I’m reading Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare at the moment. It’s a brilliant book, grounding the often mythic character of the bard into his real world of Elizabethan London. I’d highly recommend it.

One quote that jumped out at me the other day in within a discussion of Anthony and Cleopatra, where the characters perform a ‘deliberate indulgence in a fiction’ – choosing to believe something they know is not true, for the sake progressing the plots they are engaged in.

Greenblatt quotes Coleridge, who says that when watching a play we have a ‘willing suspension of disbelief.’

I’ve been pondering on this, wondering if within the performance of ritual – the church service as theatre – we are required to suspend our disbelief for a while.

But perhaps the opposite is true. Too often I think church services can be museums of fact. We trail round singing one truth, then hearing another before recanting another. We rehearse and recount them over and over to make them more true. There is, in many evangelical services, no suspension of disbelief, because there is no doubt. There is thus no theatre, no drama. It is all sermon: an expounded text to be taken as read.

As we come to key moments like Easter, perhaps what we are required to do is not suspend disbelief, to trot out the facts that we find to be true. Perhaps we are required to suspend our belief for a while.

Why? To enter into the drama. To enter into the uncertain plot, the doubts and troubles that good theatre explores.

Nick Clegg – Deputy Prime Minister – has travelled to Pakistan to ‘see for himself’ the horrific destruction that the recent flooding has caused. It annoys me that politicians always feel the need to do this, especially when environmental issues are involved. Everyone has to fly off and see the melting polar ice caps for themselves to ‘prove their green credentials.’ Not content to see the images of chaos and suffering, political leaders have to fly half way round the world to ‘see for themselves.’ I can understand politicians within Pakistan needing to go and visit, I can understand Obama needing to go to the gulf of Mexico, I can see why Bush not going straight to New Orleans was wrong.

But imagine if a leading figure from each nation had to fly with their entourage to ‘see for themselves’ what had happened when disaster struck. It becomes absurd. Especially given that these floods, hurricanes and melting ice are caused by global warming which is itself caused by the huge increase in human movement – flying in particular.

Though I am critical of the ‘virtual world’ in many ways, I think it’s also hugely beneficial: people can experience something of other areas without having to travel, without having to add tonnes of carbon emissions to confirm for themselves what must be patently true anyway. Did Clegg doubt the scale of the disaster until he’d seen it for himself? Did he not trust the television pictures or the words of his civil servants?

I’m reminded of Jesus’ words to Thomas – the disciple who had to physically witness his resurrection before he would believe:

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

I wish more people would take that line when it came to being able to act compassionately in the face of terrible disasters.

Still working my way through The Monstrosity of Christ, a dual between Zizek (Marxist-Atheist) and Milbank (Radical Orthodox) in which the atheist rather brilliantly claims to be a far better Christian that the orthodox theologian.

One passage I’ve been very struck by in Zizek’s opening salvo as he discusses religion in general:

Christianity is the exception here: it enacts the reflexive reversal of atheist doubt into God himself (sic). In his “Father, why have you forsaken me?” Christ commits what for a Christian is the ultimate sin: he wavers in his Faith.

While in all other religions there are people who do not believe in God, only in Christianity does God not believe in himself.

While I’m not convinced that doubt is the ‘ultimate sin’ I’m very taken by this idea of doubt within Christ, which perhaps calls on us to rethink our attitude to Thomas, which has always struck me as rather cruel.