Smith & Watson, & Me

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Thoughts on Being a Companion to Saviors, Sociopaths, and Space/Time-Traveling Madmen-with-Boxes 
This one is for the ones who know all the words:
           
Sometimes, I feel a lot like John Watson.
            Now, mind: I have never been to Afghanistan, nor Iraq neither; I am not a medical doctor, nor any other kind of doctor. 
            No, I often feel like John Watson because I am a Christian, a follower of God.
            And trying to follow God is often a lot like living with Sherlock Holmes. 
            Yes, God is very similar to Sherlock: he ignores me (or appears to) when I try to talk to him, then he prattles on about things I don’t understand while I am trying to do other things—even when I’m not there to listen at all.  He disrupts my attempts at a quiet life with his seemingly arbitrary actions and demands; he fills the fridge of my life with all sorts of strange, unlikeable things which seem to serve no purpose—until they do—and yet…
            And yet, in the end, it always seems he knew what he was doing all along, and it turns out, he always had my best interests in mind.
            Every.  Single.  Time.
            (Okay, so maybe Sherlock isn’t exactly like that, but God is.)
            Do you have any idea how annoying it can be to live with someone like that?
            And then—and this is by far the worst part—then, there’s the face.  This is the one point where I can most identify with our man John Watson, when he gets the face.  There is a scene in the Sherlock episode “The Reichenbach Fall” that captures so much of the dynamic between Holmes and Watson (and, as I am painfully coming to realize, us—or at least me—and God) .  It goes like this:
John: Don’t do that
Sherlock: Do what?
John: The look
Sherlock: Look?
John: You’re doing the look again.
Sherlock: Well, I can’t see it, can I? [looks in the mirror] It’s my face.
John: Yes, and it’s doing a thing.  You’re doing the “we both know what’s really going on here” face.
Sherlock: Well, we do.
John: No.  I don’t.  Which is why I find the face so annoying!

            I can really relate to that.  So often, I get that feeling, the feeling that God is giving me the look, the look that says, “we both know what’s going on here; we both know what the next step is…so do it!”
            But really, I don’t know!
            Or at least, I don’t think I do.  I feel like God has done all he is going to do to show me the answer, now it is my turn to find that answer and apply it.
            So frustrating!
            So what do I do in such a situation?  What?  You want an answer?  This is just an essay!  An essay is just an attempt.  That’s it.
            Okay, I will try.
            In such a situation—locked door mystery, the answer clearly right in front of me, but I can’t see it—I recall a friend who once said that sometimes God shows us what to do by closing every door but one.
            But…what if they are all closed?
            Well, for that, I have to invoke another Steven Moffatt/Mark Gatiss-influenced character: the Doctor.
            Go ahead, ask the question…
            Exactly.  Yes, that Doctor.  The Doctor, last of the Time Lords.  The Doctor is full of all sorts of whimsical wisdom.  I have taped up on the wall of my living room one of my favorite lines from the Doctor: “[It’s] a thing...It’s a thing in progress!  Respect the thing!” (He was—once again—of course—trying to think his way out of a jam.)  As I sit here thinking about what to do when all the doors appear to be closed, I remember his[1] words to Amy Pond in the episode where they first meet.  There, he urges her to “Look…Exactly where you don’t want to look; where you never want to look: the corner of your eye.”  It’s how you get around  perception filters—and we are oh so good at throwing those up, making it impossible for us to see the truths that are right in front of us.  Now I wish I could tell you that having learned this little trick from the Doctor, I can always see right through my personal perception filters, right to the heart and truth of things.  But, no.  I’m still working on that bit (Why do you think I’m here, writing this essay?).  I’ll get back to you when I figure that bit out.
            But before I go on (more) about the Doctor, I must remember one more time Sherlock Holmes reminds me of God’s always-wise-and-for-the-best-but-often-terrifying way of dealing with us.  In the very same episode of Sherlock where he give John Watson the face, he also confronts Ms. Mackenzie, housemistress of a school from which two children have just been kidnapped.  He quickly walks up to her and begins to interrogate her:

Sherlock: Miss Mackenzie.  You’re in charge of pupil welfare, yet you left this place wide open
            last night!  What are you, an idiot, a drunk or a criminal?  Now, quickly, tell me! [He rips
            the afghan off her head; she responds in a rapid babble of words, ending with “you have
            to believe me!”]  I do.  I just wanted you to speak quickly.  Miss Mackenzie will need to
            breathe into a bag now!
           
Yep.  There we have my experience of God.
            Tevye said it well in Fiddler on the Roof; Evan Baxter said it again in Evan Almighty: if God does everything he does because he loves us, maybe we should ask him to do us a favor & love us less.  There is an old story of a saint who once asked God to remove at least some of the grace he had given the man, because it was just too much.  Yes, sometimes God can be just a little too much.

            Getting back to the Doctor: not only can he help us see things more clearly in ways, but he also provides another good analogy; for dealing with God can sometimes, it seems to me, be a lot like encountering the Doctor.  Over the years, the Doctor has had many companions, some more willing than others.
            Me?  That’s easy: I’m Mickey the Idiot.
            You remember Mickey Smith: cowardly, sniveling boyfriend of Rose Tyler…In fact, maybe it’s like that: God is like that combination of Rose & the Doctor.  You see, I used to be like Mickey; I always wanted the simple things: meet a nice girl like Rose, take a simple job in a shop (or in my case, a school), be happy.  The end.  But in comes the Doctor, with his leather jacket and his Northern accent (lots of planets have a North, you know).   Then he regenerates into David Tennant and, well—how do you compete? 
            Poor Mickey.  Poor me.
            God sweeps in and disrupts my plans, disrupts my life.  And yet, I can’t get on.  Can’t get that simple shop job and marry the girl from the shop, because God calls from somewhere in space & time, and I come running! 
            What else am I supposed to do…?
            To be continued (perhaps).

[1] Yes, I know that the Doctor has recently regenerated into a female form, but all my references here are to the pre-Jodie Whitaker Doctors, so for the sake of clarity & simplicity, I shall continue to refer to the Doctor as “he.”

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