Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming upon you.  Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days.  Look! The wages you failed to pay the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty.  You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter.  You have condemned and murdered innocent men, who were not opposing you.  Be patient, then, brothers, until the Lord’s coming. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop and how patient he is for the autumn and spring rains.  You too, be patient and stand firm, because the Lord’s coming is near.

The bloke who wrote this nearly 2000 years ago was probably one of Jesus’ younger brothers. He saw what it is to be true and faithful and patient. Truth is patient.

He has a lot of other interesting things to say. I expect he saw a lot of interesting things.

The recent Occupy Wall Street protests have aimed their message at the income disparity between the 1% richest Americans and the rest of the country. But what happens when you expand that and look at the 1% richest of the entire world? Some really interesting numbers emerge. If there were a global Occupy Wall Street protest, people as well off as Linda Frakes might actually be the target.

In America, the top 1% earn more than $380,000 per year. We are, however, among the richest nations on Earth. How much do you need to earn to be among the top 1% of the world?

$34,000.

Why stop there? Why not go further?

Every human on the planet is no doubt part of the top 1% of privilege compared to the other 99% of life on our planet. And even pond slime has its privileged position as part of the minuscule proportion of matter manifesting life as compared to inanimate matter on our planet. And perhaps our whole life bearing planet is in turn part of an even smaller proportion of privileged happenstance in a vast beautiful but barren universe.

But where does that get us? Very far from the point.

Probably less than 1% of the occupy movement are actually motivated by base envy.

The point is that with privilege comes responsibility. The old word for it is stewardship.

From those to whom much has been given, much will be required.

If it is very clear that the 1% are fucking it up (and it is!) then it is not wrong – in fact we have a duty – to remind them (us) that they (we) are answerable for what is being done with what has been given. And it is in the nature of things that we are always answerable downwards as well as upwards. If the cry from below is not responded to, then the thunder from above will have to be.

They is we, but let that not be a means of diluting responsibility. There might be a certain nobility in that on the part of those who have less, but it would be utterly despicable cowardice and worse on the part of those who have more. From those to whom most has been given. most IS required.

Tweaking a photo with Instagram does not make it artistic. Selective redefinition of terms like ‘creativity’ and ‘intelligence’ makes for category errors rather than creativity.

So – come to think of it – maybe iPhones DO enable artificial intelligence. (In which case we should stop playing with our digital appendages: even though its makes the logo bigger we really only need that because we’re going blind?) Forgive my grim wit please – but there IS something about AI coming which is self-deluding, profoundly unsatisfying, and a little narcissistic – not just a surplus of cognitive shallowness.

So there is more to us than what we think. Yep. Thank God. We are not men without chests – even though we have tried.

So we can be caught in our own traps. Yep. That has always been true too – thank God.

So the solution to the problem of making our own singular god which we then have to cringe before is to keep it pocket sized? Or eat it before it eats us? Become it before it becomes us?

With apology to Woody Allen and our mother who is the source of the dust from which we and our gadgets are born – ‘Artifice Wrecks’ might be the name of this story.

Which reminds me that we are children – not robots. Men – not mannequins. Children with a father – an artist who creates beyond our wildest imaginings – who gives us a hand in his creating.

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,
When our deep plots do pall: and that should teach us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will,–

Even in the darkest night
we walk through fields of blazing lights.
There is nothing hidden
that will not be revealed.

and I felt like it was the light which had penetrated my dreams and woken me up.

There are many of those blazing lights. They are all around us. My wife is one of them. It is good to be near her, beside her. Truth and love blaze within her, wake me up, make me warm,  keep me real. The light that leaks out of her reminds me that the best part of truth is lived out in flesh and blood. I’m deeply grateful that she is who she is.

From an ABC news article:
(http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-10/society-role-in-london-riots/2833168)

But Ms Batmanghelidjh says many British youths have lived with that feeling of fear for their entire lives.

“This happened to the public for a few days. But many of these children are chronically frightened – they get attacked in their own homes, they get attacked on the estates,” she said.

“[To them] it feels like at that point civil society doesn’t step in to, for example, create a robust child protection structure to protect these children, or to protect them from attacks at street level.

What a good idea! It’s called family.

“So from a young people’s perspective, their conditions of fright have been chronically ignored.”

She says the way to counter the problem is to create communities which engage and support disadvantaged youth.

Yup. It’s called family.

