Apologetic ramblings ...

So I’ve posted about going to Wattamolla Beach with a friend on Saturday. This is the same friend from work who came with me to the I ♥ Kirribilli exhibition last year. I didn’t have a lot planned for the weekend and was going to just rest and recover from last week, but then she checked the weekend weather and asked me on Thursday if I wanted to go down there. Like the Tramsheds, going to Wattamolla is one of those things we’ve talked about doing for a while. And sometimes it’s just nice to know that someone wants to spend time with you, so I thought ‘why not? – if you want to spend the day with me on Saturday, that will be nice’. So off we went.

We tend to have most of our “God conversations” when we get out of the office, because there’s not a whole lot of scope for having them in it. I never have try very hard to start them, and this time she began with, ‘don’t you think there’s a similarity between Tolstoy and Jesus?’ (yes, this is what we talk about when we’re on the beach!), which arose out of a discussion of our mutual appreciation of the film The Last Station, and aspects of hero worship …. So, on we went. Being a person who dislikes confrontation I do find these conversations a little stressful, just in knowing we’re in disagreement, and they get quite intense, and she’s very intelligent and researched so my head starts hurting with trying to respond to all the surprising things that come my way, and conversations are never really all that structured in reality. It's tiring. And further, she has a dislike of “proselytising”, because that is the antithesis of everything she believes in, which is allowing people to work things out for themselves (thus she appreciates Buddhism(?)), so I don’t know when it is that a dialogue turns into “proselytising”, and it would also have to be said that’s she’s trying as hard to influence me as I am to influence her in these discussions.

On Saturday she was telling me that she believes people are inherently good (which took me by surprise!), and had examples of native Indians that have been used to prove this and societies that are better constructed so that this is apparently obvious etc, and of course I disagree entirely with that, and agree with Solzhenitsyn that “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts” (from The Gulag Archipelago). So in the end she had to blame the influence of “culture”, and it's conditionings, for all the evil people manifest. And, you know, I didn’t really say this at the time but I was thinking ‘don’t you just despair? – because your only remedy is to work to alter the entire “Western Culture” – that’s exhausting!’. And she is heavily involved in activism, because that is what she sees as the answer to the world’s ills. It was a rather backhanded sort of encouragement for being a Christian really (while I felt the sadness for her), because I thought ‘here is a very intelligent, enlightened person, who has done more research than anybody I know, whose only hope is to basically reconstruct the world’. At the end of this discussion I had a sort of lightbulb moment about how the gospel really is a much easier (and more cohesive) framework and “solution” to live within than anything else any thoughtful person has ever come up with. I knew that, but I had a fresh moment of appreciation for it.

That's all.