Everything At Once

“All I want to be is everything at once.”

Lenka, ‘Everything at Once’, Two (2011)

The relevance of the chameleon will be clear by the end of the first paragraph, I promise. Apparently this one’s from Malta.

Remember the Very Hungry Caterpillar?¹ The eventful life story of this gluttonous insect, written and illustrated by Eric Carle,² played, as I recall, a fairly prominent role in my five-year-old self’s formal education, though I have to say I was always perplexed as to why, if the caterpillar in question was indeed so very hungry, he didn’t just eat a few pieces of fruit in their entirety, instead of wastefully munching mere holes through a whole cornucopia’s worth. In fact, although The Very Hungry Caterpillar is indisputably Carle’s most famous work, I can’t say I could ever see why it particularly deserved to be; my personal favourite was always one called The Mixed-Up Chameleon.³

In this story, our reptilian hero, used to a simple life of changing colour and catching flies, takes a trip to the zoo, where he encounters and marvels at a whole variety of animals very different from himself. Observing particular abilities possessed by these other animals and wishing he too had these abilities, he finds that, by some mysterious magic, it’s not only his colour that he’s able to change; every wish is immediately granted. As a result, he ends up as a bizarre patchwork of creatures, sporting such disparate features as antlers, flamingo wings, a tortoise’s shell, and a giraffe’s neck, and totally unable to change colour or catch flies at all. And predictably, he realises that life as a typical chameleon wasn’t so bad after all, wishes to regain his original form, and, having regained it, goes contentedly home.

Be yourself, cries the not-so-subtle subtext; no good will come of wishing you were more like someone else. It’s a moral so obvious that I suspect we barely think about it beyond a vague approval to the effect that it’s a good lesson for the kids to learn. But I think it’s worth pausing over exactly what it was that our friend the mixed-up chameleon learned, because I for one am still discouragingly prone to making the very mistakes he did.

The chameleon’s ultimate problem was nothing more than straightforward covetousness – that is to say, desiring something belonging to somebody else. I’d anticipate that those of us who take the Bible as the authoritative word of God would all quite happily agree that coveting is a Bad Thing:

You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbour’s.

That’s the last of the Ten Commandments God gave his people Israel after rescuing them from slavery in Egypt, as recorded in Exodus 20.⁴ Now, funnily enough, I doubt that any of us finds her- or himself seriously wrestling with the sin of coveting someone else’s ox or donkey on a regular basis, but the real crunch point of the commandment is those few words at the end. As some of the other examples might suggest, we’re clearly not talking solely about external property – about stuff.

You shall not covet … anything that is your neighbour’s.

In the case of our friend the chameleon, it was the zoo animals’ abilities – attributes, talents – that he desired. He saw a polar bear and wished he were big, a fish and wished he could swim, a seal and wished he were funny. Coveting is a see-it-want-it sort of a process; one is made aware of the fact that somebody else has something, and resents the fact that it’s that other person who has it, rather than oneself.

 

Although if the chameleon had known about the threat of climate change, maybe he wouldn’t have been so keen to be more like a polar bear after all.

Moreover, it’s worth stressing that the chameleon wanted to be all these things simultaneously. No one improvement was enough to satisfy him; he wanted the ability to do anything and everything he saw another creature doing. Lenka expressed a similar sentiment in a song with which you may be familiar from its use in the 2012 television adverts for the then-new Windows 8:

As warm as the sun, as silly as fun,

As cool as a tree, as scary as the sea,

As hot as fire, cold as ice,

Sweet as sugar and everything nice,

As old as time, as straight as a line,

As royal as a queen, as buzzed as a bee,

As stealth as a tiger, smooth as a glider,

Pure as a melody, pure as I want to be –

All I want to be is everything at once.⁵

It’s a pleasant enough song to listen to, though it does rather give off the impression of having been written by a small child who has just learned what a simile is and is very excited about the fact. I don’t want to disregard Lenka’s lyrics too hastily, though: how often, after all, do I feel exactly the same way?

That I’m already graciously blessed with a good range of abilities and opportunities to hone them simply isn’t enough. I chat to a friend who’s particularly good at sewing, and wish I could do that; I hear someone effortlessly harmonise as we sing in church, and wish I could do that; I enjoy some kind of delicious food item that someone else has creatively prepared, and wish I could do that. Even if the skill in question is one in which I do already have some measure of proficiency, every superior demonstration of it at someone else’s hand is an occasion for my covetousness to rear its ugly head. It’s not that I want to exchange my current abilities for an alternative set, but that I want to supplement and augment them in almost every conceivable direction. Exactly like Lenka and the poor mixed-up chameleon, I want to be everything at once.