“Sort out the civil structures around these young people, provide for them adults who are caring; who can provide a healthy counter culture to the perverse street culture that they are exposed to,” she said.

Yup! It was invented a long time ago. It’s called family.

“Then you have the beginnings of the making of a genuine community that includes these young people. And then you can legitimately hold them accountable.”

Absolutely! It’s called family.

The things that corrode family corrode society. Maggie thatcher was wrong – there IS such a thing as society. But the lefties and libertarians and free-love loonies are also wrong – society starts at home.

Remember all that rhetoric about the fabric of society? We’re all either letting it rip or making a stitch in time – or maybe nine. There isn’t any neutral ground.

It may well be that we get a rise in the stock market before a much bigger drop – (a friend of mine who has a wave theory of market psychology has been predicting that – but he didn’t expect this drop to be as big as it has been) -  but up and down or just down we can still expect much bigger drops to come. The general economy (jobs, houses etc) will start to really feel the heat probably about 6 months after that. I don’t know anything about the ‘physics’ of crowd psychology but we all know about the physics of gravity, and Wiley coyote ran off the cliff quite some time ago.

The bigger question in my mind is what do we do about the social problems that will follow. The ‘arab spring’ has been largely a result of economic problems impacting the middle class. How do we make the best of what happens? I’m asking myself that question as a member of a Christian community / mission order as well as dad / family member / individual. We can’t all shout “We’ll all be rooned!” and head for the hills.

This is not a double-dip recession – it is a continuation of what started in 2007 and has been held off temporarily by making things very much worse by sending governments (tax payers) broke by bailing out banks that deserved to fail. Ordinary savings in those banks could have been safe-guarded for a very much lower cost.

At another level this is a continuation of what first showed itself in 1987 and would / should have been able to run its course back then with less damage than will now occur if the general public hadn’t been encouraged to take on so much debt to keep the bubble growing in the years since then. The things that we have been encouraged to put our hope in – housing and super – will now show themselves to be debt-fueled rather than savings based.

You could say you don’t get something for nothing – but that plays to the lower side of human nature and perversely avoids the core moral issues.

I think a more sensible way to say it is that if you are not actively doing something good then bad things will happen: and if you do good things and bad things still happen – at least you still got to do good. Another way I like to think about is this: Never under-estimate the power and value of being a servant – God is the servant of his entire creation.

(This is a slightly edited version of something I wrote over a couple of posts to a private e-mail list a few days ago.  It is edited just enough for it to make sense outside of the list context – nothing material is changed.)

Along the way to preparing for the talk I realised there was something I wanted to talk about a lot more than Christian community in urban environments. But in the end … well you’ll have to listen to find out more.

Download here.

faith*, hope and love are like a colour-space of personhood. That is if you were painting a personality you could do it in colours composed from faith, hope and love.

Or we could think of them as another three dimensions (along with space and time) that people occupy in a way that ‘things’ (aside from their personal use) don’t.

They are essentially personal in nature: they make no sense outside of person-hood; and the experience and exercise of them are fundamental to the experience and exercise of person-hood.

Every story that is a story rather than just the bare recounting of facts has in it dimensions of  faith, hope and love. A story with little of  these elements is a flat story.

Conversely personal life always takes place within the context of story. Every life tells a story. There are multiple levels of story. Ultimately they are all within the context of God’s story. We exercise authority as we act as authors of the stories (our own and others) it is given to us to take part in. There is even one who is the ultimate author and has ultimate authority.

Matt 28:18-20
Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

leadership and authorship …

We are all authors in the lives of others. A leader is deliberate about playing a role of authorship in other stories than his own direct personal story. Leadership is about building stories together into bigger stories.

A story is good and true and beautiful to the extent that what it does with faith, hope and love is good and true and beautiful.

Imagination, reason and will are some of the ‘muscles’ or soul ‘body-parts’ we have available as persons to do things in the universe of faith, hope and love. These are some of the muscles we use to grab hold of the raw stuff of the personal universe, build the stories, and navigate our way through them.

* If the word ‘faith’ sticks in your throat try substituting the word ‘courage’ and you’ll probably still get a big chunk of what I’m getting at. Someone told me that C.S. Lewis once said something like ‘Courage is fear that has said its prayers’.

It is true of people and it is true on the web. The more you give the more you get. The more you send people away the more they come back. Imagine if google had links only to google. The more facebook points outside of facebook – the more it makes other things useful to me – the more likely I am to use facebook.