Category: Culture (Page 7 of 8)

Reflection, information, obsession, and Jesus

September 26, 2010 / soulthoughts / 0 Comments

“All the books you never read, just started; all the meals you rushed, never tasted” – U2, Falling at Your Feet

I lament our loss of reflection in this information age. We are the most informed generation in history but we are losing the art of reflection. We are constantly wired, and I don’t mean just connected to an iPod or iPhone but emotionally wired. When we are constantly consuming information we are no longer being still and thinking about the deeper issues of life. Everything is rushed. We are overwhelmed with choice and we no longer feel at peace with ourselves. We have everything at our fingertips but don’t know anymore how to be. We think we have to always be doing something; we feel guilty when we aren’t being ‘productive’; and we wonder if we’re being lazy when we’re lying around on a Sunday afternoon.

Linked to this loss of reflection is our culture’s obsession with experience. We have a terrifying fear of missing out. We are the addict who thinks we cannot do without more and better. We talk about things being boring or cool. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe in leading a boring life. The life of following Jesus is anything but boring; it is counter-cultural and filled with opportunities. But what this means is that we live a life that is other-centred and not based on how we feel at a certain time. A life of other-centredness is one that doesn’t have to look for the next fix, because it is inherently satisfying. It is borne out of a deep knowing that we are loved by God and therefore don’t need to spend our days and years trying to prove ourselves to others. We are free to love and serve our fellow human beings. This is what it is to be a follower of Jesus. This is life, and deep down we know it is the right way to live.

The way of Jesus gives the most satisfaction, the most depth and the greatest enjoyment of life. This is anything but boring, but it is not a life that seeks to avoid boredom as an end in itself. It is a life that has a higher end; a life that has found something better. For if we do not find what we are really looking for we will inevitably go back to the life we lived before, and, such being human nature, we will pick up where we left off and it will be worse than before. Jesus spoke of this when he told about the house from which a demon has departed but then has other demons more evil than the first one come back and make the house worse than before (Matthew 12:43-45).

Life in the information age promises so much but delivers so little. We are still dependent beings. The fact of human nature is that we simply cannot live without outside help. We are created with a God-shaped hole and as St Augustine and others down through the ages have said, we are forever restless until we find our hope in Christ. No wonder Edward Mote could write the words of that famous hymn back in the 1830s, “On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand”.

We are indeed in trouble when our information age gives us so much to take in but leaves us with so little time to reflect on it. The Christian message is one which offers a way out of our malaise; a way out of the self-centred slavery to which we are addicted. The way to life is to fall at the feet of the One who is Life itself; Jesus, who says to our tired and information-burdened age, “Come to me all you who are weary and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). It is when we reflect on this that we come back to reality and find the life that is truly life, where we share with those people down through the centuries who have had their lives unburdened and their hopes transformed.

Some more words from Falling at Your Feet sum it up eloquently:

all the information
all the radio waves
electronic seas
how to navigate
how to simply be
to know when to wait
this plain simplicity
in whom shall I trust
how might I be still
teach me to surrender
not my will, Thy will

Clive Hamilton on boredom

March 8, 2010 / soulthoughts

There’s a great article by Clive Hamilton in The Age today on the madness of our consumerist lifestyle and how it strips away our ability to just be. As I have been reminded by some friends of mine over time, we are human beings, not human doings. I particularly like the comment from Hamilton about the Twitter phenomenon, when he says that

“new modes of communication keep appearing to prevent us from owning our attention. The most absurd must be Twitter, which spreads like a virus for one reason only; our waning capacity to be alone with ourselves. Our brains have been rewired so we crave external stimulation to avoid succumbing to boredom”

Mark Sayers deals with this issue in The Trouble with Paris when he talks about our culture of hyperreality and how it is basically a sin to be bored. I have mentioned in a previous post a reference to a TV ad for the benefits of particular mobile phone games which you can play while you have to go through the hassle of waiting for the bus.

Our society tells us that we need to constantly fill our lives with ‘noise’. Clive Hamilton, in this article, as mentioned above, refers to this as our inability to face ourselves by saying, “we are terrified that if we strip away everything to reveal the essence we will find there is nothing there”.