So what am I saying? That it’s an infringement of the tenth commandment ever to want to learn a new skill? That we sin every time we ever aspire to anything? Unsurprisingly, no. Covetousness isn’t wrong because it involves the desiring of something; there are all sorts of things it’s very right to desire, like the vindication of a just cause, or the love of one’s spouse, or the coming of the kingdom of God. Rather, covetousness is wrong because it involves the selfish desiring of something despite the fact that said something belongs to somebody else. You shall not covet … anything that is your neighbour’s. The implication, inescapably, is, “I would rather I had that good thing than you did.”

And that kind of attitude reveals not only a brazen flouting of the tenth commandment, but also – particularly when applied to abilities – a fundamental failure to live in accordance with 1 Corinthians 12:

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body … God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.”⁶

 

An example of an activity requiring input from both the eye and the hand.

The “I have no need of you” there can be doubly construed; on the one hand, it could easily mean, “I have no need of you because I don’t think that what you do is at all important;” or on the other, it could just as easily mean, “I have no need of you because I think what you do is very important, and as a result, I’d much rather do it myself, thanks very much.” Either way, it’s clearly not acceptable as far as God’s concerned. If the only reason I’m not coveting someone else’s abilities is because I’m disdaining them as unimpressive, that doesn’t testify to my selflessness but to my arrogance – which is really just selfishness in another guise. And if I am coveting, then I’m not submitting to God’s design for how the body of Christ – the community of believers, the Church with a capital C – is supposed to work. The section of 1 Corinthians I quoted above is sandwiched within its chapter between two other sections of very similar structure:

For to one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills.

And a little later:

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helping, administrating, and various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret?

The questions are clearly rhetorical, because they were already answered in the negative in the first layer of the sandwich. God doesn’t give anyone a full set off all the abilities going; he apportions to each one individually as he wills. There are always going to be loads of things that I’m rubbish at and other people are really good at, and that’s very deliberate on God’s part. That’s how the body of Christ is supposed to look. And, like everything God ordains, that’s ultimately a very good thing.

Diversity of abilities within the Church means we can’t all be splendidly self-sufficient islands; it forces us to depend on one another. We have to generously help one another where we have the capacity to do so – bear one another’s burdens – and bow graciously out where someone can do a better job than we can – submit to one another.⁷ It’s that kind of interdependence that creates a home for real love and unity, which, I think it worth mentioning, was the subject of Jesus’ last prayer before he entered Gethsemane, so evidently something of a priority for him.⁸ Coveting others’ abilities, by contrast, represents, at its heart, a movement towards robbing them of their God-given role, and practically kicking them out of the body altogether. “I have no need of you.”

So what can I do the next time I find myself pulling a mixed-up chameleon and wishing I could add an ability I see someone else displaying to my own repertoire? The answer isn’t to try to persuade myself that that ability isn’t actually that great and so I don’t really want it after all. Rather, I can take the fact that I do (rightly) value the ability in question and redirect it towards praising God for the way he has designed the community of his people to work. I can thank God that he has given that person that gift, partly for the person’s own blessing and enjoyment (which, if I’m truly being loving towards this person, should be a cause close to my heart), but also (more significantly) so that he or she might use it for the benefit of the rest of the body – which includes me, of course. And I can also thank God that he has given me my own set of abilities, partly for my own blessing and enjoyment, but also (more significantly) so that I might use them for the benefit of the rest of the body. Indeed, the benefit of one’s fellow-believers is, unlike covetousness, a perfectly valid motivation for learning a new skill, though one should still bear in mind that it’s not any individual’s job to be the whole of (or indeed a disproportionately huge chunk of) the body.

As the mixed-up chameleon found out, trying to be everything at once is more burdensome than it is freeing, and hinders one from properly doing what one is actually already good at – be that catching flies or writing blog posts. God designed the community of believers so that none of us would be encumbered with an obligation to be everything at once, but so that we would all be able to benefit from the fruit of one another’s unique abilities, in which light there’s no need for covetousness. So instead of wishing we were everything at once, let’s strive to be what we are in the most God-honouring way possible, and make space for others to do the same.

Footnotes

¹ If not, this audiovisual rendering of the classic children’s book is as good a reminder as any: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4HI7q38VmQ.

² A talented and prolific guy – here’s his official website: http://www.eric-carle.com/home.html.

