It was a small gathering in our home of around a dozen
people and the discussion for debate was the existence of God. My youngest son had become bored with the
whole tenor of the conversation and was finding it hard to control his
temper. It is a general rule, I’ve
found when discussing religious subjects that if heated arguments develop it is
not worth continuing as the outcomes rarely lead to enlightenment. They usually end with a fall out of hurt and
aggrieved feelings. In my experience it
is not wise to tell a friend that their nose is exceptionally large. It will be taken as truly offensive not an
objective assessment. Worse still if
you tell someone their child is misbehaving, they will rise to their loved
one’s diffence and hate you for a lifetime.
But on a sliding Richter scale past personal slights, insults to their
offspring comes challenging religious views.
These classify as 9.2 on the Richter scale of damage fall out. Only the foolish, brave or stupid expose
themselves to such danger zones.
So it was with some concern I noted the rising voices and
heated tones as the discussion developed.
Susan, a rather large lady was an agnostic and had been belittling the
Christian and the Islamic Faiths with some fervour. How could any sensible person believe such twaddle. As most of the rest were religious people
from a wide range of backgrounds, hackles were not surprisingly rising. The small flat was packed every seat filled
and we had brought in plastic garden chairs. There is an advantage in uncomfortable seating, visitors are
not likely to over stay their welcome.
The quiet Quaker gentleman to her left launched into a detailed
metaphysical proof of the existence of God.
Halfway into his piece Susan leant over and sneered
“Who are we kidding here?”
My youngest son, Daniel had had enough. There was no escape in this tiny flat from
such challenges, he just had to endure what came and went. There were no private spaces to withdraw to
and obviously he’d passed his own personal limit of patience. He asked Susan,
“Do you want me to prove to you the existence of God?”
Coming from an adolescent in obviously bored tones this
silenced even the loud Susan. But not
for long she recovered quickly and extending her arm to him said,
challengingly,
“The floor is yours!”
Frankly, I was more than a little concerned. Daniel has many qualities but subtlety was
not one of them and I knew we had entered dangerous waters with a rather
articulate adolescent thrown in the mix.
He’d had enough of Susan dominating the evening and was determined to
put on a good show. Pushing himself out
of the stool in the corner he walked to the middle of the room and looked at
everyone around him soberly. He then
dramatically lay flat on his back on the floor and stared at the ceiling in
silence. There was an uncomfortable but
dramatic silence in the room and it filled with all the tensions of the
religious disputes that had dominated the evening. Those who had been offended had time in that short silence to
nurse their hurts. It was an angry
silence not a nice one. I wondered what
on earth was about to happen. Suddenly,
he stood up and said to Susan,
“The reason you don’t believe in God is because you don’t
feel Him. You are trying to understand
Him but you can’t.”
Susan started to speak, but Daniel held up his hand,
“Let me finish”, he advised
“It’s like expecting the chair you are sitting on to
understand you. It can’t because it is
only a chair. So when we try to
understand God we are like a chair trying to grasp what a person is. It is beyond us. But we like the chair can feel things.”
Susan had been silent long enough and interjected with her
sarcastic cry,
What exactly can the chair feel?”
Daniel approached her and pointed to the splayed legs of the
plastic chair beneath her and said,
“The chair cannot understand you but it can feel you, look
at the way the legs are bending.”
here he dramatically pointed out the
straining plastic to all in the room.
There was a horrible intake of breath as the significance of that remark
was digested. Mute horror followed, but
Daniel was in full throttle and took the silence as appreciation of his
point. We all stared in consternation
as Susan’s face blushed a crimson colour.
He elaborated,
“It means the chair knows you are sitting on it, well not
knows, it feels, responds to your weight, right?”
Susan blinked twice and looked at Daniel with growing
discomfort. He took her silence as
agreement,
“So even though the chair cannot grasp what kind of person
you are, it knows exactly what weight you are, because it supports you, all of
you.”
This was becoming painful in so many ways I cannot begin to
bring to life here in print. Daniel
however was well into his Attorney for God’s defence mindset and extremely
focussed on the argument in hand.
“So even if we cannot understand God, we might be able, like
the chair, to feel Him? Right?”
Susan sat, appalled by the turn of events and yet like us
all, strangely gripped by the theatre of it all. She was still blushing in her role as the magician’s assistant
and not at all sure where this was heading.
I wanted to start serving tea and coffee, or press a fire
alarm, anything to break the growing tension in the room but sat as horrified
as the rest, spell bound by just how awkward this all was.
Susan for the first time, that evening said nothing, just
nodded at Daniel, as if playing along would lesson the present pain. Then out of the blue came a small voice from
Susan, more of a cry than a statement,
“But I cannot feel Him!” She looked at only Daniel and there
was a desire there, a genuine desire to be understood. There was a truth in that cry and my heart
missed a beat. Gone was the aggressive
argumentative woman and in her place was a gentle soul, bewildered at the turn
of events.
Daniel spoke quietly in response,
“The reason the chair feels you is because it is under you,
the reason it can carry the weight is because it bends. If you want to feel God you must want to be
near Him, and you must bend.”
A magical moment in a very long and uncomfortable evening.
