As a child and teenager in the 1950s and 60s I
was presented by the Christian teaching I received with a choice regarding which
of two radically different environments I would inhabit. On the one hand, there
was the dimension of faith and certainty and sober, God-focussed living; on the
other ‘the world’ – a seductive but ultimately barren environment. This ‘world’
was defined not in physical terms, but as an attitude, a way of thinking and
living which excluded God, explained
existence in purely scientific terms, and regarded morality as the fruit of
human expediency. The persistent message from parents and church was that
‘worldliness’ – embracing the values of ‘the world’ was at all costs to be
avoided.
I understood this to mean that I should squeeze
myself into the mould of Christian living as it was modelled by the believers
in our circle, and indeed there was nothing I wanted to do more, for it was the
only lifestyle I knew or aspired to.
The opposite of worldliness and the goal of our
aspirations was ‘godliness’. Christians were to be dedicated to God, and
obedient to God. This dedication and obedience should be transparent in our
everyday lives, for if our hearts were centred in the divine, then we would
avoid both inappropriate and sinful behaviour, and an over-attachment to
material possessions. And as St Paul wrote (Philippians 4:9) ‘whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is
admirable – if anything is
excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things.’
The problem was that since I wasn’t certain
what it meant to have your heart so fixed on God that godliness became
instinctive, the instruction against worldliness reached me as a list of dos
and don’ts. Or it might be more accurate to say that I sought for a list of
‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ which would help me to avoid worldliness, and I didn’t have
far to look. In fact when I was young this list didn’t seem too burdensome,
since I was a biddable child not given to pushing too hard against the
boundaries, and in any case there were far more ‘dos’ than ‘don’ts’. I happily
accepted the few restrictions which were placed on me, happily embraced the
role of being an unworldly child.
But I found this increasingly difficult as a
teenager. The certainties of Christian
faith eluded me, and consequently I never felt there was any authenticity in my
attempts at Christian living. Besides this, due to the sheltered nature of my upbringing,
I hadn’t learned the skills to negotiate a relationship with ‘the world’, with
new ideas, and with those who didn’t share Christian beliefs.
And so for most of my teen years I felt I
belonged neither in ‘the world’ nor in ‘the church’, but hovered in between in angst-ridden
uncertainty as I struggled to find an authentic way of living and being.
Relationships were particularly difficulty – I felt
I couldn’t relate with honesty to evangelical Christians, because I was ‘not
one of them’, or with those I had been taught to perceive as ‘nominal
Christians’ and non-believers because I felt awkward and different and felt it
was my responsibility to ‘evangelise’. I knew that forming relationships with
girls who weren’t Christians was definitely unacceptable. The prime goal of
parents in the church was to see their offspring embracing the Christian faith,
and then marrying Christian partners. My
understanding of who could be defined as a ‘true Christian’ was very narrow,
and this led me to assume that any girl I met out-with the confines of our own
kind of church was somehow ‘in the world’. I would be aware of a great gulf
fixed between us, and I found it almost impossible to establish a natural,
relaxed friendship.
In daily life there were many activities on
which absolutely no restrictions were placed on grounds of religious belief. I am grateful that I was encouraged to read,
to develop creative writing, and to cultivate my passion for listening to (most)
classical music. But there were things which you simply weren’t allowed to do.
Wearing lipstick, drinking alcohol, frequenting pubs and dance halls were all
deemed to be forbidden territory by the kind of Christians we associated with –
not that I had the remotest inclination to indulge in any of these activities.
Listening to pop music – certainly of the pelvis-gyrating, rock-and-roll
variety was frowned on, although I was occasionally allowed to submit my name
to a request programme on the radio, which presumably played this kind of
music.
We didn’t own a TV until after we moved to
Carluke in 1962, when one was acquired, justified on educational grounds. As a
younger child I had glimpsed The Black
and White Minstrel Show in my friend Isobel-from-down-the-road’s front
room, and had watched Flowerpot Men and
Lassie at the next door neighbour’s. But
viewing TV in our house was an unsettling, morally challenging experience. You
could watch – but you always had to be prepared to switch off if anything
unacceptable came on-screen. Watching with mum and dad was stressful, as you
never knew when something might happen which would switch dad into censorship
mode.
