Now another point. There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest: and lending money at interest—what we call investment—is the basis of our whole system. Now it may not absolutely follow that we are wrong. Some people say that when Moses and Aristotle and the Christians agreed in forbidding interest (or “usury” as they called it), they could not foresee the joint stock company, and were only thinking of the private moneylender, and that, therefore, we need not bother about what they said. That is a question I cannot decide on. I am not an economist and I simply do not know whether the investment system is responsible for the state we are in or not. This is where we want the Christian economist. But I should not have been honest if I had not told you that three great civilisations had agreed (or so it seems at first sight) in condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life.

- Mere Christianity

Thoughts?

TL I was thinking that you are so similar in that you both speak of things of the spirit, one in pictures and the other in words. But there is another sense in which you are different: Michael’s message finds its natural home in a broad mass audience and Rowan’s message finds its home more naturally among a body of believers. So that got me thinking, why is it that the church finds it so difficult to speak to that mass audience?

RW There is a “good” reason and a “bad” reason. I think the bad reason is that religious language often comes across as possessive, defensive of its territory, and it can build up a very considerable sense of power and privilege. If you are talking about God, and God is the most important reality you can imagine, then you can think there is a lot of reflected glory, and want to hang onto it. And the bad reason therefore is something to do with the way in which religious language is meshed in with a particular kind of power. The good reason is that it ought to be difficult to talk about spiritual things to a mass audience, which is, of course, why it’s best done in pictures very often.

ML I agree with you Rowan. I find that a language has developed in journalism which is glib, facile and restrictive, and it’s difficult to talk about all manner of truths. And a cartoon is meant to break that. And yes, certain things can be touched on in pictures because they break through the cult of cleverness. We are trapped by an expectation that we shall be articulate and clever. Yet the closer we come to the nub of things the more inarticulate we become. But there is this restriction on being inarticulate and stumbling and we expect so little of our fellows in the way of patience that we have to get it right, and quickly. So there is always that problem in the media that you have to be slick. Yet spiritual matters are often awkward and embarrassing and all the things that society is not.

RW Two things come to mind about what language can’t do. One was the great remark made by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that the words that once signified a real change in the world, don’t do it any longer, and so what do we do? We have to find other words, not to make it easy but to make it difficult again. The other thing I was thinking of was an extraordinary short story by Rudyard Kipling about three journalists coming back from South Africa on a ship and they are in the middle of a storm in the South Atlantic, and out of this colossal storm emerges a sea monster. And it’s described – fantastically. And the three journalists think “this is the greatest scoop of our career. Who is going to file the copy first?” And they all go to their cabins and try to write about it. And they find they can’t. They haven’t got any language left for real newness or extremity because the language they use as journalists all the time is about newness and extremity in a routine way, and so there is nothing left to talk about the really strange. And I think religious language suffers from that as well because it has become, as Bonhoeffer suggested, rubbed and worn and domestic. How do we use it to speak of something that is really strange and really frightening?

TL But Michael you almost actively avoid religious symbols, with the exception of angels.

ML Yes, the angels are there, but what else would be a symbol? I would have thought a flower is a religious symbol, or a duck. Or the way you draw a human face, might have a religious and iconic feel to it. It’s that feeling that life itself is religious.

RW I am fascinated by what you say, Michael, about the way in which the human face is actually depicted. The religiousness being the way it is done. That says a great deal about what I might want to call “religious art”. I think there are works of art with religious subjects which are irreligious in their execution. And the opposite applies, obviously. I don’t think Rembrandt, for example, was a “religious” artist simply when he was doing scenes from the gospels, but also when he was painting his mother, and when he was painting his mistress with her skirts up – it’s how you look. And to see that as religious, you have to do a bit of unpicking about what lies in the background, that there is a way of looking which is somehow aligned with a reality that is itself, as a whole, looked at by God, loved if you like…

ML Absolutely yes. I was going to say made with love is part of it, but you took it further that it has been loved and seen, and I think this is terribly important. And to draw a cartoon depiction of the human spirit, I suppose, that looks, somehow, secure in all its floundering and pathos… It’s the person that is a religious symbol for me, well not religious, but whatever it is, it’s real and it has been seen.

RW Yes. And to pick up something Michael said earlier. I think he used the expression “expecting a certain patience from people”. Most of our activities these days have in common a deep impatience. We need to be aware that some things cannot be done impatiently. There are certain aspects, even of the most apparently functional economic life, that you can’t do without taking time. I mean the exercises of life together, the exercises of patience, the exercises of the time taken to listen to someone else’s humanity, whether it’s locally or globally.

