A thought to ponder...
“If you tell me Christian commitment is a kind of thing that has happened ot you once and for all like some kind of spiritual plastic surgery, I say go to, go to, you’re either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine. Every morning you should wake up in your bed and ask yourself: ‘ Can I believe it all again today?’No, better still, don’t ask it till after you’ve read The New York Times, till after you’ve studied the daily record of the world’s brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side by side with your Bible. Then ask yourself if you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ again for that particular day. If your answer’s always yes, then you probably don’t know what believing means. At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The Nor is what proves you're human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that’s choked with confession and tears and...great laughter”-Frederick Buechner
The Return of Ansel Gibbs
qtd. in Soul Survivor, Yancey
posted by J.M @ 10:14 PM
1 Comments:
All I can say is, right on. That was a strong post, one that cuts through to some very intense issues. Thanks for that.
There are a few things that spring to mind in reading your post:
I recall a section in a book I read recently where the protagonist refers to a character in one of Tolstoy’s works who goes down from his castle to work among his serfs (read indentured servants or slaves) for the afternoon. When he returns to his castle at the end of the day, he feels that he has gained understanding of the serf’s suffering and found commonality with the ‘common’ people. (I see myself in that story, as a voyeuristic westerner who gains some sense of moral satisfaction by going on short term missions, for example).
In the book Work, Consumerism, and the New Poor, (Bauman?), the author discusses the idea of ‘carnivals of charity’ where westerners every once in a while see a scene (read: something like one of those commercials with images of starving children) on television or in the media and are hit with a profound sense of guilt. In response to it, consumers engage in short term charity carnivals to appease guilt and make themselves feel better. They drop a bit of money, and then turn away feeling they have done something. The problem is, according to the author, these are short lived events with very little in the way of actual impact.
There must be more than this...
You asked a very intriguing question: who is my neighbor? In the world climate of the ‘global village’, does our neighbor change? I think the answer is both yes and no.
Yes...with the emergence of expedient travel, internet, satellite, television, and technology, our neighbor can easily become someone on another continent, in another culture, etc. We can connect ‘virtually’ with crises in a very different way than, say 50 or 100 years ago. If we are so moved, then we can travel to almost anywhere on the planet within a day or two (at least world-wide to major airports) and deliver aid to our global neighbors. Internet sites like makepovertyhistory.com and others provide outlets for us to lend aid to our neighbors in the global village.
No... I think it would be a huge disservice to include our global neighbors and exclude the person/people who physically live next door to us. It is so much easier to extend love to someone on the other side of the world, and so much harder to extend love by walking through each day with your physical neighbor.
You said: “The world, outside of our affluent, safe, posh, protected bubble, is a sad, broken, destroyed and being destroyed, hungry, homeless, dirty place.”
How true. But what is the solution? The world cannot sustain a kind of equality where the whole of humanity is ‘lifted’ to the affluent lifestyle we take advantage of in the west. This is an ethnocentric, colonised, materialistic, and, frankly, ignorant suggestion. Imposing our view of ‘success’ on the world would cripple and destroy it. There are not enough resources to sustain such growth and affluence.
Leaving the inequality that exists in the world today is not a solution, as it creates a hierarchy which, loosely translated, is the enslavement of approx. 92% of the world’s population to the comfort of the 8% of us who enjoy the affluence of the Western world.
We must become less, so that they can become more...
Thanks for the post. I think it has ignited an idea for another post!
j.m.
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