The Bible Museum in Amsterdam did not, unfortunately, survive Covid. But when open, on the third floor, you could find a scale model of the tabernacle.
The model was not aesthetically inspiring, but it was devotionally and historically cool. A guy named Bonhoffer spent his whole life researching and building his own recreation of our long-since departed home. Any facts of the structure he could not discover, Bonhoffer just made up. A man ahead of his time you might say.
The first time I went to the museum there was a special exhibition of silver prayer books. During the city’s golden age, the wealthy would pass these on from generation to generation. You could see a worn smoothness in the silver, held over and over in human hands.
This morning's walk reminded me of all this because I happened to end up near the canal house which had been the museum’s address. Near there too, I saw a group of tourists focused on their phones rather than enjoying the city’s holiday quiet.
Until then I had mostly passed joggers committed enough to be out on a holiday (all more willing to say “morgen” than usual) and the dog walkers wedded to a schedule of poop, not of presents.
When I saw that exhibit of prayer books, many years ago, phones were not ubiquitous.
What if, I thought in an odd Christmas wish, your phone was something you were expected to pass on to your kids? Would you still walk through the streets holding onto it carelessly? Would you take it with you everywhere you go or leave it at home for safekeeping? Would you wear it, as the wealthy Dutch wore their silver prayer books, close to the heart?
B.B. King says somewhere how shocked he was to see The Who destroy their instruments. He, after all, had run into a burning building to rescue the one guitar he could afford to own, Lucille.
The invention of the car and of plastic and of a disposable economy obviously made modern life uber-transactional, more about things, less about traditions. We all carry with us so much information now, and often less history.
My mother gave me this prayer book . . . this instrument is my life . . . surely something has been lost with the loss of that. And surely no trumped-up excitement about 12G technology fills this gap.
The Bible is a book of myths and stories, some of which are beautiful and many of which offer no more spiritual or moral nutrition than you would get from a horror movie or a leader of the Taliban. A book you must read to understand the world, it is a bad source from which to construct ethical or political principles.
But as an object? To make a fetish of? Well, that is no sillier than what we do with the device we all now use to connect to everything except ourselves. As a species, we do like to own our rituals for swerving away from the essence of love.
Coming back home—or rather to where I will be living for a few more weeks—I pass an old couple. Overly dressed against what is not all that cold a morning, they walk gingerly and argue, fighting in slow motion, as it were. One of them says to the other: “I was not talking to you. I was speaking out loud to myself.”
In what we cannot-not say, the relationships we survive, and all we wear down, through, and away we may yet shelter beauty, hint at nurture, find our way out.