Perception and Delusion

One Sunday at noon, a woman exited a church. It was the first time she’d been in a long while, and she felt pleased by herself as if she’d just taken part in something onerous but worthwhile. The people had been so nice. One man in particular, whom she’d shaken hands with and said ‘peace be with you’ had made a deep impression on her.

‘What a nice man, what a genuinely nice man. It’s people like him who make the church. They’re kind, courteous and respectful, they’re pleasant to all, irrespective of what they are like, what they look like. They take the Christian attitude to heart. They go week in week out to church, and don’t have a bad bone in their bodies. It’s from people like that that I have to learn.’

In her heart however she thought him a bit of a bore. As a woman she could never find that sort of man sexually appealing. His grey beard; his skinny, scrawny looking body; his intellectual looking face, his spectacles and unmanly bearing; his niceness, sensitivity and meekness – none of this attracted her, and she found him, in that sense, contemptible. She liked her men to be men.

However she wanted to make peace with the world. She was getting older now, and was more and more lonely. It wasn’t a time to be petit. You had to open your heart and love everyone, even if you felt disinclined to. Otherwise you couldn’t say you were a good person. That man was exactly the sort of person she’d often been derogative of in the past, the sort she’d bullied at school. But she didn’t want to be nasty anymore. She wanted to be fair to all.

‘He is a really nice man. I mean so what if he isn’t cool, if he doesn’t feel at home in a nightclub or at a party or doesn’t have fun. So what if he prefers staying in the house, reading a book or studying the Bible. So what if he doesn’t know how to dress well, or looks a bit of a misfit. Who cares if he sports a beard like that. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter.’

She genuinely wanted to be kind. If she couldn’t make room in her heart for men like him, she really wouldn’t be happy with herself. He was a million miles away from the world she inhabited, the fashionable, chic, trendy world, the world of partying and having fun. But that wasn’t important.

She headed into town and went and had a coffee. She was so pleased with herself for having gone to church and for having felt good thoughts, that now she felt she deserved a treat. It was time to relax. She pulled out a celebrity gossip magazine and started to read. She was glad to get back to this bright, happy world after the stuffy tedium of church.

Shortly after she had left the church a man had come out. It was the first time he’d been to church in a long while.

‘What a nice woman, what a genuinely nice woman. It’s women like her who make the church what it is. Rain, snow or shine they’re always there. They have such good, pure hearts, they have given themselves up to Christianity entirely. That woman is a bride of Christ. The love of Jesus runs through her heart and soul, it flows through her veins. She thinks of orphans, of the homeless, she helps the hungry, the destitute. She is good, honest and decent. I have to learn from people like her, I have to.’

In his heart however the woman was not quite his cup of tea. Apart from the fact that he found her common, uneducated and anti-intellectual, she was also unattractive, not his idea of a woman at all, not with her corpulent, lumpy body shape or her red hair. And her outfit was drab and dowdy. It clashed with her hair.

Yet he knew he had to learn to like her. He had recently gone through a crisis in his life, felt lonely, unloved and out of sorts. And he’d come to realise that if you expected to get sympathy in this world, you had to be nice to all, to overlook such trivial things like appearance, especially in one such as that woman, who was so good and kind hearted, and who deserved to be loved. If he let his natural feelings run wild, he felt only annoyance and dislike of that undistinguished little woman. She was exactly the sort he had scoffed at and bullied at school. He just felt disinclined to like her, she didn’t appeal. Yet he knew that he had to like her, otherwise he wasn’t a good person.

‘She is a really wonderful woman. I mean so what if she’s a bit common and speaks with an accent, so what if she didn’t go to university or didn’t get an education. So what if she’s unattractive or dresses in such gaudy clothes. It’s her right to dress as she likes. You can’t go around persecuting people just because they’re a bit different. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter. And in any case, what a boring world it would be, if we were all the same.’

He genuinely wanted to be kind. Women like her were a million miles away from the world he inhabited, and she was not the sort he found attractive. His world was the world of intelligence, education, riches. He was a somebody in that world. And the woman whom he found attractive – young, slim, intelligent women – were fond of him and found his intellect a turn on, his beard distinguished. But it wasn’t nice not to give a thought to people like that woman, so clearly unnecessary in this happy little world. She obviously felt left out of it, jealous. There was no place for her in it. So he wanted to be kind to her, to be generous, for he wanted to be good.

He was quite a nasty man at heart, conceited and superior. He was prone to becoming snappy and irritable and rude with people. He was glad to have come out to church for once. It made him feel renewed. But he was glad now it was over, happy to get away. He had work to get on with this afternoon, and not looking forward to this, he resumed his typical, terse, irritable demeanour.