It was love at first sight. As soon as I set eyes on the beautifully crafted cabinetry of that grandfather clock, (and noted the knock-down bargain price), I knew I had to make it mine. I am glad I did. The deep-bass boom of the chime and reassuring tick-tock of the three-hundred-year-old timepiece calms my soul. The sound of it, accompanying the smell of blazing logs, provides surely a perfect Christmas combination, especially with chestnuts roasting on that open fire. I love that clock.
But keeping it to accurate time has taken some work. Over recent weeks, every day I’ve made the tiniest adjustments to the pendulum, a little to the left, a hair to the right, and now, I’m thrilled to report, it’s perfectly balanced, accurate to within seconds. Voila.
And that’s how I like to think of myself. In my opinions, my theology, my lifestyle, I’m the balanced one. I’m not so sure about everyone else, but I’m centred: in a word, right. But surely, I’m fooling myself.
We’re all pendulums, and inaccurate ones at that. Our responses are usually in reaction to something, and however much we fool ourselves that we live in the epicentre of correctness, our humanity makes us unreliable. We hold in our hands a Bible that is trustworthy, but the hands that grip the book are not.
Unbalanced pendulums wreak havoc in the church. The soul seared by betrayal swings into isolation, quickly growing a thick skin, thwarting hurt before it comes knocking. Wearied by breathless prophets who insist they know the mind of God, some people react by treating prophecy with contempt. Rightly angered by bullies thinly disguised as church leaders, others veer into anarchy, insisting God alone should lead, and thus rejecting His gifts of leadership. Others swing wildly out of church altogether, angrily insistent that all that singing and praying and small-grouping are the death-throes of a dying and outmoded institution. Good riddance to it, they say.
So how can we avoid the extreme pendulum swings? We can start by facing the truth that we’re not always right. That’s difficult, because we spend our lives quietly formulating our opinions, rehearsing them to ourselves in that inward conversation called self-talk. We’re rather convincing, at least to our own ears and minds. But we are wrong sometimes.
Let’s spend time with those we may not agree with, and give them permission to say so. Birds of a doctrinal feather tend to flock together, and too often we cocoon ourselves in social circles with like-minded people who heartily endorse our views because we confirm the rightness of their views.
We’d do well to learn to dialogue respectfully, and disagree agreeably. When healthy disagreement descends into lobbing word grenades at each other via the internet, nobody wins. For many Christians, their weapon of choice is a labelling machine. Someone steps out of line with our cherished view, and we swiftly brand them as heretics, liberal, dangerous, wrong. The danger of heresy is real and serious – which should cause us to pause instead of rushing to label people as heretics.
Meanwhile, upon hearing the beautiful on-the-hour chimes of my clock, I realise my ancient timepiece is once again at odds with my more accurate Apple watch. Yikes. It’s out by a whole three minutes. Perhaps another adjustment is called for. Who knows? Perhaps it’s time for yet another adjustment in me.