I’ve been tagged

During my sabbatical leave I am spending most of my Sunday mornings overseas: I am travelling across the River Tamar and joining with Saltash Baptist Church. Contrary to humorous mythology you don’t need a passport, but you do need to pay for the use of the Tamar Bridge – to cross back into Devon. (I’m going to try to resist making a joke about why you only have to pay in that direction of travel, but by pointing it out I think I have already made the joke).

Presently it costs £3 for cars to cross the bridge into Devon, which over a summer of visits would become quite a lot of money. So I invested in a Tamar Tag, which is a pre-paid system with an electronic tag that debits my account every time I cross, but which is much cheaper per trip than the cash equivalent.

At the end of last week’s holiday in Cornwall I had the opportunity to use it for the first time. We pootled over the bridge, traffic moving slowly because of the time taken for each vehicle to stop and pay at the barriers, until we reached the section where the seven barriers stretch across the road. There were long queues behind each of the cash / card barriers but there was no queue at the Tag only barrier.

There ought to be a word to describe the feeling of smugness as you drive past queues to an empty barrier because you have a Tag and nobody else does. (It’s driving with swagger – perhaps it’s a new meaning of ‘stagger’ as a portmanteau?) Anyway, whatever it is, I felt good driving past the queues because of my forethought in buying the Tag.

But, remember dear bloggists, this was the first time I had used the Tag. I staggered my way to the barrier and drew to a stop at the indicated line.

I waited for the barrier to go up.

But it didn’t. An error message flashed up and I had to reverse sheepishly back out of the booth area and then try to hope that someone I had just staggered past would take pity on me and let me join the queue. You can imagine how everyone in the queues I’d staggered past were feeling – you have just shared it!

It’s a good job the air-conditioning was working in my car because I was glowing bright red with embarrassment.

However, and this is the bit that pleases me most, the previous two paragraphs are works of complete fiction. Actually what happened was that the electronic sign signalled that the Tag had done its job, the barrier rose and I drove off full of glee.

Why did I feel the stagger? Why did you feel the ‘serves him right’ schadenfreude when you read of my fictional fiasco?

I wonder if it’s because an innate (yet usually dormant) sense of competitiveness is awakened when we’re in a queueing situation. We want to be in the faster moving queue when there’s a hold-up on the motorway and resent the people who switch lanes ahead of us to gain an advantage. Is it just me, or do you use an obvious vehicle in another lane as a marker to see whether or not your lane is moving faster or slower?

When we’re at the supermarket and there are queues at the checkout we want to join the queue that is going to get us to the till quickest so we check out not only the length of the queues but also how much shopping the people in the queues have – it may be advantageous to join a longer queue where people have less in their baskets / trolleys that one where there is just one person but whose trolley is almost full to overflowing.

The competitiveness exists because we see ourselves (and everyone else) as individuals. If we saw all of us as having a shared experience then wouldn’t our reactions and emotions be different? You can see this when the motorway traffic is at a standstill and no lanes are moving at all. Instead of being competitors we become victims, sharing the same experience. People make jokes to one another between cars, sharing previous experiences of hour-long waits. We look at how different car occupants are coping with the boredom and even have pity on parents with small children who are become fractious.

In the Bible, in 1 Corinthians 11, Paul was writing to a church that was being competitive rather than collaborative. Some people (the rich and privileged) were eating bread and wine together before the poorer ones arrived, and feasting on it. Trying to get them to realise the divisiveness of what they were doing Paul urged them (especially the rich and privileged) to wait and eat together:

“For those who eat and drink without discerning the body of Christ eat and drink judgment on themselves.”

‘Discerning the body’ is recognising that we’re not individuals, we’re part of something bigger. It’s moving from being competitive to gain an advantage for ourselves to collaborating for the benefit of all. It’s being community.

And I don’t think it’s just for churches.

Streets; communities and countries can ‘discern the body’ – seeing what we share together as more important than any differences. It’s how God wants us to see one another.

Be blessed, be a blessing