Justice, Fairness, & Equality (+ Heaven & Hell)

There's been lots of talk recently around the whole area of Justice, Fairness, & Equality - there's even been a season about it on BBC4. Thing is, for all the effort that's been expended in the latter half of the 20th Century & early years of the 21st on providing equality of opportunity, it would seem that the gap between the richest & poorest has become larger than ever. So, if equality of opportunity isn't cutting it (and I don't think it is), then what is to be done? How about equality of outcome?
In Matthew 20 Jesus tells a parable in which the vinyard owner (God) pays everyone the same, regardless of how much of the day they'd been working for him - a clear image, I think, of the Kingdom of God, and therefore of the values of God. And we should also not forget the words of the apostle Paul in Galatians and Colossians about the equality of all people in Christ.
So, what if everyone did what they enjoyed and/or had a talent for & were all paid the same? What would our society look like if, instead of being driven by the fear of money, we were motivated by the joy of the task? Alright, so we might have more plumbers, nurses & musicians, and less administrators, accountants & merchant bankers (but not none! Some people do enjoy such roles, and they are needed in some measure), but would that necessarily be a "bad thing"?
Now, I know that's so far-fetched as to be ridiculous to many, and I can't wave a magic wand to transform society, all I can change is myself, but that doesn't mean this line of thought is completely pointless - consider the following question...
 What does a theology of equality of outcome do to our conceptions of hell/damnation/eternal suffering? A theology of equality of opportunity makes it easy for us to condemn others to hell ("I've told you the gospel, so I'm in the clear - it's all on your head now!"), whereas a theology of equality of outcome requires us to at least consider the possibility that all, in the final analysis, will be saved.
If what happens to the other guy is what happens to me (& vice versa), then humanity ultimately stands or falls as one.


Peace

Moving

Microsoft decided to close their Windows Live Spaces blog facility & "upgrade" everyone to Wordpress.
I happen to think that Wordpress is toss, so have shifted over to Blogger.


Have copied over posts from the old site, so you can still read 'em if you're interested.


Peace.

A Harsh Lesson

A friend died recently, a good bloke who somehow managed to slip off my (and everyone else's) radar.

I guess that everything else just seemed more important at the time, and getting back in touch was always something that I could do another day -
and now it's too late.

It brings back to mind an old, old story about four people...

Everybody, Anybody, Somebody, & Nobody

There was an important job to be done,
and Everybody was asked to do it.
Everybody was sure Somebody would do it.
Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.
Somebody got angry about that,
because it was Everybody's job.
Everybody thought Anybody could do it,
but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn't do it.
It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody
when actually Nobody asked Anybody.
It's a hell of a price to pay to be reminded that life's too short to put off contacting old friends - especially when I'm not the one picking up the tab.


Originally posted 10/11/10

The Priest in Modern Society

My vocational advisor gave me the task of writing on "What do you see as the role of the priest in modern society?" - didn't get terribly far with it, due to my life being chaos central 99.9% of the time, but thought I'd throw out the fragments I managed to come up with, just in case anyone's interested. When reading, remember the name of the blog...
The heart of priesthood is, of course, primarily about ‘Being’ rather than ‘Doing’ (Nouwen In the Name of Jesus). It is not, however, a Being dichotomised from Doing – an erroneous forced-choice either/or approach. It is not even necessarily a both/and approach, for at its best it is a seamless cycle of “prayer and ministry of the word” practiced by the first leaders of the church, and illuminated wonderfully by Brother Lawrence in his The Practice of the Presence of God.

 So what is this Doing which is the fruit of our Being in Christ? The original charge laid down by Jesus still applies today – “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations…” – as indeed, does all the apostles good advice to church leaders contained within the epistles, but what does that look like in concrete terms in the early 21st Century?

