Page 42 of 53

Vale Ted Kennedy

August 27, 2009 / soulthoughts

The death of Senator Ted Kennedy brings to a close an extraordinary dynasty in U.S. politics. The Kennedy’s have often been referred to as America’s first family – the closest thing they have had to royalty. While he always sat in the shadow of his two more famous elder brothers, Ted will be remembered for his tireless work on health reform in the United States.

ABC radio reported a couple of days ago that perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Senator Kennedy’s passing was that it was due to natural causes. If there was any family that seems to have been cursed in history, it was the Kennedys. Apart from of course the tragic assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, it is often forgotten that the eldest brother was killed in action in World War 2.

The one even that perhaps thwarted the journey of Ted Kennedy to the United States presidency was the infamous Chappaquiddick affair. Time Magazine describes his legacy well:

…his failure to get to the presidency opened the way to the true fulfillment of his gifts, which was to become one of the greatest legislators in American history. When their White House years are over, most Presidents set off on the long aftermath of themselves. They give lectures, write books, play golf and make money. Jimmy Carter even won a Nobel Prize. But every one of them would tell you that elder-statesmanship is no substitute for real power.

It was fitting that a member of the family that did so much for black America lived to see the swearing in of it’s first black President. Ted Kennedy had his weaknesses, but who among us doesn’t? He will be missed by many the world over. Politics needs more like him.

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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.

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Book Review – Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus

July 31, 2009 / soulthoughts

Imagine if you could take yourself back 2,000 years and immerse yourself in the world of 1^st Century Palestine, in a little Jewish backwater where you were hearing reports of a man who was healing people and making the most extraordinary claims about himself. Imagine if you could follow him on the way for a bit and listen to some of what he was saying, and see some of these things he was doing, these things that had people talking and spreading all sorts of rumours about him. But imagine your disappointment if you had no idea of the meaning of what he was saying; if you were just thrown back in time to try to understand the scandal that this man was creating everywhere he went.

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Some thoughts from Rowland Croucher

July 23, 2009 / soulthoughts

Someone told me once how, in our culture, we don’t seem to seek out the older generation to mentor us. Rowland Croucher is one such elder statesman who has been a mentor to many a burnt out pastor over so many years. Our society needs more people like him to turn to for their wisdom that only comes with the experience of life and a maturity that comes from long days and nights spent in meditation, prayer and contemplation on the vagaries of this life. Here are a few examples of such wisdom:

“Enemies and close friends are the only two groups who will tell you the truth about yourself.”

“Walter Brueggeman said in answer to the question ‘What’s the Old Testament about?: ‘It’s about a God of grace who often breaks the rules God has set for God’s creatures.'”

“Success will feed your ego, but never your soul”

More can be found on his website.

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Out of the mouths of babes

July 18, 2009 / soulthoughts

A study of the Gospels will quickly reveal that, for Jesus, physical healing was never enough. Take the story of the woman with the bleeding problem who touched Jesus’ cloak and was healed. My friend and colleague, Siu Fung Wu, says that

“if we read about healings and exorcisms in the Gospels in the light of the woman’s socioeconomic context, we would realise that in almost every case someone was restored from impoverishment and social exclusion to physical wellbeing and fullness of communal life.”

This was the breaking in of the kingdom. But if you want a simple analogy of what the breaking in of the kingdom of God means, and of our role and God’s role, get this from Siu Fung’s 8 year old son:

“It’s like baking something in the oven. You have done everything you have to do, and then you put it in the oven. When the time is right, you take the food out and the job is now fully done.”

Isn’t that fantastic? Out of the mouths of babes comes such wisdom. I can honestly say that, of all the analogies of the kingdom vision that I have read from such eminent scholars as N.T. Wright and Ben Witherington, I have never heard it stated as simply as this.

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The media, climate change and 'balance' (cont'd)

July 14, 2009 / soulthoughts

Further to my previous post, Crikey have written an excellent detailed response to Steve Fielding’s concerns that, while the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been skyrocketing over the last 15 years, air temperatures seemingly have stayed steady.

The graph that has Steve Fielding up in arms

I’m sure that others have pointed these arguments out to Senator Fielding and if he remains steadfast in his stance, one of the conclusions we can make is that he is not sincere in his desire to see the truth. The fact that he comes across as so dogmatic in his stance on his website suggests that he seems like he does not have much of a desire to budge. To his credit though, he has asked for an appointment with Al Gore while he is in Melbourne.

As well as this, we cannot judge him if, after seeing evidence such as Crikey’s, he remains convinced that climate change is not being caused by human activity. After all, the same evidences that convince some people of the claims of Christ are the very same evidences that cause others to remain unconvinced of the same claims. An honest position is to pray for Steve Fielding, and for ourselves, that the Spirit of God will pierce our hearts with His truth.

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The media, climate change and 'balance'

July 13, 2009 / soulthoughts

Have you noticed recently that articles treating climate scepticism as one side of a level debate on climate change are becoming more numerous? There is now even a political party in Australia called The Climate Sceptics. Of course they were outside protesting in Melbourne today as Al Gore did his bit to convince more people of the deep peril that we are in.

