Collectors Cornered?
Darren Smith has, apparently, the largest private collection of Lego in Britain. That's more than two million bricks, in case you were wondering. Accommodating the collection has necessitated the conversion of both his loft and his garage. 'I love Lego', he explains, 'the colours and the shapes are timeless.' His wife, however, regards her husband as 'obsessed', commenting 'the house is overrun. Sometimes he spends large amounts of money on Lego when really he should be treating me.' For the record, Darren's collection is worth £50,000 - a more expensive hobby than some, certainly, but considerably cheaper than others.
Take art collecting, for example. Last week, a sale of works by Damien Hirst made a record £111 million. Later this year, in November, Edvard Munch's 1894 masterpiece, The Vampire, will go under the hammer and is expected to sell for around £19 million.
In the face of such vast sums it's easy to pride ourselves that our own indulgence of our particular enthusiasms sits comfortably within the rubric of 'all things in moderation'. But I for one have to confess that I probably already own more CDs than I'll ever have time to listen to, and have books on my shelves that I'll never get around to reading, despite my best intentions.
There's nothing wrong, of course, in indulging our passions and enthusiasms. Indeed, such indulgence is the stuff of life as God intended us to live it. Not for nothing does CS Lewis' fictional devil, Screwtape, in one of his letters to his nephew, Wormwood, advise him on derailing a young Christian:
'I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust.'
Most of us no longer own barns that we could tear down in order to build bigger ones to accommodate our many possessions. But how often does our expressed desire to move to a bigger house betray the same foolishness of the rich man in Jesus' parable who did (Luke 12:13-21)?
In a consumerist age we would do well to pause and reflect on the extent to which our indulgence in pleasures and pastimes has lost its innocence and humility. Our hobbies should be a means of losing ourselves in sheer delight in those things that appeal on account of the divine image we bear. Have they now become proud demonstrations of calculating self-centred attempts to remake ourselves in an image that we imagine carries greater cultural kudos? Has the acquisition of things, and the status that their ownership brings, become more important to us than any actual pleasure they impart?
Nigel Hopper
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