Bishop's letters: January 05 +James Victim sof Spin

One of my fondest memories is of playing cricket as a twelve year old. I had the unsurpassed joy of keeping wicket to a brilliant leg-spin bowler. Batsman after batsman was tempted out of the crease – and duly stumped. As far as I know, his wicket record still hasn’t been beaten.

As Forrest Gump might have put it: Life is rather like a game of cricket. The Christians have been put in to bat – and the spin we’re up against is a barrage of false assumptions. These assumptions are deadly, and society (the bowler) delivers them with deceptive simplicity. Time and again, we’re tempted out of the crease only to find that the ball has sailed past and the bails have been whipped off. What we thought was going to be straight has swerved round the bat, and up goes the umpire’s hand.

Some of this spin has to do with our Christian faith. Many people nowadays assume that Christianity is all about being good or going to Church. Anyway, everyone knows (don’t they?) that faith of any kind is about values and value-judgements, not facts. So it doesn’t matter what you believe so long as you believe it sincerely. My faith can’t claim to be any more or less valid than yours – and vice versa. And – whoops, there go the bails again!

Or how about what really matters in life? Here comes the off-spin, catching us unawares. We’re so used to hearing that freedom, self-determination and physical well-being are the goals of our existence, we fail to notice that the ball is moving in a different direction.

Then there’s the little question of reality. This is the yorker, the one that stays low and slips under the bat. Reality, according to post-modernists, is arbitrary and meaningless. There is no ‘story’ which can begin to explain what is going on all around us. If you want meaning or purpose – you have to create your own. DIY is flavour of the month spiritually as well as physically. Blend a little bit of this with a little bit of that, choose (and choice is the value now) whatever suits you best from the smorgasbord on offer and hey presto – if it works for you, that’s what ‘real’ means today.

So to the googlie. Truth, we’re led to believe, is entirely relative. What matters is experience. There is no such thing as ‘absolute’, and claiming that there is makes you guilty of the ultimate sin – intolerance. This is the ball which looks as though it’s going one way – but ends up going another, and leaves most of us pretty confused in the process.

We’re used to the idea of ‘spin’ from the worlds of politics, marketing and the media. We’ve even learned to look out for it. But we’re often not aware that it’s going on all the time in the assumptions people make – and that we so easily end up making too because they are part of the prevailing ‘mindset’ of our culture.

There’s a new programme on radio called ‘Heresy’. In it, commonly accepted opinions (such as ‘men can’t multi-task’) are questioned and discussed. All the false assumptions that I’ve mentioned are ‘heresy’ from a Christian point of view. They are all ‘spin’: - and during 2005, I hope to use this page to explore them in more detail and offer a few tips on how to play them without getting stumped!

James Newcome