PUTTING GOD IN HIS PLACE

In the days when I tried my hand at teaching, a kind of madness would occasionally come over me and I would try something a little unorthodox with the fourth years. Always it was the poor fourth years, bless 'em. Of course I didn't really think it was madness, more a flash of inspiration, my innate reservoir of originality, or just sheer genius. There was the "White Chair" business for instance. I'm quite proud of this one, even now.

A plain ordinary kitchen chair that someone had painted white seemed to do the rounds of the lower class rooms, for no apparent reason. One class after another seemed to use it, and when not in use, it looked completely at home wherever it had last been abandoned. 

It must have been a Tuesday, I was always a bit desperate on Tuesdays following Monday's attempt at playing golf. I can't help you with the actual content of the classwork; no idea now, but I do remember feeling how important it was for us to have a clear picture of this God person who had got us together in Classroom 9. 

I took the white chair into class and invited people to imagine that it was God. They were then required to respond appropriately to Big G. Yes I'm afraid that was my name for the deity. It worked like a dream. Several precocious young men came forward and prostrated themselves before the chair while one of the stalwarts of the art department, ( I recall him clearly, his name was Mitchell) got himself a round of applause by stroking the chair affectionately and then sitting on it, which after all is what chairs are for.

By now I needed my coffee break and so ended the class by suggesting that since God belonged to everyone, they should find the best possible place for him within the college grounds. My coffee break was interrupted by colleagues warning me that the fourth years were going crazy in the quad. And sure enough they were. There, atop a tower of desks, sat the ubiquitous white kitchen chair, now doing stand-in for God. It might not be where I or others would have chosen to locate  "God" within the college community, but the message was clear. The whole episode came back to me recently in very different circumstances. 


I had gone to Mass in one of the local churches, a building that is a compromise between the needs of the local authority for a school and the desire of the local faithful for a worship centre that looked like a Church. An elderly couple came and sat in the seats in front of me. They had to be helped to their places as they were blind. I hadn't seen them  previously but lots of people looked after them. They were inundated with greetings at the sign of peace, Neither of them wanted Holy Communion so the priest came to give them a blessing. He knows me well and glanced over their heads to me as he blessed them. I don't know if he was trying to tell me something, but I couldn't help asking myself, "If God showed up, what kind of welcome would he get? (White Chair and all that.) Or, to move the scene to today's date and place, if God were blind like these two folk, how would we go about showing him to his place? 

More: should God come among us needing to be shown around, what would we “Seeing People", choose to show him? What would our priorities be? Would we want to tell him about the nice community we’d found? About the people who joined us every Sunday, our kind of people. Would we feel it important to describe the building itself, the lady who plays the organ, the priest and the various other ministers? 


Or maybe we’d feel we should take him out of the building altogether. Perhaps we’d want to take him to the angry places in our lives, places filled with frustrated ambitions, muted fears or nagging doubts. We could take him to the happy places too, where everything seems to be running smoothly. 


Or, and here’s a question for sure, if God came among us, blind and needing us to show him to his place, would we really feel like involving him in our daily goings-on? Or would we rather keep him where he belongs, in church especially a new one that doesn’t look too much like a church? The very idea. The God who's puzzled us so much with his plans and his providence all these years, and now we've got him where we want him, and we're asking the questions!

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Morning....a reply! Thank you for doing your blog....I might not reply but I do read, think and soak it in. 

Love the white chair latest. Have you listened to Gregory Porter's "Take Me To The Alley".