What a sad place our culture is when we are afraid of being with ourselves, of looking ourselves in the mirror and facing life on life’s terms. I believe it is only Jesus who gives us this ability to see ourselves more as we really are and cope, with the fact that we are loved beyond measure despite our tendency toward self-destruction. Jesus offers and delivers on life in all its fullness. And this involves a life of being, of reflection and contemplation as well as passionate action and commitment to ideals greater than ourselves.

The dumbing down of culture

February 5, 2010 / soulthoughts

I’ve been reading Colossians Remixed recently and I find I’m having to stop every page or two to make my own notes. This book has such profound things to say to our culture. Basically, this book looks at what Paul might say to our western culture if he were writing his letter to the Colossians today. One of the issues this great book discusses is how we are so captive to the consumerist culture we live in. Consider this quote, taken from Walter Brueggemann’s Interpretation and Obedience:

“The key pathology of our time…is the reduction of our imagination so that we are too numbed, satiated, and co-opted to do serious imaginative work.”

The authors of Colossians Remixed call this ‘disempowering us from dreaming that things might be otherwise’. Do you ever feel like you’re so busy that you don’t know what to do with all the choices you have? It’s sometimes called ‘choice anxiety’. Or as U2 put it some years ago, freedom looks like too many choices.

Our culture keeps us so busy, so wired, that we never stop to question our lives. As my Dad has said numerous times, “we’re living all wrong”, but we’re either too wound up in getting through each day to realise it, or it occasionally flickers like a dim light in the distance but then disappears again like a ship in the night. The fact is that we have fallen hook, line and sinker for the lie that more ‘stuff’ and being busier is what life is all about. And then we wake up one morning when we’re 65 and wonder where our life went.

I’ve said it before, but I find Jesus’ words in Matthew 16:26 to be some of the most timeless ever said – “what will it profit you if you gain the whole world but lose your very self in the process?” (my paraphrase). Deep down most of us know there’s something wrong with the way we live, we know we’re not really happy with our lives, but we feel powerless to stop it or we are paralysed by indifference to it. As Brueggemann says, we are numbed, or satiated to the effect that we are sleep walking our way through life.

A life focused on self and being ‘comfortable in captivity’ (another quote from Colossians Remixed) is an anti-life. Unfortunately much of the middle-class church is just as captive to this cultural numbness as the rest of society. Keith Green, referring to the church in this way, said it was asleep in the light.

Some years ago, Tim Costello wondered if God was actively working against the church. I have wondered sometimes if Tim is right. Like a frog in boiling water, we don’t even know we’re dying.

Fortunately there is a better way, the way of the Jesus, the road less travelled, a life less ordinary, to use a few clichés. But a cliché is a cliché because it is true. Jesus offers, and actually comes through, on a peace that passes all understanding, a joy that transcends our circumstances, and a freedom to be the people we really want to be – giving to others without counting the cost and loving extravagantly because we are loved beyond measure.

Engaging the culture with intelligence and relevance

January 7, 2010 / soulthoughts

Just like Paul in Acts 17, one of our tasks as Christians is to engage the culture where it’s at. Why is it that so much Christian media is so hopelessly out of touch with where it’s happening in society? As film maker Bruce Marchfelder says, we’re answering questions nobody is asking. No wonder Christianity is seen as irrelevant.

Rikk Watts tells the story of being at a party when the conversation inevitably turned to ‘so what do you do?’. Rikk answered ‘I teach theology’, expecting his answer of course to be the ultimate conversation stopper. But then he went on, saying that he was just talking to some people about how the Gospel of John is alot like the movie Terminator 2. The people he was talking to pricked their ears up and asked how so. And so the conversation continued. Some weeks later Rikk was told that these people had turned to faith because they were so struck that the Christian message was so relevant. Not many of us would think that Arnie blasting his away around the place in Terminator 2 would be a good advertisement for the Prince of Peace, but there it was.

Bruce Marchfelder, in an interview with Canadian Christianity, explains eloquently the importance of engaging the culture with relevance and interest. Here’s some of what he had to say:

I think in terms of the industry and so on, we just have to be smart. It’s Paul suggesting to Timothy that you might want to get circumcised because we’re going to be dealing with people of a certain type, and you know what, even though biblically you don’t really have to any more, I think it might be better culturally that we fit. The fact that you show up in a business suit or work out and stay fit so you don’t look like you’re going to keel over on set — it’s natural. You meet the culture where it is. That’s the way we need to engage…we don’t understand that the Lord puts us in these places where we can really make a dent on the universe.

