It’s a funny old world

It’s a funny old world

The English writer G. K. Chesterton is often credited with the insight that people who stop believing in God do not cease to believe. Take away the supernatural and what you get is the unnatural. He wrote to the effect that those who no longer believe in something usually end up believing in anything and tolerating just about everything. He was speaking from experience as he had dabbled in the occult as a young man before settling into orthodox Christianity. Tolerance, he claimed, is the virtue of those who do not believe anything.

On browsing the bookshelves marked Self-Help in local bookstores, any observer can get a sample of the latest, most faddish therapies or the most popular gurus of the moment. It is curious that as some people have abandoned regular church-going and the practice of pious devotions, sales of candles have increased. As churches abandoned real wax candles for the fake, push-button, electrical variety, many people have turned their window-sills and shelves into veritable candle-racks. The use of candles, incense sticks and aromatic oils has made some homes look and smell like the local chapel following Sunday evening Benediction.

A glance through the columns of a local newspaper will assure you that superstitions of all kinds and magic incantations that are to be said ritually, are still alive, thriving in the spiritual vacuum. Some gullible people put their trust in lucky numbers to win the Lotto for them, just as others pay out good money to fortune tellers in a bid to put shape on their uncertain future. Even the ghosts of darker days have not quite gone away. Priests are regularly called to ‘bless the house for me sometime’ because the occupants are experiencing some kind of uncomfortable presence. It reminds me of the Connemara woman who replied to an anthropologist interviewer that she did not believe in fairies. She went on to add that just because she did not believe in them did not mean that ‘they aren’t there’.

Though heaven and hell have largely disappeared from the public consciousness, beginning way back in the 1960s, according to another English writer, David Lodge, the convicted criminals that tabloid newspapers love to parade are often consigned to ‘rot in hell’ by irate and presumably largely unbelieving readers. We have ‘neighbours from hell’ to remind us that hell can begin on earth and ‘holidays from hell’ to remind us that expectations of ‘paradise’ do not always live up to their glossy-brochured promises. The inheritance of Paradise as a reward for a life well lived has been replaced by the prospect of an expensive fortnight in Paradise Hotel or on Paradise Island in the present, as soon as the holidays can be lined up. The all-knowing Internet offers no less than twenty million ‘hits’ or pages of information that link the words paradise and holiday in their promotional material. The really virtuous, the supremely talented or the super-rich can perhaps look forward to a holiday home there or to retirement in such an earthly Eden. The reality seldom lives up to the promotional hype and the nearest we get to an earthly paradise is often found nearer home.

The drama of final judgement or saving one’s soul no longer troubles even the most sensitive of minds yet our society has never been more condemnatory or judgemental. We have high-cost tribunals that run for decades and investigative journalists shining the glaring light of judgement on every aspect of an offender’s life. We are encouraged to be non-judgemental in our approach to the trials and difficulties of life, even as so many people slump in front of ‘Reality Television’ and use their mobile telephones to pass sentence and judgement on the self-worshipping participants. The thumb signal that once determined the fate of Roman gladiators now determines the fate of those who take to the public stage, not with a traditional thumbs-down sign but with the button-depressing mechanics of text messaging.

Relics of the saints have been replaced by show business or football memorabilia as contact is sought with the alternative gods of celebrity culture. There is no shortage of adoring followers who are willing to paint, pierce or parade themselves in the team colours or with the logo of the sect. If you get tired of offering adulation to others, then you will be counselled to believe in yourself and all things will become possible. As Margaret, Lady Thatcher said wistfully on her unwilling way out of Downing Street and high office, “It’s a funny old world”.