Flashing before one's eyes
Memory plays strange tricks, and (like death in one of my favourite movies) was whimsical today. I know that when you are about to die, or at extreme risk, your whole life is supposed to flash before your eyes. But what are the other circumstances in which long-unremembered details suddenly bubble up - more like gloops of mud from the depths of the primeval slime?
Both these memories came from the year when I worked as a language assistant in a Realschule in Gronau, in 1969-70. I wasn't yet 'a Christian' - or didn't know I was, or whatever - but the memory is that I prayed an awful lot during that year. And that prayer came out of being far from home, a stranger in a strange land, lonely, isolated, not many friends: all the things, in fact, that are so conducive to spiritual experience. It was a Joseph, or an Exile, experience. And who can tell, in the economy of eternity, how much weight that prayer carried? As if, when I came back to England and the time had fully come, God said, 'OK, Tony, now that I've got your attention, let me show you what it's really all about, and what I've got in mind for your life.'
The other followed on from it. What had I got to be so anxious about, anyway? Well, one thing was that the headmaster of the school was really keen on what he was hearing about the comprehensive school system which was just about to be widely introduced in Britain, and asked me (told me) to give a paper on it to a day conference he was organising for local teachers and educators. So picture this very un-self-confident, grammar school boy, who knew nothing about educational theory let alone comprehensive schools, and who hated teaching grotty German teenagers, reading up in a Penguin book about The Comprehensive School, and writing in rather faulty German a 45 minute talk, which he then read out to the assembled long-suffering audience. Nightmares about public speaking, or what?
Who could have discerned in this scene, the future addict of the 'buzz', the very distinctive high, you get from preaching or storytelling?
Both these memories came from the year when I worked as a language assistant in a Realschule in Gronau, in 1969-70. I wasn't yet 'a Christian' - or didn't know I was, or whatever - but the memory is that I prayed an awful lot during that year. And that prayer came out of being far from home, a stranger in a strange land, lonely, isolated, not many friends: all the things, in fact, that are so conducive to spiritual experience. It was a Joseph, or an Exile, experience. And who can tell, in the economy of eternity, how much weight that prayer carried? As if, when I came back to England and the time had fully come, God said, 'OK, Tony, now that I've got your attention, let me show you what it's really all about, and what I've got in mind for your life.'
The other followed on from it. What had I got to be so anxious about, anyway? Well, one thing was that the headmaster of the school was really keen on what he was hearing about the comprehensive school system which was just about to be widely introduced in Britain, and asked me (told me) to give a paper on it to a day conference he was organising for local teachers and educators. So picture this very un-self-confident, grammar school boy, who knew nothing about educational theory let alone comprehensive schools, and who hated teaching grotty German teenagers, reading up in a Penguin book about The Comprehensive School, and writing in rather faulty German a 45 minute talk, which he then read out to the assembled long-suffering audience. Nightmares about public speaking, or what?
Who could have discerned in this scene, the future addict of the 'buzz', the very distinctive high, you get from preaching or storytelling?
posted by Tony at 9/06/2004 06:24:00 pm
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