Is God still at work in the West?

September 15, 2009 / soulthoughts

Is it really true that, when people travel to what we call the developing world, such as much of Africa, they see God’s Spirit move in powerful and miraculous ways which we don’t often see in the affluent West?

We live in a time which is the most materialistic in the history of humanity. In our culture, intellect rules. If you’re smart you will go places; if your IQ is not up there you will most likely be consigned to life as a struggling labourer, constantly battling to make ends meet, and having to live out your days in the service of the born-to-rule elite, those clever people who were smart enough to be doctors and lawyers and are now living it up in a great big office. That’s the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) message we have drummed into us every day.

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Sitting with pain

August 4, 2009 / soulthoughts

Recently I received some news which was particularly unpleasant. My emotional response over the next week ranged from defensiveness, to acceptance, to seeing my part, to mild depression, not in that particular order.

One of the lessons in life I have learned over the last few years (I’m now 40. You would think I wouldn’t have taken this long!) is that of not running from pain when life doesn’t treat me as I want it to. We live in an analgesic society. We have pills for almost everything and, as Stephen Ilardi says in his new book The Depression Cure, the rate of anti-depressant medication in America (translate that to most other western societies) has skyrocketed but the rate of depression has not reduced. It has in fact increased tenfold since the Second World War.

The culture we live in is a feel-good culture where pain is to be eliminated at all costs. As a result, our pain threshold lessens and we become less resilient people. The offset of this is that we become less able to sit with others in their pain. Rob Bell makes the profound point that your ability to sit and listen to someone else’s pain is directly proportional to how well you have dealt with your own pain.

The results of our addiction to pleasure and to pain minimisation is that our society ultimately fragments. We become more distant from each other and more unable to empathise with other in our times of sorrow. In my culture in Australia, many people still live by the adage that “she’ll be right mate” and “just have another beer”. And it’s generally us men who display this very unmanly attitude. Contrast that to the attitude and response of Jesus at the death of his good friend Lazarus. In our sporting culture, when a team comes frmo behind to win, we sometimes say it was the greatest comeback since Lazarus. But we have no idea who Lazarus was and what the circumstances behind his amazing comeback were. The shortest verse in the Bible, which comes from this story, is also perhaps the most human and at the same time the most divine – “Jesus wept”.

Jesus demonstrated gutsy, manly care for his mate Lazarus when he found out that he had died. He was unafraid to show his emotions and to sit with his pain. He didn’t run from it, he didn’t try to medicate it. He sat with it and expressed it, and did so for all to see. The responses he got were mixed, but the people’s response when he did something about the situation was nothing short of amazement.

I well recall some years ago when I was going through a very acute personal trauma that, one afternoon, it just felt like I had this huge hole in my chest. I called a friend and shared my feelings with him. I have never forgotten his simple response – “you’ve just got to sit with the pain”. I did and, after some time it lessened and I became a little more resilient.

When we don’t run from pain as from a burning building, our character grows. We become a little more able to deal with life on life’s terms. And we become a little more able to help someone else when they go through their pain. And in the process the kingdom of God is demonstrated yet again.

The (un)Happy Planet Index 2.0

July 11, 2009 / soulthoughts

Back in 2007 I wrote an article on the decay of western culture, in which I mentioned the New Economics Foundation’s Happy Planet Index. This is an index that addresses the relative success or failure of countries in supporting a good life for their citizens, while respecting the environmental resource limits upon which all our lives depend. Australia was ranked 139th out of 178, which suggested that Jesus was right when he said that life does not consist in the abundance of one’s possessions.

Well, the NEF has published its latest version of the Index, and it is indeed quite prophetic in its call for a new way of living in a world in which the earth’s resources are being depleted at a simply alarming rate. The report begins by stating that,

“In an age of uncertainty, society globally needs a new compass to set it on a path of real progress. The Happy Planet Index (HPI) provides that compass by measuring what truly matters to us – our well-being in terms of long, happy and meaningful lives – and what matters to the planet – our rate of resource consumption.”

It goes on to say that “we are still far from achieving sustainable well-being, and puts forward a vision of what we need to do to get there.”

