The Blog and the Shower

Today we had a professional musician visit our summer program to give a presentation and demonstration of various Middle Eastern instruments and dances.  His drum playing was particularly dramatic, as he spun the disk around on his thumb and swung it high in the air with exaggerated movements.  When he had finished, he asked the audience: “Why do we move around so much when we play this drum?”

A small level-one student raised her hand and offered somewhat doubtfully, “Because God can see you better when you move around?”

I love these kinds of comments because they’re so unintentionally revealing of unexamined ideas about the physicality of God, who is apparently located far away, probably far up in the sky and perhaps sitting on a cloud in the stratosphere, and must really be an old man because he has bad eyesight, and needs humans to mix it up a little bit in order to pick out individuals who otherwise don’t attract much attention, massing like so many ants.  I don’t know much about this student’s religious background or upbringing, but I rather wonder if drawings for children of a God who sits up in the sky, aging and aloof, didn’t leave a much stronger impression than implicit threats that God, like Santa, some third-world dictators, and the CIA, is always watching us.  I’m definitely not religious, but if I can put in my own two cents anyway then I think I rather prefer the student’s theological vision to the traditional one.