Gods and MonstersDavey Spens - 18 Oct 2010
God is not the same as he was when I was a kid. He couldn’t possibly be. Either that, or I’ve changed.
I was reading an article this week about how we spend our free time. What do you think is the most popular thing us Westerners do when we’re not pretending to work? It’s not eating, drinking or partying. It’s not talking to friends, playing sport or having sex. The way we choose to spend our time is to lose ourselves in made-up worlds. Video games, movies, daydreams, we spend more of our free time pretending we were pirates, or shooting aliens, or being whisked away by a man on a horse in a romantic novel, than we do engaging in real stuff. People came out of watching Avatar and wanted to top themselves, not because the dialogue was flimsy but because the world that James Cameron, the director, painted was too perfect. A lot of the time real life is boring. There. I’ve said it.
When you are a child the imagination seems to be actively encouraged, and when you grow up the rules change. My wife and I were sitting in Queen’s Park the other night when a boy with floppy hair and combat shorts conducted an assault of the bandstand, which he feared had been taken over by Zombies. His parents, a few yards away, dipped pieces of cucumber into taramasalata and nibbled blinis with chili prawns, while their ten-year-old son was seeing off the greatest threat North West London had seen since the Luftwaffe. “Get away from the generator,” he hollered to a couple of twins in tie-dyed t-shirts who were minding their own business with a tennis ball. “Give me back my heart!” he screamed. Erin and I sat between the Zombie siege and the yuppie picnic and decided that given the choice we would rather join the siege. I was just contemplating whether to wade in with a cricket bat when the boy’s mother dragged him off by the arm to have his al-fresco dinner. The poor boy had to listen to them droning on about Ocado deliveries and solar panels.
The imagination is a world where you can try anything and not come to any harm. You can fly a plane, sail around the world, invent a new condiment that puts the three best sauces (English mustard, ketchup, and HP) into the same tube and squirts it out like coloured toothpaste, or you could hang out with God and ask him some questions. One that if you were really in front of him would make him really mad like why did you bother making flies, and did you seriously expect us to believe you made all this in six days?
When I was at Sunday School we were asked to draw God. Most of us drew pictures of our Grandads, some of us drew pictures of Father Christmas, nobody drew a picture of their mother, or their best friend, or their cat. When I picture God now he’s different from when I saw him as a kid. He’s actually changed quite a lot. He went through a period when he was really really nice, then really caring, then really strict, then really laid back and now he’s getting stricter again. He used to not mind when I got a little drunk, or swore. I sort of like it that he’s got a bit stricter again, he’s a bit closer to what I think God ought to be like. Fun but with boundaries.
When you step into church you’re supposed to leave your imagination in the car park. It’s dangerous, all that imagination stuff. Leave the door open and you never know what might come in. If faith was advertised on TV it would carry a ‘not suitable for free-thinkers’ warning. But I genuinely don’t think you can talk to God without using your imagination. Not a decent conversation anyway. Maybe my understanding of faith is simplistic, but isn’t it all about leaping off into the unknown? You have to leave the real world for a bit, especially if you want to enjoy it. Forget the laws of physics and medicine and the stuff they taught you at school, we’re going somewhere where those things don’t apply. When you look at it in the cold light of day, yes it’s weird, you’re chatting to someone no one else can hear, but it’s also weird having a boring conversation about solar panels over a plate of scotch eggs when you could be somewhere more exciting.
When God talks to me I don’t want him just to repeat words he’s already said years and years ago to characters from Sunday School. I don’t want a hand-me-down God character. And I love the Bible, it’s the best evidence there is that God’s into stories, but instead of having a relationship based upon reading these transcripts of other peoples’ conversations with him I close my eyes, I use my imagination and we have our own conversations. Sometimes when I talk to him he laughs, most of the time he says nothing and just listens. I’m sure people think I’m a dreamer. But I’d rather be the boy in the park shouting ‘Give me back my heart!’ than his yuppie mummy and daddy passing the cucumber.