Readings:
Sermon:
I am sure you are familiar with the elephant in the room, the subject everyone knows is there, but they have to pretend not to see it because it is too contentious or too emotive or just too plain difficult to talk about. Well, obviously I am not going to talk about that. Instead I want to talk about the gorilla in the room.
You may know that back in 1999 two psychologists at the University of Illinois carried out an experiment. Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris invited participants to watch a short video. In it there were two teams of three people, one trio dressed in white shirts and the other in black, each team with a basketball. The teams walked round in circles, passing the ball to their respective team mates. The observers were asked to count the number of passes made by the white team. Their counting was pretty accurate. Full marks for their maths. Simons and Chabris then asked the observers if they had noticed anything unusual in the room. Because in the video as the six ball players were circling round, someone in a gorilla costume walked into the middle, beat his chest three times, then walked off again. Half of the observers reported seeing the gorilla; but half never even noticed, they had to be shown the video again – without having to count – before they would believe it. They were so focused on the task of counting the passes that the hairy intruder did not even cross their radar. The experiment has since been often repeated, and always with the same result. And it turns out that it is not a question of half the population will always notice and the other half never will. The vast majority of humans on the planet will roughly half the time not notice something if they are looking for something else.
The experiment illustrates a universal human reality: the way we humans attend to the world is conditioned, so we will see some things, but miss others. In real life there are no experimenters to condition attention, instead for most people in the world, our attention is shaped and directed by our past experience, our beliefs, our prejudices (we all have them).
Most of the time this is no big deal, it just gives us a quick and easy means of negotiating life. But it means we are all at risk of missing something, and that something might be something important or even life-saving. Take those religious leaders we have just seen in conversation with Jesus. Living under Roman occupation, they are expecting God to liberate them by sending his chosen one, his Messiah. They have a fixed idea of what the Messiah will look like, and Jesus does not look anything like what they have firmly in mind. Also, from their conversation they seem to have an overliteral way of looking at the world. They were saying, ‘Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?’ They know who Jesus is, and their minds are closed to learning anything new about him. Their experience of him, and their prejudices about the Messiah focus their attention like a fixation, so they just simply cannot see that he is, as he says, from God. When Jesus talks about the bread that came down from heaven, they probably wondered whether it was wholemeal or sourdough, missing the point completely.
St Paul was clearly aware of this danger. He writes to the Christians in Rome; ‘Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you may discern what is the will of God - what is good and acceptable and perfect.’
As a person of faith, I find that quite a challenge. It can be hard to face the fact that my experiences, habits and prejudices can restrict the focus of my attention so I see what I believe instead of believing what I see. I would rather just believe that I am right. The truth that my ‘right’ may be wrong is not something I want to talk about – an elephant in the room, in fact. This conversation between Jesus and the religious leaders reminds me to keep alert, to be open to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, to look out not for the gorilla, but for God at work in the world today.
Questions:
- Jesus often tells his disciples to stay alert – what helps or might help you to do this?
- Do you have a prayer partner or spiritual director? If so, what benefits does this bring; if not, how might you find one?