Saturday 1 June 2019

Losing faith

Sooner or later in a tv detective series, I give up. A staple of the genre is that the super-intelligent/insightful/against-the-grain-of-conventional-thought hero, in spite of a cast of supporting extras, works it out on his or her own, and the culprit will not be who you thought it would be.

And this is where I lose faith . It's all set up to look real ( cast of thousands.....) but becomes the work, the genius, of one person. This, apart from the fact that the plot has so many twists and turns I rarely catch them all, and as the credits roll, I turn to Mary and say either 'What was all that about?' or 'So, explain it to me.....'

I have no doubt that genuine police work is patient, thorough, exasperating, and yes, intelligent, insightful, and considers all the possibilities; but my guess is that essentially it's teamwork. Not a facet that gets much credence in our super-cop tv world. It will be the combined gifts and expertise of the whole team in the real world which leads to that lovely but unlikely phrase beloved of post-war chummy detective films, as the villain is handcuffed- 'It's a fair cop, guv!' (As if...)

Teamwork. In our fragmented and individual-centred world, we could do more to emphasise this. It takes a whole village to raise a child, says the African proverb. Church struggles to articulate and actualise this concept of 'team' as it seeks to live out what being 'the body of Christ' means, and prayers centre on 'the common good'. It's in our DNA, even if we fail.

What an appealing facet of experience this would be in our broken, fragmented, me-centred world if we could make that teamwork, that unity, centre-stage. I live in hope.  


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