Army of Priests

This blog is usually a bit preachy; this post is more like a diary entry (extroverted thought vs introverted thought perhaps). Chances are that only people who know me will read this because they are sticky beaks – or perhaps some faithful, long term readers from across the inter-web.

I’ve been a lot more introspective over the last month or so (as evidenced in a few recent blog posts) and learned a bit about myself in the process. For the last couple of months I have felt run off my feet, and like I wasn’t in control of my life due, in large part, to events at work. I have been focusing on urgent, short term tasks rather than on long term development. In the last week or two this has eased slightly and I have a two week holiday starting at the end of this week (yippie) so I have some breathing room to look at the use of my time and effort and figure out if it is the way I want to use them (I have a work mate who would point out that this is typical ENFP behaviour).

One thing that has been made obvious to me is that time is not my most precious resource, as I had been conditioned to believe. I can think of time, money, energy, focus, and social capital. There are probably others too (I know there are whole tribes of professionals who study this but I haven’t read any of their stuff, so let’s just pretend that I know what I am talking about). Money, energy, and social capital are resources of which I have seemingly endless supplies. Time has been a little strained when various work and non-work commitments compound (suffice to say I have worked a couple of 50 hour weeks in the last couple of months, but that’s not too bad).

However, my focus has been running pretty low. “Focus” to me is defined as the ability to think, and work has been stealing a lot of that lately. I get home and I have no brain matter left to use on the other things I want to use it on. I just keep thinking about the problems I am trying to solve at work and can’t put them aside in my mind. This is a common curse for a programmer.

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I’ve been a big Shane Claiborne fan since his first book, The Irresistible Revolution, came out in 2006. I’ve noticed a trend in his books since then as each one repeats the main ideas in the previous books with small additions. This book, Becoming the Answers to our Prayers, written with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is the greatest example of this trend.

The book can’t decide what it wants to be. It dithers between offering advice for your prayer life and convincing the reader of the need for social engagement. As a book about prayer the authors advise us that, “where we pray makes a difference,” (pg 57) and that, “If you will, you can become all flame.” (pg 94). In general the book is quite clumpy when it talks about how we should pray, with the ideas seemly tacked into the book in such a way as to feel out of place. Part 3 of the book focused on mysticism in prayer but in a way that seemed only to confuse the issue rather than offer genuine incites. If you are looking for a book on prayer there are much better ones out there.

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People are dying. Thousands of people – everyday – the forgotten machinery in our 21st century economy. We all have blood on our hands. We have participated in a system that values people solely by their purchasing power and bought goods based on their price or quality regardless of their morality. We have elected governments that “protect” our economy through tariffs and trade barriers whilst demanding the removal of the exact same protections from poor countries. We have enforced structural adjustment programs on our neighbours and imported goods created in working conditions that would be illegal in our own country.

And what have we gotten out of it? No man is an island. We are so consumed by our thirst for material goods that we have devoted our lives to it. We don’t care who we hurt whether its a peasant in a 3rd world country or our own family and friends who just want to spend more time with us. We’re certainly no happier for it. We have less leisure time than anyone since the Feudal Ages and the suicide rate continues to rise.

Watching the world is like watching a train rushing at high speed toward a precipice.

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Christian Culture Tip #12: Always Be Happy

The bible encourages us to be loving, and joyful, and patient and a whole other load of “good” emotions and from the moment we become Christians we are pressured to do experience such. This is positive pressure, perhaps, but dangerous because it causes us to disengage from our emotions when they don’t meet the standard and become unauthentic.

I had a Christian friend post a status update today: “Is it ok to hate someone just a bit??”

It really ticked me off. Why does he care to ask for permission, and are they after the permission of us or God? Why can’t they acknowledge that a problem obviously exists even if they don’t “hate”? What make’s “hate” the point at which we decide a relationship is in a bad state? Why can’t we be honest enough to feel what we actually feel what we feel and find redemption from that broken, real place?