1. We need to help people reconnect with the context in which Jesus taught – Community. For, unlike Jesus, we live in a society which has increasingly fragmented and undercut many of the things which have acted for centuries as ‘social glue’. Even in the relatively short time since Vanstone faced a seemingly content secular community (as recounted in Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense), we have almost entirely lost the idea and practice of meaningful communities, and we need to re-establish these. The founding of meaningful communities of people dedicated to Christ and each other, where the Kingdom of God can break into this world, has to be a part of what we do.
2. In a society driven by the constant need for ‘more’, even in the face of the current global financial problems, we need to live lives that say “enough”. We need to be the first of the least, to lead in living a ‘downwardly mobile’ lifestyle that shows there is a different way to do things – the way of God’s economy. In contrast to Vanstone, who found himself a priest in the church at a time when the State had all the solutions to society’s ills and the church was increasingly seen as “irrelevant”, we are living in a time when the State is reaching the limits of what it can achieve for its citizenry, and the church once again has the opportunity to play a real and vital role in caring for the poor, the orphaned, the widowed, and the alien.
3. 1 Timothy 4:12 “…set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity.” And not for them only, but also for all those whom we live alongside and come into contact with. To hold out what Ramsey (The Christian Priest Today) called “the timeless truths” (p.73) of the Gospel to a post-modern world that often no longer recognises anything as ‘true’ by “living” Jesus every day.
4. Not to do things “for” or “to” people, but “with” them. Never to condemn, but to raise up and release the God-given potential within each and every individual (for we must never cease to appreciate “the infinite worth of the one” (Ramsey p.42) in our attempts to reach/organise the many), that they might grow in grace and love and so fulfil Christ’s call upon their lives.
5. To teach the teachers, to lead the leaders, so that the church can grow effectively. In order to be able to do this, it is vital that we not only have a vision for the place we’re in but that we can convey such a vision to people in a way that they can grasp it and move forward with it.

I want to wander for the love of Christ, like the peregrinati of old.
I want to teach, live & obey Jesus wherever I go.
I want to be a transmitter of ideas from one ekklesia to another.
I want to found meaningful communities of people dedicated to Christ & to each other,
in the Celtic monastic tradition, where the Kingdom of God reigns supreme.
I want to help the Church be all she can be.
I want to see a world in which all the resources of the earth are shared equally
between all the people of the earth,
so that even those most disadvantaged are able to meet their most basic needs
with dignity & joy.

Originally posted 22/08/10

The Death of Letters

Been sorting out a mass of paperwork as it's come out of storage boxes today, and came across my bundles of personal correspondence. Shockingly, the last personal letter (not including 'round robin' updates) I received was in 2007! It's not that I've failed to write to people, it's just that people don't appear to sit down with paper & pen to reply any more, as responses almost invariably arrive via e-mail.

Personally, I think it's really sad that we seem to be losing the art of letter-writing as a form of ongoing communication, as there is - to my mind, at least - something special about setting aside time to sit down & write a reply to someone who's written to you (a letter that has probably been read & re-read several times prior to replying!). It's a form of communication which (unlike e-mail & texting) encourages you to reflect both on your own words & those of the person you're corresponding with, which I think leads to a deeper & better level of communication. There's also a sense of permanence involved in a letter which is utterly missing from e-communications; a sense that the words on the page could well last beyond your lifetime, whereas on the interweb it seems like you're lucky if your words last 'til teatime.

What, then, shall we do?

Write a letter - make someone feel special...

Peace

Originally posted 21/08/10

And They Call It Democracy

Like millions of others, I voted in the General Election, an experience I found depressing in the extreme. For Parliamentary candidates, I was faced with the lunatic fringes, Labour, LibDem, or Tory (who're very nearly the lunatic fringe around here.). Really, I'd like to have voted Green, but they didn't bother putting up a candidate here, so I was left with a choice between a Labour candidate who doesn't have the morals of a cat, or a LibDem candidate who didn't even bother sending out any flyers – and I'm sorry, but I'm really not that easy!

So, who did I end up voting for? None of them – I 'spoiled' my ballot paper. What I would really have liked was a box for “None of the Above”, so that my paper could be differentiated for those who simply can't be arsed to vote or who can't fill in a ballot properly. I want to vote for my right not to vote...

Turning to the Local Council Election ballot paper, I was confronted by a wider range of options – unfortunately, not one of the candidates for our ward actually lives here! So much for local representation...

