My fingers slid into the grooves of the flint and pondered its heft as it sat, snugly, in my palm. Its age and provenance — at least 100 million years old as a stone formed by the remains of microscopic sea creatures; at least 4,300 years old as a tool rejected by a Neolithic human. As a line of connection formed in my mind between my hand and that ancient stranger’s, I had to laugh. This old thing that had been picked up through sheer serendipity felt more valuable than any new thing that could be purchased in a shop. What a fool I was to have forgotten once again the beauty in nature that is ours for free. For an urbanite of the Anthropocene, the natural landscape is for digital wallpaper, and retail therapy replaces a walk in the woods.
Yet, humankind cannot live by stones alone. Even with the shame and guilt borne out of extinction repression (that comfortable neglect of how much I and we in the developed world are a danger to our continued ‘peace’ on earth), I am reminded of something else meant to be held in the hand, something sculpted out of raw material, something spiritual in its materiality.
The holding (or clinging, or comfort) cross is shaped to nestle in the palm of a hand. Thousands are available on the Internet — each one is at least a few decades old as part of a tree, and at least a few years old as a crafted tool for prayer, meditation, and consolation in the home or hospice. This natural-cultural hybrid of ancient faith and modern capitalism is made to be sold as a gift. One shop claims their version is made of olive wood from the Holy Land. Another claims they have trademarked the term for this sort of cross. All offer other paraphernalia associated with religiosity, like candles, prayer beads, and anointing oils. But I would be a fool to reduce this marketplace to crass yet conflicted materialism.
Whether it is the history of a stone or a theology of the cross, the aim is to make sense of the world. And whether it is according to natural or theological history, it seems the shallow breaths of countless lives and deaths are enmeshed in the lungs of a story with unplumbed depths.
However it may be, I am caught in a web of connections between the flint and the cross — the enchantment cast by this ancient flint, found in the context of a privileged university; the belief in the mattering of a wooden cross, found online for a mite of the price of a Cambridge degree; the materiality of this stone that shrinks my existence to that of being merely human; the spirituality of this cross that grants me significance through the hope of becoming fully human. In my bewilderment, another realization oozes its way out: in this mixed-up, mangled, entangled, enchanted, doomed, decaying, renewable, redeemable world, the short-lived thrill of consumerist habits that got us into this whole Anthropocenic mess in the first place cannot replace the enduring joy of meeting God and nature face-to-face — and so the flint and the cross, rather than any trillion-dollar technology or global government, may yet save us from ourselves before the end.
About the author
Belinda Tan is in the second year of her PhD and is working on agency and materiality in the Ark of the Covenant stories under the supervision of Hilary Marlow. She was born and bred in Singapore, and for eight years was an editor in the educational publishing industry in Singapore and Hong Kong. She has a Master of Divinity and a Master of Theology from Singapore Bible College, whose faculty she will join after completing the PhD.