The Crooked Perspective

Ours was a conservative church, that’s for sure. Serious men wearing back suits, black ties, black shoes, white shirts. The women likewise reserved in their dress and in their manner. But then there was a troubling development. Someone broke ranks. Someone, you might say, ‘got religion’. He came to be called ‘Jimmy the One’. Well, in theory at least, everyone was believing the same gospel – the Nicene Creed, the Westminster confession – all of that. But somehow it had come alive for Jimmy. He started speaking about being chosen by God, about being anointed by the Spirit – and hence, I suppose, the nickname. I was just a teenager at the time, and truth to tell, my vote was with Jimmy. At least he was something different. At least he was enthusiastic about his faith. But there were lessons there for me in the way Jimmy was treated. Jimmy the One, you see, may have thought that it was all about God, but his name sort of suggested that it was really all about Jimmy. He was, others seemed to be suggesting, a little too full of himself rather than full of the Holy Spirit, as he was claiming. It was all a bit too clever-clever, a bit too cute, for our conservative Scottish tastes. Worst of all, he had broken ranks. Ours is a cold country with a bloody history. You needed to be tough to grow crops here, or fish the seas or mine for coal. Tough too, in more recent decades, to drill for oil under the North Sea, or set up turbines out on the ocean to capture the power of the wind. We are therefore a pragmatic people – engineers, builders, farmers, fishermen – not given to flights of fancy. Jimmy broke ranks with all this, just by his imagination and his enthusiasm. It mattered very little whether his faith was a truer or a less true version of the Christian faith. It was all about attitude. Fast forward several decades and here is another man who broke ranks. He’s a gentle old guy. He lives in a community of folk who try to respect the plane. He wants to build a meeting house for everyone, as there are too many people to all fit into one person’s house when the community needed to discuss things. The man is Scottish, but neither a builder or an engineer. But he sets about the task of building with the kind of pragmatism that is worthy of a Scot. It’s a circular building. There’s a metal ring at the top of the roof and rafters span out from it to sit on the top of the walls. He realises (just by intuition) that there will be an outward thrust from these rafters – they would not be weighing down directly onto the top of the walls. He puzzles over this for some time. Then one day he is passing a building that is being demolished. He sees steel cables. He asks the workmen if he can take one and they agree. So he ties the ends of the rafters of his building with the steel cable. Intuition had led him to a workable solution. What really inspired me about this man was what came next. He is thinking about windows. He decides on two. One he calls the ‘straight’ window. It is made from straight lengths of recycled timber. The other one he makes from the curved timber of an old whisky barrel. This he calls the ‘crooked’ window. He explains to folk that you really need both perspectives in life. You need the straight view – our pragmatic, Scottish view – that’s all about truth, honesty common-sense and getting things done. But you also need the crooked view – the crooked perspective – because, well, because the world is fundamentally mysterious. There’s so much we don’t know – that we will never know. And therefore our need to be open to surprises, to novelty, to the random and the mysterious. Somehow this old guy got away with it! He was humble in his manner, I suppose, and friendly and unassuming. It would be very difficult to take offence at him. So yes, people could take in that message he offered us – take in the crooked perspective. I grew up to be a crooked perspective person, I suppose. I broke ranks. I have not conformed. I’m always off on flights of fancy, abstractions, crazy ideas and crazy projects. And yes, sometimes the legacy of Jimmy the One haunts me. It’s all about ego. It’s all about showing off, being clever-clever, being a bit too cute – and even just wanting to be different for the sake of it – wanting to get my own way. Arrogance. Well, I don’t know. If you’re going to take the crooked route you’re going to have to expect some folk to question what you’re all about. People have all sorts of reasons for believing others to be arrogant or smug or just plain crazy. Often we don’t mean what we say and we don’t say what we mean. Often we don’t know our own thoughts and motives. Or it could be that there’s just some random thoughts and feelings that we give voice to and don’t think too much about. On the other hand, common-sense, solidarity, the straight-forward approach to things – these are strong influences trying to draw us back to the accepted ways and means that our culture has of dealing with everyday life. You’ve got to have very good reasons for looking at things differently. You’ve got to question yourself – over and over – is this just stupidity on my part, or is there something worth seeking out here? Is there some good reason for choosing the crooked perspective? Or is it just ego, arrogance, wilfully breaking ranks, attention-seeking? In a sense that’s been my whole life. And, well, if I was ever going to get a simple answer to this then I think it would have shown up by now. Instead, all I can do is muddle on. Try the crazy stuff, the less-than-obvious solution, the radical alternative. Too bad if other folk think I’m deranged, deluded and self-obsessed. And I’m not going to say that I’m grateful to Jimmy the One, or to the old guy building his round meeting house. It’s just the way things turned out, and perhaps they’d have happened this way anyway. The crooked perspective, you might say, once seen, can never be unseen. It’s got you for life.