And now there's reports of hundreds of people across the country being refused entry to polling stations because of large queues meaning they hadn't got their ballot papers before the 22:00 hrs deadline. After years of the political classes carping about voter apathy & disengagement with the political process, for the system to fail the moment there's what is, in reality, a very modest increase in voter turnout is absolutely shambolic & shameful.

They call it democracy – I call it a bunch of arse...

Peace


Originally posted 07/05/10

Shopping & Immigration

Reading The Open Family and was very struck by the following extract from St. Ambrose, given the quite frankly xenophobic spirit currently loose within this country. The extract is quite long, but I thought it better to be read in its entirety.

“Councils who expel strangers from the city are wrong to do so, particularly at a time when they should be giving them help. Both citizens and strangers share the earth as a parent, it is their common right and inheritance, and should not be denied. Wild animals do not drive each other away from food; only humans do that. Wild animals accept that food is to be shared, as a resource provided by the earth itself. They also give assistance to members of their own species; only humans, who ought to regard nothing else human as alien to themselves, offend against this principle.

There was an Urban Prefect once who was very different and acted much more nobly. He was already an old man, and the city suffered a famine. As usual, the citizens tried to have all strangers expelled. But this Prefect, showing a greater responsibility than the rest, summoned all the rich and well-born, and insisted on a debate. He said it was monstrous to expel all strangers, because it would involve denying food to those who were dying. 'We do not let the dogs by our table go unfed, and yet we are depriving human beings of food. The death of so many by famine is a terrible waste for the world and the city. These strangers from the countryside bring trade and produce. To let them die of famine will not help anyone. You may be delaying your own starvation, but you will not prevent it. The farmers will die, and our supplies of grain be lost. We are trying to expel the very people who would have brought us food. Why in times of famine are we trying to get rid of the very people who normally feed us? These people can do much for us even at this time. “Man does not live by bread alone” (Deut. 8:3). They are our families, our very parents. Let us repay what we have received.

'Maybe we are afraid their presence will make the famine worse. But mercy is never destitute, for it receives assistance. If we share our grain with these people, we can buy it back later. If we lose these people as the source of our food, we will have to pay for others. It will turn out much cheaper to share our food with them now. Otherwise it will be impossible for us to obtain food later. If we were to find others to farm for us, they would be unskilled, however numerous they were. What else? We can collect money and buy grain. Without diminishing the city's treasury we can provide financial support for the strangers.'

This old prefect was commended by both God and men. He could show to the emperor the people of the whole province, and truly say to him, 'All these I have saved for you, all these have survived by the kindness of your senate.'

All this is far preferable to what recently happened at Rome. People who had spent most of their lives in this magnificent city were thrown out weeping with their children (whose expulsion is no more acceptable than that of fully-grown citizens) and bewailing their broken relationships. Although the season was barren the city could have imported grain from those very Italian regions whose children were being expelled. Nothing is more disgraceful than to expel someone as a stranger, having demanded their resources for oneself. Why do you expel the person who has been eating what is their own food, and even giving some of it to you? You take their grain supplies and give them no love. You extort food from them and give them no gratitude.”

If it was true in the ancient times of the City-States, how much moreso is it true in the 21st Century web of globally interconnected Nation-States?
Why do we feel justified in excluding others from something which is only 'ours' by an accident of birth?
Who'll pick our crops if we expel all the "foreigners"?

Maybe you want to think about it the next time you want strawberries in January...

Peace

Originally posted 01/05/10

A Disappointing Kingdom?

Was doing an event a while back, and someone asked me if it'd turned out as I expected. My reply? “No, because I wasn't expecting anything.”

Now, this doesn't mean that I didn't believe that God was going to do something – in fact, I was absolutely convinced that He would (and, indeed, did), but quite simply that I had no idea whatsoever what it would look like, and all I could do is be there, be open, and pray that I spotted the Kingdom when it broke in.

Y'see, I think we're so often disappointed within the church because we think we know what the Kingdom's going to look like when it breaks into a particular situation – in truth, that we think we know exactly how God should do it (always a fatal flaw!) - that when it doesn't happen how we thought it would/should, we assume that it hasn't happened at all! Of course, this is an incorrect assumption (I won't go into the whole thing about thinking we know better than God), but because of it we so often miss what God is doing/has done.