³ If I recall rightly, this video version is the very same one that sparked my fondness for the story as a child: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEqoJMNU2eo.

⁴ Have a look at the whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=exodus+20&version=ESVUK.

⁵ Here’s the music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE9tV1WGTgE.

⁶ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+12&version=ESVUK. Give the whole thing a read and keep it open – we’ll be coming back to other bits of it in a second.

⁷ The italicised expressions are taken from Galatians 2, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Galatians+6&version=ESVUK, and Ephesians 5, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians+5&version=ESVUK, respectively. I’ll let you track down the individual verse references for yourself.

⁸ As recorded in John 17: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+17&version=ESVUK.

How to Write Epic Hymns

Unfortunately, I was forced by the download rules on the computer on which I wrote this post to reuse an image from a previous one. Not totally unrelated, though, right?

There is a formula for writing great hymns.

 

That’s not to say that every great hymn ever sticks to said formula like glue, nor that any hymn which does stick to said formula like glue must automatically be great, but it certainly seems to me that an awful lot of very good ones follow a clearly identifiable pattern that goes something like this.

 

Verse One focusses on God’s transcendent qualities, perhaps including his eternal existence, some key features of his unchanging character, and his work in creation.

 

Verse Two focusses on the incarnation (that is, when the Son of God became a human being, Jesus).¹

 

Verse Three focusses on the cross, where Jesus sacrificed himself to pay the penalty for our wrongdoing so that we might be reconciled to God.

 

At some point in Verse Three or Four, there’s a bit about the resurrection, when Jesus was raised to everlasting life as the firstfruits of a new creation.

 

And Verse Four, predictably, focusses on that new creation to come when God’s kingdom will be fully established in total perfection.

 

It’s not hard to see why it’s a reliable recipe; all the key aspects of the gospel are covered in a nice logical order. All the hymn needs now is a theme to distinguish it, a common lens through which all its components may be viewed, and it’s ready to be enthusiastically belted out on a Sunday morning (or whenever else one might want to enthusiastically belt out an epic hymn). The formula isn’t totally rigid, of course: extra verses may be included here and there to introduce other themes or elaborate on present ones; equally, verses might be squashed together; and we haven’t yet considered the possibility of such a thing as a refrain. Still, many really great hymns conform to the formula at least to a certain extent.

 

And I would like to make it very clear here that I’m not complaining. The gospel never changes, so it’s perfectly predictable that our hymns should be rather, well, predictable. Much as hymns can of course deviate from the formula without deviating from sound doctrine, the formula is, at its heart, a good and secure outline of the gospel, and so it’s surely commendable for a hymn to follow it. We should not be bored of these truths. Christians have a horrible tendency to want to move beyond the gospel, to reach Level 2, to attain to some higher level of divine knowledge – but there is no moving beyond the gospel that doesn’t amount to moving outside it. The following is from the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the church at Colossae:

 

And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, [Jesus] has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.²

 

The gospel from which we must not shift if we are to be presented holy and blameless before God is the same one that has been proclaimed in all creation. It’s the same old story, every single time, and we are to continue steadfastly in it, not rewriting the ending or getting distracted by subplots. The gospel, unchanging, is nevertheless the only thing that stands any chance of changing us.

 

In which light, I’m a huge fan of the Epic Hymn Formula and its stubbornness in churning out the same old truths. And it’s not as if every hymn that follows the formula is exactly the same; each has its own unique perspective on the gospel it proclaims. Those common lenses I mentioned earlier give us new eyes to see the same reality and be blown away by it all over again.

 

I’m writing this rather pushed for time, so I can’t provide as extensive a list of examples as I would ideally have liked, but here are a few favourite formula-followers of mine just off the top of my head:

 

At the name of Jesus

Crown him with many crowns

Christ triumphant

From the squalor of a borrowed stable (Immanuel)

How great thou art

I cannot tell

In Christ alone

 

A very meagre list, certainly, so I’d be delighted to be informed of any of my lovely readers’ favourites. Hymnary.com is a good place to search for old hymns (on which the copyright has expired!) by the odd bits of lyrics you can remember.³

 

Footnotes

 

¹ The word ‘incarnation’ is from the Latin for ‘in flesh’, if you didn’t know.

 

² Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Colossians+1&version=ESVUK.

 

³ It also has details of tunes, author biographies, and multiple scores for lots of them and generally seems like a pretty great resource: http://www.hymnary.org/.

