Nelson Mandela

This quote by Nelson Mandela speaks so eloquently to me of what he must have experienced on his release from 29 years as a prisoner on Robben Island, as he tried to fit in again to the community he had left behind. I have heard over and over as part of the news coverage the Mandela was not a ‘church’ person, so I can only wonder about how his perception of that ‘might’ have altered over those years.

I would wager that most of you reading this blog can also relate to a time or times in your own lives when on returning to a beloved place or meeting with friends from years previous, you have found that things didn't fit so well anymore. Sometimes we need events like these. We need to become aware of how we have changed, of where we have traveled, of what new things have become part of who we are.

The church is the one place we can all go that remains for the most part virtually unchanged from what we remember growing  up … and many continue to go precisely because what they find there is ‘the comfortable pew’ to quote the phrase coined by Pierre Berton. Little has changed over the years; the ‘smells and bells’ are familiar!

 But is it also a place where we experience a ‘disconnect’ between what we are hearing and seeing and where modern biblical scholarship is leading us?

Interestingly I know from my experience it is actually easier for me to attend a traditional service where the visual and the auditory send the same message, even though I find myself bending my mind into a pretzel trying to cope with what I’m hearing, then it is to attend a service where there is a disconnect between the visual and auditory because my mind is then split into two, one part agreeing with the auditory and the other part at odds with the visual, and doing the ‘pretzel thing’.

And so this quote from Mandela resonated with me this week . . . as it speaks to my human condition.