14

In a mirror, dimly          

Julian Allwood

For the past three months, I’ve been spending a day every week in front of a green-screen, trying to create compelling online lectures. Dorian, my son, has been behind the camera, and the song linked to this reflection reflects the fun we’ve had.

 I want to raise three questions about reality as a result and from the experience of lockdown.

 Firstly, about reality and truth. With the green-screen, I can change the backdrop at the touch of a button, and I can also change who I am. That’s also true in real-life. Who I am depends on the context in which I was born and the context to which I’m responding. When Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13.12, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face”, I’ve never been less sure of what that underlying reality might be.

 Secondly, about reality and community. The reaction of the students to online learning has been anxiety. They’ve lost the reassurance of being together in a large lecture theatre, where they can see that if everyone else got the point, probably they can get it too. There have been many positives for me about zoom-life. I’ve enjoyed getting rid of work travel, having more access to people, spending more time with the people that work with me. But yet I’ve been on my own, speaking through a screen. We enter and leave the world with very few people around us. We express our Christian faith in a community. So, in the face-to-face reality that Paul describes, are we the person with the screen, or are we the person we are when we’re in community?

 And thirdly, about reality and individual creativity. I’ve loved making these films and the song is probably something only I could have made, whatever its flaws. Faith is clearly an act of imagination. But I think there’s a danger of it being a bit reflective and passive. What stimulates me most is to be creative, active, to do something that only I can do. I’d like that to my part of my expression of faith. Could there be a form of worship which allows each of us to express and extend the very best of what we can be?

 Paul’s verse ends when he says, “Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.” I don’t think I’ve previously been so conscious of the limits to my understanding of that promised reality.