A great uncle of mine, a few times removed, worked in the shipyards in Belfast and - so the family rumour goes - he helped to build the Titanic. When the ship sank, he gave up his job and retrained as a plumber. His justification was that the Titanic was always considered too big to fail. When it did, he decided to work on something that was small enough to grasp in his hand.
There’s been a lot of talk of late about things that are too big to fail. Mostly, it refers to financial institutions which are seen to be so large and interconnected that they must get a financial leg up to keep them alive. We seem dazzled by the big stuff, as if there’s some almost magnetic appeal in sheer size. But I wonder if size is all its bigged up to be? Allan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, implied that there were limits to scale when he said ‘if they’re too big to fail, they’re too big.’
The great danger of this is delusion. It’s like the fading actress in Sunset Boulevard who is told ‘You used to be big.’ ‘I am big,’ she replies. “ It’s the pictures that got small.’ Pride inverts our perspective. We are no longer able to see the pathway to redemption because it seems too insignificant to us.
When people built the tower of Babel and said ‘Let us build a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens,’ they were sure their project was too big to fail. Seeing their arrogance, God stepped in, confused their languages and scattered them. By letting Babel fail God was scattering the seeds of a future hope. Humankind wanted to get to God by bigging themselves up. But God’s plan turned all that on its head. In order to save mankind God made himself too small to fail.
There.