Some of the interesting results to come out of the study we as follows:

The highest HPI score is that of Costa Rica (76.1 out of 100). As well as reporting the highest life satisfaction in the world, Costa Ricans also have the second-highest average life expectancy of the New World (second only to Canada). All this with a footprint of 2.3 global hectares. Whilst this success is indeed impressive, Costa Rica narrowly fails to achieve the goal of ‘one-planet living’: consuming its fair share of natural resources (indicated by a footprint of 2.1 global hectares or less).
Of the following ten countries, all but one is in Latin America.
The bottom ten HPI scores were all suffered by sub-Saharan African countries, with Zimbabwe bottom of the table with an HPI score of 16.6 out of 100.
Rich developed nations fall somewhere in the middle. The highest-placed Western nation is the Netherlands – 43rd out of 143. The USA comes a long way back in 114th place. Australia comes 102nd, a slight improvement on its 139th in the original study.
Many of the countries that do well are composed of small islands (including the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Cuba and the Philippines).
No country successfully achieves the three goals of high life satisfaction, high life expectancy and one-planet living.
It is possible to live long, happy lives witha much smaller ecological footprint than found in the highest-consuming nations. For example, people in the Netherlands live on average over a year longer than people in the USA, and have similar levels of life satisfaction – and yet their per capitaecological footprint is less than half the size (4.4 global hectares compared with 9.4 global hectares). This means that the Netherlands is over twice as ecologically efficient at achieving good lives.
More dramatic is the difference between Costa Rica and the USA. Costa Ricans also live slightly longer than Americans, and report much higher levels of life satisfaction, and yet have a footprint which is less than a quarter the size.

What this study clearly shows is that our way of living in the (still) affluent west is unsustainable, as if we needed reminding. Brian McLaren calls our way of living the ‘suicide machine’, because it is a way of living that is literally killing us and the rest of the planet. His brilliant book, Everything Must Change, explains this in more detail.

The study also highlights what many people have been saying for a long time now. Consider this quote from Thomas Friedman, a long-time advocate of growth and globalisation:

“Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall – when Mother Nature and the market both said: ‘No more'”

Jesus was indeed right when he warned of greed which is idolatry. Our whole way of living is based on greed and it is not just a doom-and-gloom killjoy remark to say that it is killing us. It is an undeniable fact. T. Jackson, in a NEF publication called ‘Chasing Progress’ has said that “every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth.” The Happy Planet report has an excellent section on this myth in which it discusses the history of the philosophy behind economic growth and how it came to prominence.

Many respected social thinkers have long put forward the argument that a religious outlook on life is beneficial to a peaceful and harmonious society. A society that places ethical values and a positive outlook for the future, often based on a religious faith, is a society that is based on a solid foundation. The Happy Planet report echoes this by saying that even a magazine such as The Economist says that

“attempting to explain why well-being does not keep rising in line with consumption, [The Economist] suggests that ‘there are factors associated with modernisation that, in part, offset its positive impact.’ Specifically, it argues that alongside consumption growth, [a] concomitant breakdown of traditional institutions is manifested in the decline of religiosity and of trade unions; a marked rise in various social pathologies (crime, and drug and alcohol addiction); a decline in political participation and of trust in public authority; and the erosion of the institutions of family and marriage.”

An article in The Age a few years ago showed that, if all people in the world lived like Australians, we would need 4 planets to maintain our lifestyle. And of all the states in Australia, my home state of Victoria was the worst of the lot. That is mainly due to our reliance on brown coal to create electricity. We have a lot to change, but happily, there are signs that change is happening. The Happy Planet report tells of incidences such as a community in Scotland sharing ownership of a new windfarm with developers, a ‘Big Lunch’ being arranged on streets across Britain to bring neighbours together, a community in a council estate in Luton partnering up with tea-growers in Southern India to ensure trade that is even fairer than fair trade. Things are happening. As Gandhi famously said, we must be the change we want to see in the world.

Jesus said the kingdom of God is among you. Through Jesus, the kingdom is invading history, and the good news is that all are invited to be a part of it. Heaven on earth will only happen when the resurrected Jesus returns to put the world to rights. But in the meantime, we have the absolute privilege of laying the building blocks. That is why everything we do matters. Every act of kindness, every act of justice. It all matters because when we do it in the name of Jesus, it has cosmic and eternal implications. As Ross Langmead sings,

“the kingdom is coming, a kingdom of peace. Beat swords into ploughs for fighting will cease. Justice will prosper, love will be king. Peacemakers will be able to sing that this is God’s earth and it has been worth all the pain.”

