The succour of nothingness

abc imagineSome years ago, when my son was preparing for his Confirmation, dutiful parenthood obliged my attendance at what the instructor explained in an advisory note would be, and here I can quote only from memory, a “family day to celebrate our faith.” As an agnostic by indolent default, given that atheism requires a degree of effort and commitment, it was not an afternoon I anticipated with any degree of pleasure. But I had given my son’s young mind to the care of Jesuits, so it seemed part of the bargain that I turn up and go through the motions. As it happened, there was quite an education in store.

The first surprise came when the lay preacher charged with conducting the class asserted that the Eucharist is merely “symbolic” of Christ’s presence. Evidently that pesky doctrine of transubstantiation, the focus of bloody dispute during the Reformation and later, had been quietly retired. But that was a minor quibble in light of another of the afternoon’s jaw-dropping moments. Having minced Catholic doctrine, the lay instructor treated us to what she no doubt believed would be an uplifting musical interlude. This was, and I kid you not, a recording of John Lennon singing “Imagine”.

Here was a revelation indeed. Apparently, a willingness to “imagine there’s no heaven … no religion too” had been adopted as a foundation of Roman faith and belief. My quiet yearnings for a cigarette and a softer chair were banished by the sudden insight that this reverence for a hymn to nihilism might help to explain why the pews these days are largely empty. Good manners stayed an interjection, however. The Jesuits were doing a splendid job with my boy’s Latin and other invaluable subjects, so I reminded myself that wheat always comes with its load of chaff and managed, just, to hold my tongue. If the Church allowed its instructors to debase and betray the key tenet of its Mass and faith, well that was the Church’s business and no skin off anyone else’s nose.

Yesterday morning, while checking Twitter for the latest news of the Paris massacres, there came the disquieting news that Lennon’s avowal of there being nothing in this world worth defending, other than nothingness itself, was being sung by a Frenchman who must have hoped in the numb shock of the attacks’ aftermath to draw comfort from its familiarity, this plunked-piano paean to passivity.

“Imagine” is something of an anthem for the modern left, which by now has filled several generations of young minds with the notion that the ills of the world – the intolerance, anger, hate, inequality, not to mention all the wars their grandparents fought — are a consequence of fervently held beliefs. Slip into my nothingness, Lennon is saying, and we’ll build a better world – presumably one with a high tolerance for hypocrisy. After all, the man whose song decried private property and materialism — Imagine no possessions/I wonder if you can – purchased an entire apartment in The Dakota on NYC’s West 72nd Street building and converted it into a storeroom for his and Yoko’s fur coats. The “brotherhood of man” starts once you get past the lobby doorman.

Camera-phone footage of Parisians gathered around a street musician’s keyboard as he played Lennon’s ode to emptiness was so moving, at least to a certain kind of mind, that the ABC’s Twitter team quickly shared it with tens of thousands of followers. That’s their tweet atop this item. This, apparently, was a civilised reaction when confronted with the violence of those who still believe in something and are dead keen to kill for it.

If the Islamists and their fellow travellers saw that clip, and surely they did, they would have cheered more loudly than if problematic women were being stoned or trussed homosexuals tossed off tall buildings. .

“Look at that,” they must surely marvel, “the infidels believe in nothing and, how ridiculous, find comfort in the void where once their convictions dwelt. Oh, brothers, how can we not win!”

And they will win, of course, by bloody coups and creeping, insistent steps, because they believe as we no longer do.

As to my son, now a grown man, he called me from New York after the news from Paris and mentioned in passing that Obama would be gone from the White House within a year and then, if America gets a decent president, a muscular defence of our West might begin.

“Some people just need killing,” he said.

It seems I did a good job with the boy after all, the worst of Jesuit lay preachers’ meddling with his young mind notwithstanding.

— roger franklin

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(Those with an appetite for the spinelessly offensive can watch the kerbside performance of Imagine via the youTube link below.)

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