ML Yes, that is endangered perhaps, because it seems to me that speed is revered. And the problem is that certain human things cannot happen at speed. Can you love at speed, can love flourish at speed? That sounds glib, but the dreadful worry for me is that we tend to copy unconsciously our technologies. I think, for example, we imitate the way movies are edited. This cutting and close-up quick grab, this strange traumatic discontinuity, which we accept as normal, and we enjoy it because of its speed and its traumatising stimulus. And there we sit and expose our eyes, the windows of the soul, to this bizarre chopping up of reality. Now we say we can handle this, but I think one thing that’s doing us great damage is this visual cacophony as a depiction of reality. The eye makes great meaning out of life, much more than we understand. It tracks this room as it looks around: as one point leads to the next point, there is sense being made all the time.

RW That image of the eye making sense as it surveys seems to me fundamental. Our seeing is also interpreting and therefore our interacting. It is not just the registering of an image on a screen.

TL That rings real bells for me of things that I have read from a tradition that is still there in Christianity but very little heard these days, the monastic tradition. You don’t hear many Christian leaders anywhere these days, publicly at any rate, counselling the great virtues of monasticism.

RW OK, well let me come out – a closet monastic! I think that the recovery of what that is really about is imperative for Christianity. And it’s very easy to trivialise all that and say well it’s about denial, it’s about withdrawal. But there is, as I think you were intimating, in the monastic tradition, quite a lot about seeing, about how you see. The word “contemplation” is just a long way of saying “looking”. Now if the monastic tradition is about contemplation, it is about ways of seeing, and part of the monastic experience in the early church speaks of the whole practice of that life as an education in seeing. There is the looking at your own reactions, your own emotional rhythms, and the careful, truthful monitoring of those responses. Then there is the looking at the structures of the universe as patiently and faithfully as you can, to see what the rhythms are there, and feel those rhythms. And then if you are learning all that, then maybe, by the grace and gift of God, you end up aligning yourself, not only to the rhythm and pattern of the created universe, but to the rhythm of God’s breathing in and out. Now all of that is bound together – the truthful looking at yourself, the truthful looking at the environment which requires space and time and patience. And that seems to be what the monastic enterprise in Christianity is very deeply about, and we have lost that. We have lost, I suppose, that sense that our religious belief and practice is about education, and it has something to do with the way, back to where we started this evening, in which religious talk can be treated as if it were a matter of conveying little gobbets of information, and if this happens to be information about God rather than information about nuclear physics, same sort of thing, it is just different subject matter. And it’s not like that!

ML What you’ve said has made me think of reverence. It’s about a way of looking. I notice children tend to have a natural reverence. It’s what they like to do: to get down on their hands and knees and look very closely at things and be absorbed in them and that to me is a sort of reverence, it’s a real looking. Now, in our culture – there’s an Australian pride in our irreverence. And yes, it’s a healthy irreverence, but I always feel it’s sad that children are often asked too young to abandon their natural reverence. I find as a cartoonist if I am looking at the world more reverently rather than sarcastically, I can actually get somewhere.

RW I am thinking of one particular visual image which I for years have found very powerful. It is one of Stanley Spencer’s sequence of paintings of Christ in the Wilderness. It is called “Consider the Lilies”. Christ is a very bulky, rather graceless, middle aged man, shabby haired and heavy browed, on hands and knees, in a sandy waste looking at a very tiny flower. It makes those words, “consider the lilies”, quite different and quite fresh. The sort of vague pious feel that that quote so often has suddenly becomes real because it is visualised in a very bizarre and challenging way as God’s reverence for God’s creation.

ML And coming into the world of bombs dropping on Afghanistan and the Middle East, what place does reverence have here? I mean, there’s this natural impulse to want to get down on your knees and care whether the ant is going to make it across the rock. That’s what children do, and that child is still within us. We still care about the ant or the spider in some way, let alone the human, and so there is this dreadful distance between the ant and a village being bulldozed with people in the houses.

RW Distance is, of course, one of the words isn’t it? Years ago, at the time of Vietnam, I remember hearing a Roman Catholic theologian in Britain saying (in an image I have never forgotten), if you told someone to pick up a child in their arms and pour napalm over it, they wouldn’t do it! But if you can do it at a distance of a few thousand feet, it doesn’t feel the same. Now most of our military technology is devoted to doing it from a few thousand feet so that it doesn’t feel the same. Now what sort of education is going on that allows you to be content with that sort of difference, that distance?