Catch-Up Culture

“I soon realised the strangest thing about my new home. All the hunting is done for you by a tribe of hunters who bring food to the shops. In my tribe, everybody was a hunter, or made the fire, or looked after the children. We only did those jobs. The humans have many different jobs and don’t have to think about hunting and food all the time. This means they feel something called boredom. They don’t like boredom, but I think it’s very relaxing and so they should shut up and count themselves lucky.”

 Gareth Roberts, Only Human (2005) 

 

We always used to call these things 'zappers' in my childhood home.

When was it that the consumption of material designed for my entertainment started to feel less like a delight and more like a strange kind of obligation?


I’ve lost count of all the books, films, television serials, radio programmes, YouTube channels, video games, musical soundtracks, and so forth that have been enthusiastically recommended to me by various friends and acquaintances. In fact, ‘enthusiastically’ perhaps isn’t quite the right word. I’m talking about the kind of recommendations made in absolute incredulity that I could possibly be ignorant of the material in question, with great stress on the grievousness of the deprivation to which I am subjecting myself by remaining in said ignorance: “How have you not seen it? You have to see it. It’s so good.”


I don’t suppose this is at all the intention of those making such recommendations, but they always leave me feeling rather inadequate. If the thing in question – I’ll generically call it The Littlest Elf for the rest of the post, for convenience and because it’s a fun A Series of Unfortunate Events reference¹ – is something so good and excellent and valuable that I simply have to see it, if watching The Littlest Elf would improve my life so profoundly, then what does that imply about the state of my life at the moment? Surely the answer can only be that my life is worse than it could and should be, and, by extension, that I am worse than I could and should be, and that I am the only one to blame for the fact, because every effort has been made to enlighten me as to the virtues of watching The Littlest Elf, and if I would only stir myself to do so, my life would doubtless attain to the same quality as that of everyone else who has seen it.


In fact, I am entirely without excuse for not having seen The Littlest Elf, because I live in a catch-up culture where a whole ocean of entertainment is available right at my fingertips. No longer is it a case of asking the friend who recommended The Littlest Elf for a quick overview of the story so far before jumping it at whatever episode happens to be on next; no longer is there any need to glean the important details from the ‘previously’ clips at the beginning of the programme; no longer is it of any import whether one manages to catch the latest instalment as it is broadcast or not. Instead, between iPlayer, Netflix, YouTube, and a whole host of other video sites of varying levels of legality, access to every single episode is freely available. Catch-up culture doesn’t just apply to television, either: there are extremely well-stocked music-streaming platforms, vast online libraries of ebooks and audiobooks – almost every conceivable form of entertainment is downloadable within minutes if not seconds, no need to move from in front of the computer.


But if the availability of The Littlest Elf itself presents me with no obstacle, the availability of the time required to watch it is quite another story. There are, after all, only so many hours in a week, and most of the time, the vast majority of them are already spoken for – work, sleep, church, and so on – so that the rate at which I receive recommendations leaves me quite in despair of ever reaching the bottom of the list even of the ones I can remember. In other words, I can’t find the time to do what has been pitched to me as nigh on vital for my continued membership of human society: “How have you not seen it? You have to see it. It’s so good.” Clearly, there must be something very wrong with my priorities.


And it’s here, I think, that we discover the heart of the problem. Catch-up culture labours under the assumption that our greatest need in life is the need to be entertained. The range of advertisements on the tube, I think, evince this particularly strikingly: of the collection of huge posters at stations and slightly smaller ones inside the trains themselves, the majority seem to be devoted to forms of entertainment – books, films, stage shows, attractions – yet meanwhile, a by no means insignificant number are busily singing the praises of products and services designed to save people time. A couple of examples: HelloFresh, who offer home delivery of ready-to-cook recipe boxes, sell themselves with the slogan, ‘Hello, is it time you’re looking for?’; TaskRabbit, who arrange for people to do chores and run errands on their clients’ behalf, opt for, ‘We do chores, you live life.’ What do the tube adverts tell the good people of London they need out of life? In first place, entertainment, and as an auxiliary to that, more time to spend on that entertainment. Humanity’s greatest problem, apparently, is that we’re bored.


It’s a first-world problem if there ever was one. The notion that our greatest need is the need to be entertained – that watching The Littlest Elf is what will really make our lives more worth living – is  a frankly embarrassing testament to the level of comfort and privilege we enjoy in the modern west. The only reason we can be persuaded that this is so is because we take it so readily for granted that our more basic needs – food, shelter, safety, and so on – will be provided by default. My opening quotation is taken from a Doctor Who novel called Only Human in which a Neanderthal called Das ends up stranded in twenty-first-century London.² Das marvels at the existence of such a thing as boredom – that because the people around him are not required to devote their time and energies to the business of survival, they have nothing to do – and can’t understand why humans don’t seem to like it very much. As far as he’s concerned, mooching around not doing a lot beats going out hunting any day.