The Happy Planet report is a huge step in showing us how our current way of living is not of the kingdom, but it also shows some of the things we can do to help fulfil Jesus’ wish that the kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.

Maturity and influence

July 1, 2009 / soulthoughts

I’m reading a very interesting book at the moment called Sitting at the feet of Rabbi Jesus. It takes a look at the Jewishness of Jesus and how it can profoundly affect our faith today. Stay tuned for a review of this book as soon as I finish it. In the meantime, I thought this quote from one of the authors, on talking about discipleship, was quite brilliant and challenging:

“None of us is so mature that we cannot be influenced. The question is: who or what do we want to shape our lives? Even the culture around us will try to ‘disciple’ us if we have not placed ourselves under the transforming influence of Jesus Christ.”

Meaning and wellbeing in the rat race

June 28, 2009 / soulthoughts

As I waited at the bus stop one morning last week, watching both school kids and adults waiting to go to their places of education or work to spend the day, I was once again struck by the thought of meaning in life.

The kids were waiting there to go to school to work out what they want to do with their lives, what career path they want to follow. Then there were the adults who had gone through it all years before. It was the expressionless or just plain unhappy looks on the faces of the adults – who used to be just like the school kids next to them – that hit me. They seemed to convey the thoughts of millions of workers across the western world – a wish that they didn’t have to spend another day at this job, that if only they could win the lotto and ‘life could be a dream’ as one recent ad put it.

As I saw this scene played out before me, as it is every day of the working week, I wondered again – is this all there is? Is all those kids have to hope for just about getting their qualifications, landing a job, maybe having a family, living 80 or 90 years and then dying? Is that it? Are they destined to spend the next 50 years just going to work every day and making money? Where is the meaning? Where is the purpose?

I believe there has to be something more. Life is more than the accumulation of possessions and wealth, which we lose when we eventually kick the bucket anyway. I remember a pastor of mine telling me years ago of a funeral she conducted for a friend. A close relative of the friend looked at the body in the open coffin, reflected on the person’s life, and made the strong point that “there has to be something more”. It couldn’t have just ended with the death of her body. Something seemed to be telling her that people are made for more than this. Soon I hope to be able to purchase a new book by Dr. Stephen Ilardi called The Depression Cure. This work looks at the massive increase in depression in the western world in the last 100 years from, not just a cognitive-behavioral point of view, but also from an anthropological angle.

Fortunately this message is slowly getting through in even the business pages of some media. The Age last week ran an article reminding us that the measure of GDP is just one way to measure a society’s wellbeing. Paul Jelfs, the author of the article, explained how the Australian Bureau of Statistics has a number of other indicators, including the Measure of Australia’s Progress (MAP) and the Generic Social Survey. And many readers will probably be aware of Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness indicator. Interestingly, according to American Public Media, since “Bhutan glimpsed the rest of the world seven years ago with the arrival of TV and the Internet…happiness [has become] an increasingly rare commodity”. Yet again I am reminded of the relevance of Luke 12:13-21 and the other old words of Jesus – what shall it profit you if you gain the whole world but lose your very self in the process?

Running to stand still

May 10, 2009 / soulthoughts

My wife and I recently returned from a holiday to the south island of New Zealand. As we were travelling around that beautiful country, I started to see how much we always seem to have to ‘fill in’ time, how we always have to be ‘doing’ something.

The first question we often ask someone we haven’t seen for a while is ‘Are you busy?’ as if busyness is a virtue, and that if you’re not busy you’re not contributing to society.

On our holiday we were always thinking of the next thing to do. But when we stopped off at a little place called Lake Paringa, on the west coast of the south island, it looked as though it was a place where time could stand still. |more…|

Category: Culture (Page 7 of 8)

Reflection, information, obsession, and Jesus

Clive Hamilton on boredom

The dumbing down of culture

Engaging the culture with intelligence and relevance

Is God still at work in the West?

Sitting with pain

The (un)Happy Planet Index 2.0

Maturity and influence

Meaning and wellbeing in the rat race

Running to stand still

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