The media in this country have a heck of a lot to answer for as they continue to portray the illusion that this is a balanced debate. Checking out some of the websites in my ‘climate change’ list on the right will show you that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists the world over are convinced that the climate is not only changing but that it is being caused by human activity.

Much of the recent flurry of articles showing sympathy for the deniers has been sparked no doubt by the actions of Senator Steve Fielding and his scepticism over anthropogenic global warming, after he attended a climate sceptics conference in Washington (funded mainly by The Heartland Institute – a group that was instrumental in denying that tobacco causes cancer).

When the ABC showed The Great Global Warming Swindle last year I called taklback radio and asked whether or not the ABC would be willing to show a documentary (if one exists) denying the Holocaust, in the name of balance. Of course there are those around who deny the Holocaust but they are not taken seriously by the vast majority of the population. Or take the moon landnig, which we will be celebrating the 40th anniversary of next week. Many people are convinced that it never happened (as a brilliant headline – The Eagle has landed – in Studio 4, announced some years ago!), but, again, these people are not taken seriously by most thinking people.

In years to come the climate deniers will be seen in the same light.

More to come…

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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.

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Trying to speak truth to a world in need

July 7, 2009 / soulthoughts

Small quotes often have great impact. As I think about why I write, a number of things that people have said over the ages have come to mind. I am a broken person, just like anyone else. I have nothing which I have not been given. Only a handful of people may ever read this website, or millions the world over may read it. Numbers don’t matter. If a grain of truth can penetrate this world, then that is enough. That has power. Jesus said the kingdom is like yeast working through a whole batch of dough. And my pastor has said that the value of any creative work cannot be measured by the size or response of the audience.

There is a danger in wanting to do ‘great things’ for God. Mother Teresa famously said once that we cannot do great things, only little things with great love. It’s very easy to cross that thin line between wanting the gospel to be heard and wanting yourself to be heard in the name of that same good news. And another thing – Jesus said the “greatest among you will be your servant”, and “I am among you as one who serves.” This is a huge challenge to the blogger like me who is constantly tempted to gain the whole world through saying something profound. But it is through weakness that God works, and through foolishness that He shuns the wise.

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Our framing story

July 5, 2009 / soulthoughts

Brian McLaren, in his book Everything Must Change, talks about our framing story – the ultimate story we tell ourselves about how the world works. For example, if our framing story tells us that the purpose of life is to have as much stuff as possible and to have the greatest pleasure possible in our short lives, then we will have little reason to manage our consumption. Our framing story determines how we live. Call it our worldview if you like.

Postmodernism says there is no framing story. What is right for you may not be right for me. Truth is relative. The problem with that ideology is that, as the global village becomes ever smaller and we all realise how much our lives are interlinked, what is right for me also becomes right for you. Take climate change as an example. Climate change is a challenge to postmodernism because more and more people are realising that, if we are to ultimately survive as a species, we have no choice but to have a framing story that says we have to manage our resources better and look after the planet. A philosophy of ‘what is right for you may not be right for me’ just won’t cut it in the real world of climate change. In my post on our addiction to growth I said the following:

“As long as the world remains fixated on the idea that we must grow our economies, we will inevitably fall into the same trap, and probably worse than we are in now.

In the mid-1980s, our planet passed a tipping point. It was then that we started going into debt in terms of the available resources that we have to survive. It was then that we started to consume more than we could reproduce. So while we remain addicted to economic growth, we continue the slide into debt. Our way of living is unsustainable.”

Truth can no longer be relative in a world where we have the choice of continuing our current way of life or making serious changes that will save the lives of untold millions. We can no longer hide behind the warm and fuzzy – but ultimately fatal – idea that there are no universal standards to live by.

Everything on this planet is interlinked. That is the beauty of how God made it. It all works together. David Suzuki, the Canadian environmentalist, describes how, if all of humanity disappeared off the face of the earth, then the rest of life would benefit enormously. The forests would gradually grow back, and relative stability would return to the ecosystems that control global temperature and the atmosphere. The fish in the oceans would recover and most endangered species would slowly come back. On the other hand, for example, if all species of ants disappeared, the results would be close to catastrophic. There would be major extinctions of other species and probably partial collapse of some ecosystems. The functions of the creatures living in the air we breathe, and beneath our feet, all work together to keep us alive. We need to, like our indigenous brothers and sisters did for 40,000 years, pay respect to the land we live on.

Our framing story needs to be one in which we all work together to bring in the kingdom of God – a kingdom of love, of justice, and of beautiful butterflies fluttering majestically over summer flowers. A kingdom where love finally reigns and where all of God’s children, in the words of Martin Luther King, will be able to shout ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’.

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Soul Thoughts

Page 42 of 53

Vale Ted Kennedy

Sitting with pain

Book Review – Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus

Some thoughts from Rowland Croucher

Out of the mouths of babes

The media, climate change and 'balance' (cont'd)

The media, climate change and 'balance'

The (un)Happy Planet Index 2.0

Trying to speak truth to a world in need

Our framing story

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