Article
- Date:
- Sunday 3rd October 2021
- Place:
- Holy Trinity, Cuckfield
- Service:
- Evensong
All my bourgeois, cumulative life, every time I have bought a shirt or a CD, I have been haunted by the waving of those lilies of the Field, consoling myself with the thought that I'm no worse than most; but I have found lately that that intermittent unease has turned into a low background pulse that will not go away. For a while I thought it was the guilt that grows with ageing, looking back over a life of steady accumulation; but while I do not deny this, I think that the reason is rather different.
Up North there was a period of terrible turmoil in the 1980s from which many have never recovered; but for us, down here, the end of the "Winter of Discontent" in 1979 ushered in a period of relative economic and political stability until the calling of the EU Referendum; and then cam Covid; and now comes an energy crisis and perhaps a food crisis; and, even if it doesn't happen, the stress of a Christmas toy crisis; and the worst flu epidemic since 2009; and on, and on, and on. Never was there a better time to observe the law of the Lilies of the Field and become existential, living for the moment, refusing to worry about the future.
But the strength is not in us. We are a culture of planning, accumulation and, above all, control and it is the failure of this last during the Pandemic that has de-stabilised us. Think of the absolute, on-going fury which has surrounded the vagaries of foreign travel rules. You would think that our bourgeois lives depended on going abroad, that it was, if anything, more important than getting the world vaccinated. and although we are relatively calm now with our double and pending triple jabs, there was a time when we did not know who would be struck down by the Pandemic which, we thought at the time, quite wrongly, did not discriminate between the rich and the poor. Control is our default cultural position and it enables us to plan and accumulate.
But that steady pulse at the back of my mind is warning me that time's up, that we will have to learn to live with a degree of uncertainty which characterises most lives now and characterised those of even the very rich until the massive advances in medicine from the end of the 19th Century.
Which leads me on to three connected thoughts. The first is that as long as we thought there was enough of everything for everybody we could accumulate with a free conscience; but now we know that there is such a limit on the world's resources that our gain, our profit, our pay rise, is almost certainly somebody else's loss. But we are so inured to the dynamics of competition that it will be hard for us to abandon this institutional selfishness, to resist the temptation to pull up the drawbridge and at the very least protect what we have when the times demand a much greater effort to build community, not in some sentimental, well-meaning cultural way but in a more concrete effort to involve ourselves in the precarious lives of others.
The second thought is that existentialism, observing the rule of the Lilies, is very tough going for people like us and it will require immense application. But, again, the hum in my head says that wishing for the crisis to pass is just not going to be good enough. We are in for a prolonged period of economic and political turbulence and we will have to adjust to it psychologically and spiritually, that carrying on as we are going to leave us and our inheritors poorly equipped for the medium-term. We have lived off the fat of the land since the Second World War and, ironically, the one area of planning in which we have been deficient is foregoing present luxury in order to build resilience into our systems; so now we are short of everything, and although we claim to love our children and grandchildren, look at what we have bequeathed to them in accumulating climate change, crumbling infrastructure, disintegrating public services, public and private debt, housing shortages and, for too many, low wages. At the very least we need to be much more genuinely, not nominally, penitent; and the way to make up, to some extent, for our errors, is to learn to accept our lot as it is and to resist the temptation to plan and accumulate and control, particularly if that is, as is most likely, at the expense of other.
And finally, my third thought is, I suppose, what you would expect a Christian preacher to say but this time, I really mean it: what history we have of promises being kept; what stability we have in the present and what hope we have for the future are all in Christ and Christ only. No matter what elegant towers of ethical beauty we erect, no matter what performances of virtue we choreograph, no matter what purple passages of pious prose we proclaim, without Christ these all are no more than instants. The idea that we, ourselves, can build not a brave new world but even a viable one is an illusion.
All of which leads to the inevitable conclusion that if we are serious about saving the world for those who come after us, we will have to alter our ways, our physical ways, yes, but even more fundamentally, our cultural and spiritual ways. If we are to build community instead of trying to insulate ourselves from it, we will have to be brave rather than defensive and this means that we will have to be prepared for setbacks; and when we suffer those setbacks, we will need to know, in reality and not simply in rhetoric, that God is our refuge in times of trouble.