TL I wasn’t going to throw this one in tonight, but it sort of grew out of things that each of you said. What is the right relationship between us and the physical environment? It is easy to say we need to be vigilant to the rhythms in the natural world, or that we should slow down and watch the ant crawl across the rock. They are nice images, but we have to confront the big question: how should we relate to this whole system that we are part of?

RW Well, when you start thinking about the scale of changes that might involve it is quite intimidating, because it does entail our living less comfortably. I doubt whether many governments get elected on that platform, and so it doesn’t get to the top of the agenda very quickly. But it does seem to me that there have to be questions raised. Let’s take the most obvious one: oil consumption. And I say it’s obvious because that’s the one we see most clearly around us, it’s what drives a great deal of foreign policy in some of the most powerful countries in the globe. It’s therefore what (I choose my words advisedly) fuels the murderous conflicts of vast tracts of the globe. Now there is something we are all involved in – I came here in a car tonight – but the spiral of consumption there is one of the things which I think most urgently needs addressing. And government after government seems to withdraw from tackling that. But it can be named publicly and that’s why I am going on about it frankly!

ML I am not sure what we can do. I do like Ghandi’s idea that in the face of problems anything we can do will make very little difference, but it is absolutely essential that we do it.

Edited by the Revd Gregory Seach, curate of St John’s Camberwell.

You can have a read here.

It becomes so clear to most of us, that when, as Mark mentions, our fragility is thrust in our face, consumerism holds no answers. Just as revealing is a our hasty retreat back into the arms of our idols (comfort, security, money). Sounds a bit like the Israelites doesn’t it?

Many of you may have been brought up on a staple diet of the likes of Colson, Piper, Packer, Driscoll et al, who would all fall in to the category of protestant evangelicals; my problem here is that much of the time this tradition is (often overtly) accompanied by an expectation that we unquestionably believe whatever we are preached (but  testing everything by Scripture, as long as it is in a specifically protestant evangelical way! Congdon comments on the idea of Sola Scriptura are very interesting in this regard). Whilst there is surely much to learn from such folk, to my mind it’s always good to read/hear some really good theological debate, have our understandings challenged, and be willing to question and challenge those statements that we believe are wrong (regardless of who has espoused them).

And to be honest, I’ve got to say I find myself falling heavily on Congdon’s side. I’ll let you read the articles, as I have no chance of doing it justice in a summary here, but I will quote a portion of each to whet your appetite:

Colson relating a discussion with another former marine:

I asked him about younger evangelicals who believe that we oldsters aren’t being sensitive enough to their concerns. ‘Can you imagine,’ he asked, ‘what would happen if a scruffy young recruit were to tell his Marine drill instructor at Parris Island that he ought to be more sensitive to his needs?’ We both chuckled, knowing what would happen to the poor recruit. If he survived, he’d be doing 100 pushups a day for weeks.

Congdon responds:

The commanding authority that Colson sees as the analogue of the drill sergeant is not Jesus or God, but rather the church. It is the authority of the church, not the authority of Christ, that demands our formal, blind obedience. Colson’s theology is the deification of the church, and thus the deification of a particular cultural form. Despite his best intentions, the gospel on such an account is simply propaganda.

Yeeee haaaaawwww!

So, if you feel inclined, jump in and have a read of both – although I must warn you, you’ll probably need a dictionary to follow along (or maybe that’s just me!). It should keep you busy and thinking for a while!

(P.s. Although Chuck Colson’s glasses are awesome, the fact that Congdon quotes T S Eliot in his blog title, likes micro breweries and smokes a pipe makes him alright in my book!)

HT to Ben Myers

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I have been pondering for sometime now the issue of commitment in our culture. Just chewing it over, ruminating, and chewing it some more, and I think I’m starting to come to a conclusion, which I thought I would share with you here.

The current them of Stoop is “Looking backwards, Moving Forwards” - in relation to this issue, if we look back in time a few decades, commitment and social duty or social responsibility were a big deal – they were a part of growing up and “becoming a man/woman”.  Today however, drenched with choice and options, there is little need for commitment, and moreover definitely no celebration of it as a marker of our social status. My question then, has included what can I take from the past that should be re-learnt as I walk into the future. I’m also careful not to be nostalgic in looking backwards – clearly there were problems in the past and things that should not have been so, and it with this mindset that I proceed. The biggest catalyst of all for this, I suppose has been becoming a father; what that means and what I want to teach my children; so, let’s begin.

