I’ve been thinking about how new ideas get embedded in us. I mean, they don’t flit around our brains like summer swallows for ever. Eventually, they either fly away, never to be remembered again, or else they put down roots in our brain cells and become part of the fabric of our minds.
Sometimes, when we realise that we are hearing a new idea, our mind grasps it and turns it over and over, considering how it connects with other ideas and what its significance may be. If it’s worth something, we hang onto it. If it connects with things we already know, then we let it sink in and become part of us.
Other ideas enter into our thinking by a different route. They settle in without us realising what is happening. These are the notions that we heard from trustworthy friends and accepted without question. They are the messages hidden under the surface of adverts (you deserve to have a better car; you don’t need to put up with having wrinkles). They are the things we heard when we were dog-tired. In these and a hundred other moments, our minds didn’t grasp the new thought, nor turn it over and over and work it out. And so the thoughts slipped into our thinking unnoticed, and became part of our mental furniture without asking our permission.
It’s always a surprise when I discover such thoughts there in my mind – ones that I didn’t know I had. It feels a bit like discovering a gentle stranger sitting cosily on the purple sofa in our front room. How could I have not known he was here? Rather, how could I have not known that this is what I was thinking, that someone had once shared this thought with me and that it had settled in me?
I experience this surprise most often when I’m reading the Bible. Again and again, the text contradicts my thinking and I realise that it is I who am at fault, that I believe something that I had not realised I believed. These moments unmask some intruder’s presence and, when it happens, I show the stranger the door and send him away. It’s rarely hard work. And I feel cleansed and delighted to be so.
Christ makes the church holy, “cleansing her by the washing of the word, to present her to himself without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish” (Eph 5:26-27)
This being so, there will be none of Richard Dawkins’ memes in heaven.