Truly, His ways are not our ways, so is it surprising that the Kingdom coming hardly ever looks like our expectations of it? But then we shouldn't be surprised – this is, after all, exactly the story told in the gospels; that the religious establishment of the day were so convinced that they knew exactly what the messiah would look like and what he would do when he arrived, that they were completely unable to even conceive of Jesus as fulfilling the messianic mandate. They totally missed what God was doing, because they were focussing on what He wasn't doing, i.e. - fulfilling their expectations of how He should be doing things!

So, where does this leave us? Do we give up expecting the Kingdom to come? Clearly not! But perhaps we do have to let go of our expectations of what it'll look like when it does come, and instead wait humbly before God, remaining open and alert, in prayerful expectation that the Kingdom will come, and that God will give us eyes to see and ears to hear it when it does.

Originally posted 24/04/10

In the Name of God

If God told Moses His name was “I will be who I will be” (Exodus3:13-15) and God is, ultimately, “all in all” (Ephesians 4:5), is it then possible that the full name of God is the utterance of all things, all people, all actions, through all time?

Perhaps the fundamental interconnectedness of all things lies in their speaking of God's name, and only when all ends will we be able to fully comprehend God, as only then will we know His name in full?

Is there a sense in which we all exist 'in the Name of God'?

Now, that's either so profound as to be potentially life-changing, or so trite as not to be worth bothering with, and I really can't make my mind up which it is, but it does make my head ache when I think about it for too long...

Originally posted 22/04/10

Ishi Means Man: Some Reflections

Reading Merton's Ishi Means Man - absolutely brilliant. A superb illustration of the fact that the past has plenty to say to us about our current struggles and follies, if we but have the wit to see it. A series of essays about various Amerindian cultures, it touches on such matters as the centrality of a God-given vision to what it means to be human; what happens when we deny those different from us personhood; the place of art and religion in civilization – many, many things in this book have sparked connections in my mind.

 One of my favourite points is in the piece “The Cross- Fighters”, concerning the Caste War of Yucatan, in which Merton notes:

“It is curious to see with what fervor some of the Maya prophets at the same time accepted the message of Christ and rejected the messengers as unworthy.”

This has real resonances for us today. Why else would the single largest grouping of Christians in this country be those who do not attend any church, nor identify with any denomination? I remain convinced that Jesus is attractive to people, but the institutional churches continually interpose themselves between Jesus and the people who want to get nearer to him. Indeed, a lot of Merton's points in Ishi... are around the fact that Western “culture” (which includes institutional churches) cannot accept that other cultures can accept Christ without accepting all the “benefits” of our society. We must recognise that our way of living is not the only way of living, indeed that it may not even be the best way way of living!

 As long as wholesale Western enculturation remains the only way for us to be prepared to recognise the personhood of those from other cultures, we will remain moral and mental midgets.

Peace.

Originally posted 20/04/10

State of Grace

Having turned 40 last month, I appear to be undergoing whatever the opposite of a mid-life crisis is. Despite everything that's still going on in & around my life, all of which would normally frustrate the *censored* out of me, I seem to be existing within what you might call a 'state of grace', wherein all this stuff of life is failing to ruffle my feathers.
I am at peace - first & foremost with myself, then with my circumstances.

I've wasted too many years being a miserable bastard about things which I couldn't/can't do anything about (and also a lot of time figuring out that not only had I not arrived, but that I needed to work out how the hell I was going to start moving - but that's a story for another day), but if I truly want to see world peace, then it has to begin in my own life, indeed within my self.

Perhaps I'm finally starting to resemble the God I believe in...

Peace.

Originally posted 13/04/10

In The Beginning...

In a vague attempt to keep those who might be interested up-to-date with what's occurring in my life, I figured I'd have a stab at doing a blog.

I'm still not entirely convinced that bearing one's innermost soul to a cold & uncaring universe that probably isn't listening anyway is the greatest of ideas, but we'll give it a go...

Please note that all blog entries will be made in line with the following equation:

time+energy/cantbearsedness

Peace!

Originally posted 08/04/10