I was allowed to watch Dixon of Dock Green, and Sherlock
Holmes, but never Z Cars or The man from Uncle which they were all
talking about in the classroom. But it was a Sherlock Holmes story which exposed me to the most disturbing image
I ever saw as a teenager. This particular show concerned a murderer who planned
to dispose of his victim’s body by interring it in the same coffin as someone
who was being legitimately buried. In the TV adaptation, a camera looked
straight down at the lid of the coffin as it was opened, and you were
confronted with the wizened body of an old woman. I had never before looked on
the face of death, even simulated death, and I was shocked and disturbed. That
affected me far more deeply than anything I would have seen the night my father
switched off This man Craig.
This was a drama series screened in 1966-67 in
which Scottish actor John Cairney starred as Ian Craig, a physics teacher in
the fictional Scottish town of Strathaird. Together, my parents and I had
watched several episodes of this innocuous show without mishap, but one
occasion, the plot involved some teenagers attempting to persuade a mate to
share some alcohol with them in a dark lane. This was enough for my
father. He rose to his feet, and turned
the television off, even as my mother was protesting ‘But he’s not going to
drink it!’
There was no discussion with me about what we
were seeing on scene or about whether it reflected the reality of school life
as I knew it, no reflection on what lessons could be learned from what we’d
been watching, no explanation as to why my father acted as he had. We watched
no further episodes of This man Craig,
and from that day on I found it almost impossible to sit with my parents in
front of a television.
Miss Taylor was considered extremely daring in
our days at Allander Hall in Milngavie because she attended Ben Hur. In general, Christians of our
sort eschewed cinema attendance. It was felt that much of what was depicted in
films was morally questionable, and that if you watched, at the very least your
sense of openness to God would be dulled. At worst, you might be tempted and
yield to the temptation to model your life on what you saw on the screen rather
than on what you read in the Word. To be fair, it was recognised that there
might be artistic merit in some films, but one was discouraged from attending
even these through the deployment of what was known as ‘the weaker brother’
argument. This was based on the teaching of St Paul, who considered that while
in fact 1st century Christians could with impunity eat food which had been
offered to pagan gods before going on-sale at the local butchers, in fact it
was not always expedient to do so. Your freedom to eat might perplex and damage
your more fastidious ‘weaker brother’ (or, presumably ‘weaker sister’) who had
a conscientious objection to eating food which had been used in non-Christian
religious ceremonies.
In the same way, it was argued, your freedom to
judiciously select a film and go to see it at the cinema (as presumably Miss
Taylor had done) might unsettle the faith of someone else who conscientiously
avoided the movies because they sincerely believed cinema-going was forbidden
to Christians. In any case they, seeing you in the queue outside the ABC, and
not realising that you were going to watch a particular film which you’d
checked out and felt was acceptable, might assume that your cinema attendance granted
them the freedom to attend any film
they chose. And so they might view something which would damage them by luring
them into unacceptable ways of living. There was also, I think, the implication
that you, the discerning brother was by definition better equipped to resist
whatever temptations might present themselves in the course of viewing a film
than was your weaker brother.
As a child, I had absolutely no idea of what
the iniquities were which haunted the great screens in the city centre ABCs and
Odeons, but I knew that at all costs they were to be avoided. I didn’t realise
at the time that what Christians would refuse to watch at the cinema, they
would view, avidly and without scruple, on their televisions at home, beyond
the watching eyes of both the weaker brothers and the church’s leading brothers
who might call them to account.
That was the one merciful loophole in the
attitude of the Christians I grew up with to the cinema – it was considered
permissible to go to see a film if it could be justified on educational
grounds. And so one day in 1967 I found myself travelling with my Latin class
to the Cosmo Cinema off Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow to see a filmed version
(in English) of the Greek play Oedipus
Rex by Sophocles, starring Christopher Plummer. I’m sure Oedipus Rex is a worthy piece of drama,
dealing with profound themes, and Plummer was certainly intense and dramatic in
his delivery, but all that was beyond me at the age of 15. I found the film
incomprehensible and boring, for I couldn’t relate it to my own experience. But
what I hadn’t realised was that there was a ‘B’ picture, and we stayed to
watch. It was Charade, a 1963 comedy
thriller set in Paris, which stars Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. I am sure it
doesn’t rank among the greatest films ever made, but it was my very first
experience of cinema, and it was a revelation to me.
But although you were given the impression that
it was easy to differentiate between behaviour appropriate to ‘the world’ and
behaviour acceptable among our group of Christians and so it was implied
acceptable to God, in fact the distinction frequently wasn’t clear-cut.
