Are Wrappings And Trappings Of Importance?

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 168, 18 July 1942, Page 4

Are Wrappings And Trappings Of Importance?

rvRASTIC economy in the use of *-* brown paper, together with the impossibility of getting the greaseproof variety, is having a noticeable effect upon the appearance of many commodities purchased over the counter.

By Rev. C. W. Chandler

Biscuits never look as nice when sold without their colourful wrapping, and I'm sure that if ever jam has to be purchased in bulk, without its luscious label, I shall go off jam altogether. A good 90 per cent of any selling proposition is in the wrapping. Things in bulk never look really attractive. It's only when they are daintily packeted that one's very "innards" sort of yearn for them. What we see of religion in the realm of altars, vestments, stained glass windows, velvet cushions, red carpets, brass lamps, wax candles, gold embroidery and incense, is really just the wrapping. Nobodv ever suggested that God couldn't be worshipped in a cowshed, or a barn, but we prefer to adorn our abstractions with beauty. Wrappings of Words To say that the sinner has a 'hell' of a hard time of it, is not nearly as attractive as saying that "the way of the transgressor is hard." It means just the same thing. The parables of Jesus are all composed of simple commonplace truths clothed in beauty of language, and bedecked with simple images, such as lilies, coins, yeast, sparrows and sheep. "Blimey! Yer can't eat them there flowers," says the coster, as he sits down to a "flash" meal in a "slap-up" restaurant. "Nobodv said you could," says the bloke at the next table, who happens to be me. Neither can you eat the label on the Piccalilli, or smoke the band on your cigar, or make a date with the bathing beaut} on your packet of cigarettes. They're just wrappings, that's all. I think God believes in wrapping a$ an aid to faith. Puritanism is far too drab for this gay world. That's why it's fading out. God clothes the hills with a mantle of snow, "and spreadest out the heavens like a curtain." "He coverest the deep as with a garment, and honour and majesty are before Him, strength and beauty are in His sanctuary." In the packet round the tea, as well as in the cellophane around a box of chocolates, we see a genuine acknowledgment of man's superior worth. Unconsciously in many instances, he does homage to the eternal triumvirate of goodness, beauty and truth, for although he cannot eat the label on the sauce bottle, or the muslin round the ham, he yet requires that the things he eats and drinks, as well as the things he smokes and wears, should be tastefully displayed. They See Only the Shell Some people make too much of the trappings of religion, to the utter neglect of its inner meaning, and as a result of this false emphasis a great many critics of the Church would crush the kernel with the shell, because the shell is all they see.

Man is a born ritualist. Everything he does, if he does it often enough, develops into a ritual. We get dressed by numbers every morning, and on Anzac Day we bow to cenotaphs while placing wreaths and garlands at their feet in honour of the dead. Neither the wreath nor the bow, but the spiritual content of such outward behavioar is all that really matters.

Of course there are some things which we deck with grandeur that would be better stripped of such gaudy trappings in order that we may see them in their naked ugliness. "Oh, what a goodly outside falsehood hath," says Shakespeare, and in modern systems of State worship this dangerous thing is clearly seen.

Perhaps it is a good thing, after all, that we have to buy our biscuits loose and that we grow dissatisfied with the trappings of religion and with the uniformed splendour of this ugly thing called war, in a real attempt to see things as they are, rather than what, in their wrappings, they appear to be.