Proof of God in Chairs

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.