L'enfer, c'est les autres

I'm in Paris with my retired French teacher mother, who is a big fan of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre famously wrote 'hell is other people'. I certainly got an insight into this yesterday when hubby and I queued for 75 minutes to get into the Musee D'Orsay in the rain, a wait which was exacerbated by some sort of strike. You visit France often enough and you get to know the word for 'strike'. Once inside the museum, which is fabulous and actually is worth a 75 minute wait, we made a beeline for the coffee bar, along with the 700 other people who had been queuing for over an hour in the rain. Then I visited the facilities - for another predictable queue outside the ladies' toilets. So many of us, all clamouring for our needs to be met. L'enfer, c'est les autres!

Mum insists, however, that this is a misunderstanding of Sartre's original meaning. Apparently what he was trying to say was not that being around other people was hellish in itself, but that other people see us as fixed objects. They perceive our personalities as set and unchanging, not realising that we grow and evolve with life's challenges, perhaps resolving to develop certain traits and downplay others. And of course we do the same to them. I am not the person I was ten years ago, and neither are you. A Christian might speak of 'sanctification' - becoming more like Christ as we seek to follow him.

The queue outside the Orsay is certainly a great place for training in righteousness. Anyone who can queue for over an hour in the rain and not begin to perceive everyone around them as objects in their way is doing pretty well.

Comments

Making the best of a bad situation

This morning, instead of going to church, I put this note through all the houses on our street. Despite being an extrovert, I have a tendency toward social anxiety. Despite being an evangelist, I really hate door knocking. As I approached each door, I noticed lots of “no junk mail” stickers and felt briefly worried. One sticker said “no unaddressed mail”. Putting notes through the doors of people I’d never met - even though we live within a few dozen metres of each other - felt risky. Even worse - some people were outside their houses. I actually had to talk to them! “Don’t worry, I won’t come too close,” was my opening gambit. As someone who suffered from OCD as a young adult, fear of contaminating others is quite a familiar sensation. We Brits have the reputation of being standoffish and maybe a bit antisocial, and the virus is not helping in this regard. And yet, I live in the commuter belt; many of us on our street go off to London on trains every morning and come home late

Halloween

It's that magical time of year again - that one night when my small neighbours knock on my door asking for sweeties. This year, I'm properly prepared: I have two pumpkins (I wanted five, but decided to be thrifty), a big tub of sweets and a tube of 100 glow sticks. The sweets are my concession to popular demand; the glow sticks are an attempt to represent light in darkness (a symbolism which will doubtless be lost on the kids). I'm seeing the pumpkin as my main opportunity to communicate something of my Christian faith to my neighbours. One year, while I was at theological college, Halloween fell on a Sunday. The new housing estate church I was assigned to met in a church hall on Sunday afternoons and many of the congregation were unaccompanied children. I googled 'Christian pumpkin carvings' and guess what - there are a lot of ideas out there, America being a country which is big on Halloween and big on Christianity too. I decided to carve a simple fish and c

Only connect

Last year on Ash Wednesday I attended an ashing service at St Paul's Cathedral. The service focused on confessing our sins and asking God's forgiveness. During the service a berobed priest made the sign of the cross in ash on my forehead. I thought this was pretty cool and refused my husband's request that I rub it off for the train journey home. Then we ran into an old work colleague of mine and I felt rather stupid. Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, is all about sin and repentance - 'sackcloth and ashes' and all that. But I wonder how many people in the UK today identify with the idea that they are sinners in need of forgiveness? My final year dissertation at theological college focused on the dilemma of how to call to repentance people who do not think they have anything of which to repent. I certainly didn't think of myself as a sinner when I first started exploring Christianity. I knew I wasn't perfect, but hey, who is? I have heard sin desc

Coffee Theology

Search This Blog