Das, total fish out of water that he is, is the exception that sharpens the focus on the rule. Generally speaking, when we as humans have our more basic needs satisfied, we don’t settle down content with the fact; we start craving something else instead. I am so desperate to be entertained, so sure that it’s the thing I really need, that I burden myself with the necessity of it. I start to define myself by the content I consume. I feel obliged to entertain myself in every way that seems attractive to me, even though I blatantly don’t have enough time to, in order to guarantee that I’m not missing out, that my life is not needlessly inferior to what it could be. I put so much pressure on The Littlest Elf to satisfy me that I can’t even enjoy it properly. Seeking to be entertained becomes a wearisome encumbrance, not a route to satisfaction – which would strongly suggest that it was never actually my greatest need in the first place.


So what is?


Have a look at John 6.³ At the start of the chapter, Jesus turns a few bread rolls and fish into a picnic lunch for thousands of people. Pretty incredible, and the picnickers clearly thought so too, because they determinedly follow Jesus across the lake (by boat, rather than walking on it like he did), and start angling for another free meal:


When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?”

Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labour for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal.”


What this bunch think is their greatest need, is the need for food. They’re following Jesus around because he can apparently pretty much generate it out of thin air, and he knows as much. Nevertheless, while starvation is definitely less of a first-world problem than boredom, Jesus still has other ideas about what the real need that wants addressing here is. The real need is for food that endures to eternal life.


Then they said to him, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?”

Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”


Food that endures to eternal life? The crowd like the sound of that. How do they get hold of it? And Jesus answers, for once, very straightforwardly: believe in the one God sent.


So they said to him, “Then what sign do you do, that we may see and believe you? What work do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”


Well, believing in the one God sent or whatever is all very well, but there hasn’t actually been any food yet, so the people issue a challenge. Jesus may have fed a few thousand people just now, but Moses fed the entire Israelite nation for a full forty years of wandering in the desert. Beat that.


Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.”


Jesus tells them they’re barking up the wrong tree. These people’s greatest need isn’t for food, like they think it is, but for Jesus himself.


That’s worth dwelling on. Jesus doesn’t say that what the crowd really needs is a get-out clause from God’s justified anger against them, or a ticket to heaven. He says they need to come to and believe in him, the bread of life. He himself is the fulfilment of their greatest need. And the same is true for those of us who are tempted to call the need for entertainment our greatest one. The whole point of Jesus’ sacrifice for us on the cross was to enable the fulfilment of that need, to grant us access to him and, through him, to God the Father. It’s not a case of subscribing to some doctrines, setting aside some Bible-study time, making a few lifestyle changes, and then settling back into the routine of seeking out the maximum possible entertainment for ourselves, betraying that we still think that’s the real business of life. To believe in Jesus is to recognise that my need for him trumps all needs. It doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference whether I ever get round to watching The Littlest Elf or not.


Now, I don’t want to make anyone feel guilty for spending time enjoying entertainment. There’s nothing wrong with it in itself, just as there’s nothing wrong with food: both are good gifts from God. The question I would, however, encourage us all to ask is: if I’m finding myself prioritising getting my entertainment fix over devoting time to Jesus, what am I saying about where I think my greatest need lies? What is it that I expect watching The Littlest Elf to achieve that makes it so important?


And I would also encourage us to stop recommending things to one another using the language of, “How have you not seen it? You have to see it. It’s so good.” By all means recommend things – if you enjoyed The Littlest Elf and want others to experience the same joy, that’s commendable – but please, I humbly ask, don’t pitch any piece of entertainment as a necessity. Whatever our catch-up culture may tell us, Jesus makes it clear that the only necessity is to believe in him.

Footnotes


¹It was a very clever way to begin the film, truly in the spirit of the continual exhortations to read something more pleasant with which Lemony Snicket filled his novels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXAZ50HOj6s.

²Recently re-released with a snazzy new cover as part of Doctor Who’s fiftieth anniversary series. On the off-chance that you feel inclined to purchase it, you can get a couple of quid off the RRP by doing so through Hive (and support independent booksellers at the same time): http://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Gareth-Roberts/Doctor-Who-Only-Human--50th-Anniversary-Edition/14525409.


³Here it is: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+6&version=ESVUK.