What caused me problems, however, were situations
where it wasn’t immediately obvious whether a particular course of action was,
or was not ‘worldly.’ I would discover
to my bewilderment that what I had expected to be considered inappropriate was
in fact deemed acceptable by my parents.
When I was ten or eleven they told me early in
December that there was to be a special treat round about Christmas. We walked
to the Post Office one dark autumn day just before tea, and posted a letter
which I was given to understand was in some way connected with the delight to
come. One Saturday morning a couple of weeks later they told me the day had
come, and unveiled the mystery. ‘We’re going to the circus at the Kelvin
Hall!’ I remember the stomach-piercing
stab of pain as, utterly confused, I slid off my chair on to the carpet, and
took refuge under the table. ‘But Christians don’t go to the circus!’ I
protested. ‘Going to the circus is worldly.’
Instead of saying something along the lines of
‘We’re so, so sorry if anything we’ve said or done has given you that
impression, but it’s wrong. God is really enthusiastic about circuses. So let’s
go along and see what it’s like,’ they took me to the shops and bought me a
plastic Airfix station for my electric train set to make up for the
disappointment of the treat which wasn’t, and that afternoon there were three
empty seats in the Kelvin Hall Arena. This outcome confirmed me in my thinking
that I had been right, and that they had been wrong.
And I remember shortly after we acquired our
first television my father noticed one Christmas that a film set in Burma,
where he had been stationed while doing his National Service in the late 1940s
was to be shown, and he turned it on. I was deeply uncomfortable with this – I
suppose once again I felt that the secular was bursting out of the cell I had
confined it to. ‘You shouldn’t be
watching that, dad,’ I said, with pious indignation. ‘It’s a feature film.’ And then I added ‘It’s
not true!’, unaware of the absurdity
of this remark coming from someone whose mind thrived in the imaginative
environment of fiction.
My father, who had never been to a cinema in
his life other than on educational visits while at school, didn’t engage me in discussion
over what I had said. I left the room,
and shortly afterwards he turned off the television.
And this confusion could work the other way
round as well – with my assuming that something was acceptable, which my
parents deemed otherwise. My last embarrassment with my parents over cultural
issues took place when I was in my early 20s. Someone I’d met through my
involvement with the Scripture Union
organisation had mentioned his enjoyment of some of humourist Gerard Hoffnung’s
radio sketches, and seeing that one of them was to be broadcast one evening, I
mentioned to mum and dad that they might like to listen to it with me, and
turned on the radio at the appropriate
time. I can’t remember much about the content of the sketch, but there must
have been something in it which my parents found objectionable. Without, as far
as I could see, any eye contact, they rose from their chairs as with one
accord, left the room and went off to bed without saying a word, leaving me
alone with the radio. What I was listening to suddenly lost all its appeal, and
I turned the set off. Nothing was said the next day, or any day afterwards
about Gerard Hoffnung. It was my parents’ silence which troubled me most – not
their views on Hoffnung’s work, but their choice not to explain to me what they
were thinking and why, and their unwillingness to explore my views. Of course I
was equally at fault for accepting and not questioning their behaviour.
In time, I learned that you can’t detect the
worldliness which destroys spirituality by listing the books you read or the
films you watch. I learned that God is bigger than I had imagined, God is active
in all creation, constantly prompting, whispering, seeking, nurturing men and
women into the way of grace and love. Also I learned that worldliness is bigger
than I had imagined – the pervasive spirit which rejects God’s values, a spirit
discerned in the poisonous presence of pride, criticism, bitterness, selfishness.
I learned that these fruits of darkness were just as evident in many people’s
lives within the Christian community as they were in society at large.
My parents could have done so much more to help
me form an integrated view of engaging with the world out there, beyond the confines
of Christian security, while making yourself at home in a God-focussed
dimension. I tried so hard to become what was expected of me, and I failed.
Much, much later, I grew to realise that God calls me to be my unique self, and
loves my unique self into being through accompanying me on the journey of life,
and that love for God, and openness to God is what sets you free to engage
fully with life while rejecting the value of worldliness.
I realised that
God is not looking for Christians, disengaged as much as possible from society,
supporting one another, looking for God to rescue them at the end of time, but
for Christians who love the world in all its brokenness, and know the risk and
danger of engagement, and yet are driven to be bringers of Christ’s love and
grace in art, in culture, in politics, in communities, in the lives of
individuals, getting their hands dirty but seeking to keep their hearts pure.
And of course
this is something with which, on their clearer-seeing days, my parents would
have wholeheartedly agreed.
