example of the “success” of mass immigration, virtually all from the Third World. Look at the Southern border and see who is coming in. Biden, like Merkel, has welcomed them and the invasion is endless.
US has maybe 330mm people and maybe 100mm are desperately poor. Really, really poor, on the brink of malnutrition, homelessness. Maybe another 100mm are working poor, a big step up. The numbers are staggering!
A year or two ago, there was a poll that essentially asked: How would you handle an unexpected expense of $400? I think 30% or maybe even 40% said they couldn’t handle it–it might be the beginning of the end, starting them on their one-way downward slide. And it’s easy to incur an unexpected expense of $400–very easy. The roads are so bad that I saw a study that found, on average, Americans pay about $1,000 every year in car damage due to bad roads. Sounds about right.
Yes, most don’t realise that America is both first and third world.
I would argue more Third World than first. Third World countries, by definition, have pockets of the elite that are extremely rich. Many of the ultra-lux flats in Manhattan are owned by these thieves, and are occupied maybe 1 or 2 nights per year.
I’d also add that the answer to the problems of the less happy lands cannot lie in the mass exodus of their citizens. While their problems are multiple and considerable, they are mostly not insurmountable. The general sentiment I have with regard to Afghanistan is that it was and is a hopeless project for the West to try and remodel the country in its own image. If the majority there wish for a Western style liberal democracy, they must fight for that and build it themselves. The same goes for the lands where these migrants are coming from: the West cannot and should not try to solve your problems by taking in everyone who wants to leave. That might be easy for me, as a holder of a winning lottery ticket, to say. But I’m not being glib, just realistic.
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
John Lennon had some noble thoughts too (maybe) but they haven’t yet become policy. Sonnets from 1883 by individual Americans should never become national policy.
It was a noble statement, and yet the USA limited immigration numbers to levels lower than those of the UK today.
I’m confident that the Poles can and will take care of this.
It seems its September 1939 and Poland is being deserted by its allies again. Not only Poland but LV, LT.
As a matter of interest, why are you confident that Poland can take care of this or are you being ironic?
Wir Schaffen das!
So 2015!
2021. Oops, maybe Wir nicht Schaffen das!
Newsflash for the EU. EU is being played once again! Someone needs to tell the EU that they are at war–maybe a hybrid war–but war nonetheless. The EU has options. Start with NO VISAS for Russians–and this includes you, UK, and US. A united front. None. Not a single one.
BBC’s disgusting propaganda reached a new low today–please, if you can, don’t pay the license fee–when it allowed MSF and others to talk about the poor “refugees” seeking safe haven, as per the rule of law, in Poland. Really! I saw videos of these scammers saying Poland No, Germany!
BBC conveniently omitted any reference to the NGOs like MSF as people smugglers, not humanitarian workers. No mention of the invading hordes using women and children as human shields, no mention that these people knew exactly what they were doing and took a risk. It is essential that they lose. For everyone who wins–makes it to EU soil–it means 100 or 500 will come. The word press shows a picture of a dead Syrian boy so Germany takes more than a million scammers? Crazy! The invading hordes need to sleep in the forest until they freeze to death or until they go back home. They should never be allowed even 1cm onto EU soil.
In other words, these disgusting, invading hordes have zero respect for EU law, no intention of complying with it, no intention of staying in Poland. The EU–supposedly–carefully considered how to deal with real refugees, real people seeking asylum, not the ridiculous mumbling of I fear for my life…. from everyone. Applicants were required to present passports and fingerprints at the first EU country, wait there, be processed there. But these invading hordes have no intention of playing by the rules, so why should the EU? They raise their middle finger–or throw a shoe, to be more culturally appropriate–at the EU and say–Screw you, I’m going to my cousin in Germany. Want to see my passport? I shredded it on the plane. Fingerprints: Good luck–I scuffed my fingertips so you can’t take them–you think I’m dumb, you think I’m staying in Poland, or Latvia or Lithuania? I’m off to Germany to be with my brother. I decide where I go, not you!
Newflash: if you lose your job in Afghanistan/Iran/Pakistan/Syria you do not have an automatic right to live with your cousin in Germany. Too bad, so sad!
In the end, I predict that each and every one of these invading hordes will end up in the EU and this disgusts me beyond words. EU–European civilization–is committing a slow suicide. At least Poland and Hungary have the good sense to fight back on a two front war–against Brussels and against the invading hordes. Once again as in 1939, Poland is left to fight alone and is deserted by its so-called allies.
Time for RealPolitik!
“Heil, Polen!”
“will be swiftly flown home”
It appears the author lives in a different world to my one, or at least their idea of swiftly is at complete odds with my notion of the meaning of the word.
The Polish authorities haven’t the problems we have in the UK. No droves of “yuman-rites” lawyers, etc and if a deportee was put on a Polish airliner there would be no Polish passengers staging a protest even if the deportee had been caught shoplifting. In fact if the deportee had been foumd guilty of a serious offence “Against the Person” he or she should consider themselves lucky to survive the journey uninjured. OK people the Poles.
If they are swiftly flown home, then maybe we could have some Polish judges on secondment here.
Do you remember all of the disdain heaped on American isolationists by wise Europeans, Americans who were said to be seeking an impossible “Fortress America?”
Welcome to “Fortress Europe,” y’all.