Shopping will never be the same again. The virus emergency has accelerated what was already happening. Suddenly, in masses, we surf the screen, make a choice and have the chosen items placed on our doorstep.
Mary Portas and the high street retail outlets would like to persuade us otherwise but shopping at home, like drinking at home and watching movies at home, has come to stay. Going on-line has been given a prodigious shove.
Either way, on-line or up and down the high street, searching for what we need – kitchen equipment, fashion items, birthday gifts – is a form of hunter-gathering. We forage and search just as our far-off ancestors did – for food, for apparel, for lifelong partners. There is always some new quest. And somewhere along the line we may go hunting for that elusive key to the meaning – if we believe there is a meaning – of our days, months and years.
For that kind of hunter-gathering we don’t go on-line or to the shopping mall. Where do we go? Up to the Lake District, perhaps, where we can be over-awed by mother nature? Sometimes Wordsworth got it just right, as when in ‘The Prelude’ he describes the summer evening when he had a breath-taking experience of his own insignificance against a looming mountainous background. ‘…o’er my thoughts, there hung a darkness, call it solitude or blank desertion.’ Or we look into the eyes of a newborn baby and ponder the mingling of innocence and experience that awaits so hugely dependent a creature?
We find clues in these and other locations. And not only there. We may well discover that imaginative writers like Lewis, Orwell and Ishiguro ignite our curiosity and enlarge our horizons. But one set of documents we will find it hard to ignore is that collection called the New Testament. The reader is not required to come to the NT with ready-made respect and a conviction that here is truth awaiting our inspection. No, a reader can come to the Gospels as he comes to any other historical documents – with an open mind. He can read the four Gospels as he might read The Times, Mail, Mirror and Sun and weigh up each for what it is worth. No person making a sales pitch could ask for more.
It’s not all that hard. If we find the Gospels dull, flat and – worse – too much to swallow, so be it. The same has befallen other best-sellers. Nobody wanted to publish ‘Animal Farm’. ‘Alice in Wonderland’ had a slow take-off but it has come to be seen increasingly by one generation after another as an entry point into enjoying the absurdity of the human condition. There’s nothing wrong with sampling different products. The sad thing is not even doing that.
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