Someone pointed out that it sounds like my friend merely “dislikes” them. But “dislike” is just a Christian term that we hide behind to avoid loving someone in a permitable way. No non-Christian uses the term “dislike” in real life. It’s Christianise for I-don’t-like-you-and-will-give-my-attention-to-someone-else. I dislike mentally disabled people, smelly people, the elderly, annoying people, and people who are bad conversationalists. They don’t have anything to give me. So I ignore them, and contribute to society’s general rejection of them. That’s cruel.

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I was thinking on the train on the way home that a fundamental economic principal that Christian must live by is that we will not benefit from injustice. Then, I began to think of how I had gained from the mistreatment of others just today:

• My clothing, my bed sheets, and all other textiles I came in contact with over the day were almost certainly made overseas by workers in appalling conditions. The cotton farmers were probably paid just enough to survive.
• All the electronic equipment I use – the laptop I write this on, my PC at work, and my MP3 player – contain coltan. Which has contributed to most of the funding of the conflict in the Congo.
• The pharmaceuticals I use are protected by IP property laws which prevent 3rd world countries from creating generic versions that would save millions of lives.
• The petrol and electricity I use contribute to global pollution. Pollution always hits the poor hardest, and if global warming is even slightly probable it reflects a significant social justice issue.
• The fashion I wear reinforces the ludicrous notion, created by cleaver marketers, that some people are ‘ugly’. This has a huge impact on self-esteem and wasted money.

This doesn’t include the implicit disregard for life created by spending money and time and effort on my own comfort whilst ignoring the basic needs of others. Nor does it take into account that even playing a part in the work-advertise-spend treadmill contributes to the overall decline of society, as we dedicate ourselves more to the accumulation of stuff than to sustaining relationships.

It makes me thing a lot about what it really means to live without doing so at another’s expense and the cost of living “ethically”.

I’ve been reading the Autobiography of Martin Luther King of late. It’s a very interesting read. King was quite intellectual, thus his biography is very educational. Its also challenging and inspirational.

I’m not yet a 1/3rd the way through. But so far King’s house has been bombed once (and a 2nd attempt was also made), stabbed once, thrown in jail countless times, and abused countless times. His friends have experienced mass jailing and persecutions. They all had to walk to work for over a year (or share cars). At one point over 11 houses or churches were destroyed by bombs in a single weekend. The entire group of justice seekers have been pushed to their limits.

It makes me wonder about how dedicated to justice I am. How much am I willing to give up so that people no longer die of hunger? How many times am I willing to go to jail to end my country’s trade barriers? How uncomfortable will I become to raise awareness of unfair labour laws?

So far, I’m barely able to battle against people’s simple expectations of me.

I want to be someone who will go the full nine yards if that’s what it takes for us to stop treating the 3rd world like slaves. But I’m not there yet.

The words of Donald Miller in his book Searching for God knows What:

Everybody who met God in the bible was afraid of Him. People were even afraid of the angels, so the angels always had to calm people down just to have a conversation. I would think that would be very annoying if you were an angel, always having to settle people down just to talk. It makes you wonder if the first thousand years in heaven will have us running around screaming like we would during an earthquake, the whole time God saying to us in an enormous, booming voice, ‘Calm down, calm down, will you, it’s just Me.’ If you ask me, the way to tell if a person knows God for real, I mean knows the real God, is that they will fear Him.

I am really interested in social justice. I believe that ultimately, the problems we have in this world will be fixed when we become less self-absorbed and start following the “golden rule” (or better yet, loving our enemies). So it disturbs me a bit when I see organisations who have what I consider a myopic view of social justice and are willing to market compassion in order to meet a specific need.

It’s like many organisations are in the business of making-people-feel-good-buy-giving. And it means that people who are compassionate might not be doing it for the sake of the people they are helping, but for the fluffy feelings. And if that is true then they are eventually only contributing to the social ills that created the problem of poverty in the first place.

Many people believe that people will only ever do something if it benefits them in some way. I desperately want to prove them wrong. But how can I ensure that I have pure motives in my activist endeavours?

And what if I aren’t after the feeling of compassion but something worse – the comfort of self-righteousness.

I really don’t know the answer to this one. We have commoditised justice and compassion. How can we be genuine?