I read an article recently that quoted the old adage, “Everyone wants to change the world, but no one wants to do the dishes!” Apart from being a nice little quip to bring up a dinner parties or when discussing the socio-political landscape of say, for instance the Make Poverty History campaign, I think there is a tightly packaged bundle of truth  in the statement, especially as it relates to commitment and social responsibility. Something that has really bugged me for a while now is the ease of “protesting” in the digital age – I can stick a cute slogan in my Facebook or Twitter status and all of a sudden I’m an activist! The digital landscape makes protest possible, without the pain of actually having to do anything. And being the savvy consumers we are, we really like this aspect – I mean surely it’s the better of two choices, one of which equals potential pain and no social recognition, and the other that equals instant social status as a philanthropist/activist without the pain. It’s an easy decision right?  However, the problem with this, like so many of the choices we’re offered by our culture, is that it doesn’t really challenge us at all – we don’t have to commit to anything; there is no long term engagement with a cause; we’re free to still do what we always have – and that is a big problem. The pain and perseverance of committing to someone or to a cause is what forces us to grow; we decide to do it no matter how it feels or what people think. When it starts to hurt, we stick in there and keep going. Our culture tells us that “if it feels good, do it” – the converse of that is “if it feels bad, don’t do it”. I fear that this loss means that we end up with a whole lot of talk but no action. Worse still, the danger is that our activism forgets the little things or deems them ineffective or unimportant when compared with the grander ideas of uprising or fighting against injustice.

From a christian perspective, this idea when read in conjunction with Jesus life is preposterous; but it is exactly the conundrum that many sociologists and missiologists report the western church as facing (read Mark Sayers, Gerorge Barna, Alan Hirsch et al for more on this) – to put it bluntly,  we have bought into the secular religion of consumerism and forgotten Christ’s call to be disciples.

The more I think about it and consider what I am actually called to as a follower of Christ, the more there is this nagging issue of discipleship. And that call challenges everything that the Empire seductively lures me with, as in order to become more Christlike I must abandon my need to be “liked”, my need for instant gratification, and biggest of all, forces me to acknowledge daily how far away from being like Jesus I actually am. Although that humility sometimes really sucks, God says that it is the humble that he shows grace to, and that a life with him starts, continues and ends with being a lowly servant.

It is from this point of humility that Christ again and again calls me to commit to the journey of becoming like Him – more kind, more peaceful, more just, more merciful; that is, more and more like the blessed people that He speaks about in Matthew 5. The annoying part about this whole commitment to discipleship is that it becomes very hard to compartmentalise my faith – God wants in on every nook and cranny of my being. I must give up my perceived right to be angry at my wife, or my self justified prejudices, my sinful lusts and desires, and my unconscious need for control. Jesus keeps exposing all of the things that I don’t want to give up or those that I don’t want anyone to know about, and to my shame, the majority of the time I wish he would bloody well stop it!

So, I’m committing to this journey of discipleship and (sort of) looking forward to the continually humbling experience of following Christ, who displayed the most incredible commitment and humility of all. And I’m hoping that this commitment will extend throughout my life so that looking back, I may be able to say that I started the race and followed it through despite the challenges that I faced. And above all, I hope that come what may, Christ (and most likely my wife) will always remind me of the grand humility of washing the dishes!

Amen.

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Dave Berlach is editor Stoop Magazine

The illusion of a Christian nation, a Christian “people,” masses of Christians, is no doubt due to the power that numbers exercise over the imagination. And yet how many are able to say of their Christian acquaintances that they are truly Christians in the New Testament sense, or that their lives are even close to resembling those of the first disciples. But when there are thousands upon thousands who confess to being Christian, one becomes easily confused. Perhaps we are all Christians after all. Why be so harsh?

- Soren Kierkegaard, excerpt from Attack upon Christendom

What we need is less consumers and more disciples:

I know all the things you do, that you are neither hot nor cold. I wish that you were one or the other! But since you are like lukewarm water, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth! You say, ‘I am rich. I have everything I want. I don’t need a thing!’ And you don’t realize that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked.

Revelation 3:15-17

There have been countless number of words written about love, indeed, the most memorable stories throughout history are inevitably stories of love and sacrifice, redemption and justice, stories of unrequited love or love lost, of longing and passion. It seems that we have a natural gravitation towards them – as if our souls have been indelibly marked by this mysterious search.

If we are to believe the stories we are told by the cultural architects of our time, love is only a feeling to be grasped at, attained only for a brief time until it peters out, at which point we must begin our search once more. We’re told that life is but a series of quests for recognition and love whereupon our old age we will look back and ponder our journey in the hope that we have quenched our thirst.

What we are not told by the Empire is that there is an infinite amount more than that fleeting flutter of butterflies and sexually fuelled passion of young love. We are not told that love is hard and bloody, and more often than not bloody hard. Or that one can love in the presence of hatred. Or that love is a more powerful force than violence.

Jesus shows us a kind of love that is real, tangible, brutal and fleshy… it is not pleasant or nice (or very “Sunday school” for that matter). It is not the kind of display that will always enamour us to our consumer driven culture, in fact it is more likely to see us ridiculed. But it is this kind of active love, gritty and unflinching, that inspires me most because it is loving sacrifice, not lust or romance or a fleeting feeling, that continues on beyond and beside ourselves. Sacrifice (which Jesus told us is the best example of Love) seems to have a mystical power to heal and renew, and it is His sacrifice that has the greatest power for redemption. When we choose to sacrifice we see glimpses of that great cosmic redemption that is offered to all humanity.

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Dave Berlach is editor of Stoop Magazine and also blogs from time to time at dberlach.blogspot.com and twitter.com/dberlach

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This Sabbatical year has been good for me in many ways, though ‘image management’ would perhaps be the least of them; the scrutiny of the congregational eye compels one to maintain certain ‘standards’ – but from the back pews I’ve felt no such compulsion.

So to be honest I’d hardly noticed to what pass I’d come; the immediate results of letting nature take over in the grooming department were of course obvious every morning, but I’d just plain forgotten to think of how others would be seeing me.

The realisation that I had traded in the image of ‘hip but respectable young preacher’ for ‘shambling derelict’ came one day on a rare trip to town for irrigation supplies.  It wasn’t until I’d left the store in a state of bewildered amusement that I realised that having first been treated with suspicion, I was then contemptuously ignored and finally outright insulted simply on the basis of how I looked.  It occurs to me only now as I write this that they must have picked me as just another Northland dope-growing castaway.

On the way home, far from being indignant, I was surprised by a sense of satisfaction.  It’s one thing to pity the marginalised, to reach down to help them from a position of privilege, but quite another to show a solidarity that’s willing to bear reproach along with them, to identify with them.  It occurred to me that while the former was charity, the latter was a more particular type of Christlikeness, and I mused over the idea of not just giving away a change of clothes, but in trading clothes with the next rough sleeper I happened to meet.

As I pondered the idea, trying to get a fix on just what it was that the holy spirit was impressing upon my soul, I realised that beyond an interesting experiment in liberation theology, I had perhaps just stumbled upon a way to finally get the respect I deserved.

Stoop, and keep on stooping ‘till your feet touch the ground.

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Peter Orchard is shepherd of a small flock hidden in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands and blogs at http://www.besideourselves.com.

Apart from the email being ridiculously nationalistic and racist, the claims within it are completely false – the email is a hoax that initially appeared in the US and Canada and subsequently made it’s way to Australia. Both the Department of Immigration and the Refugee Council of Australia have issued Media releases refuting the claims made in the email (or it’s similar permutations). The releases can be found at the below links:

http://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/docs/releases/2010/100309%20Updated%20Response%20to%20email%20on%20Centrelink%20benefits.pdf

http://www.immi.gov.au/media/letters/letters09/le090902.htm

The issue of asylum seekers in Australia has been largely based on myth in the public discourse, with the 4 main myths as follows:
Myth 1. Asylum seekers / boat people are “illegal”
This is wrong – the United Nations Declaration, to which Australia is a signatory, states that every person has the right to seek asylum – it is not illegal. There are in fact about 50,000 illegal immigrants in Australia but the majority of these are backpackers who have overstayed their visa’s
Myth 2. Australia is being flooded by boat people
Again this is clearly wrong – 90% of asylum seekers come by plane with boats making up only 10% of an already small migration quota
Myth 3. Most boat people are not real refugees (rather just queue jumping scoundrels)
False – more than 90% of refugees are eventually deemed genuine and given asylum in Australia
Myth 4. Refugees are harming Australia’s economy
Again this is untrue – refugees make up only 3% of Australia’s total immigration quota, and equate to only 1% of Australia’s population growth

So hopefully this has cleared a few things up.

As an aside, my wife and I lived next door to a young Afghan refugee couple for a few years and, despite what the media would have you believe, they were some of the most generous, kind people I’ve met – maybe it’s time people actually started to see refugees as human beings rather than some abstract caricature portrayed on the 6 o’clock news.

If you receive this email, feel free to copy this text and reply all to set the facts straight and hopefully change some perceptions.

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