Beyond Labels

Here's a wonderful article from the Evangelical Alliance:


Beyond the labels

Pope Francis has done it again.
 
This week he published an exhortation,Evangeli Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), to his followers in the Catholic Church. In it he said: “I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and clinging to its own security.”
 
There's something refreshingly unsettling about this Pontiff. He certainly isn't clinging to the security of life behind the powerful and secretive walls of Vatican City. His humility has been clear right from the papal announcement where he chose to wear simple robes and immediately asked millions across the world to pray for him. He chose to stay in a hostel instead of the official mansion residence and travels largely in a Ford Focus, rejecting the papal limousine where possible.
 
He has not been afraid to challenge hypocrisy and injustice within the religious, political and economic structures of the day. But beyond these macro-engagements on the world stage, or through Twitter, it is his encounters with individuals that has characterised his papacy so far. He has joked with journalists, washed the feet of prisoners, kissed and blessed those with disabilities and lived among the poor.
 
Pope Francis speaks of Jesus often and encourages a personal relationship with him. Again in this week’s exhortation he said: “The joy of the gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus. Those who accept his offer of salvation are set free from sin, inner emptiness and loneliness. With Christ, joy is constantly born anew. In this exhortation I wish to encourage the Christian faithful to embark on a new chapter of evangelisation marked by this joy, while pointing out new paths for the Church's journey in years to come.”
 
Growing up as a Protestant in Northern Ireland I am fascinated by this man and especially hearing him talk of evangelisation and being born anew. Many Protestants here were told from a church pulpit that the Pope was the anti-Christ. Yet this man challenges me deeply both in how I look at him and how I look at others.
 
You see, I label people. Not as the literal anti-Christ so much, but try as I might not to, I do label others who claim to follow Christ: sound, liberal, fundamentalist, happy-clappy. And it's not just me or confined to the Church. A brief reading of the headlines this week shows some of the labels society places on others: prostitute, druggie, slave, alcoholic. We take someone's action or aspect of their personhood and use that to define that entire person. We constantly use labels to separate ourselves and to define 'us' against 'them'. In doing so we dehumanise the image of God in others, reducing them down to a word.
 
I can't escape the fact that when I look at the way Pope Francis rejects labels and encounters individuals I am reminded of Christ. Jesus looked at people through God's eyes, literally. He refused to put labels on people, seeing the holy humanity of each person made in the image of God. When we encounter Jesus and become his followers he takes our labels away. This is part of the 'joy of the gospel', a new identity in Christ. We are given new life, new relationships with God and others and a new identity beyond our labels.

I am not a Catholic, I don't believe all the Pope believes or all his Church teaches. But seeing beyond the labels, I see a humble man made in the image of his maker with a practical love of Jesus. I can only hope others see that in me.
 
So here's the challenge this weekend. What labels have you put on yourself or on others? Is there someone you need to take out of a pigeonhole? What's stopping you seeing people through Jesus's eyes?
 
David Smyth is public policy officer at the Evangelical Alliance Northern Ireland .

The Characteristics of a Sacred Economy

I'm still ploughing through (when I've got the time) Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics - I'm about half-way through.

I teach English in some Business Schools in Lille and I thought it would be a good idea to discover some other economic models. After all I have the sneaking suspicion that our current economic model is taking us down a road that leads to misery and destruction!

Here's Eisenstein's characteristics of a 'Sacred Economy':

It will restore the mentality of the gift to our vocations and economic life.
It will reverse the money-induced homogenization and depersonalization of society.
It will be an extension of the ecosystem, not a violation.
It will promote local economies and revive community
It will encourage initiative and reward entrepreneurship.
It will be consistent with zero growth, yet foster the continued development of our uniquely human      gifts.
It will promote an equitable distribution of wealth.
It will promote a new materialism that treats the world as sacred.
It will be aligned with political egalitarianism and people power and will not induce more centralized control.
It will restore lost realms of natural, social, cultural, and spiritual capital.

And, most importantly (according to Eisenstein), it is something that we can start creating right now!

The Crisis of Civilization

I'm reading Sacred Economy by Charles Eisenstein.
Here's a poem from an unknown author (from the book):

We have bigger houses but smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time.
We have more degrees but less sense;
more knowledge but less judgements;
more experts, but more problems;
more medicines but less healthiness.
We've been all the way to the moon and back,
but have trouble in crossing the street to meet our new neighbor.
We built more computers to hold more copies than ever,
But have less real communication;
We have become long on quantity,
but short on quality.
These times of fast foods but slow digestion;
Tall men but short characters;
Steep profits but shallow relationships.
It's a time when there is much in the window
But nothing in the room.

Freed from th System

Richard Rohr:


Once we idealize social climbing, domination of others, status symbols, power, prestige, and possessions, we are part of a never-ending game that is almost impossible to escape. It has its own inner logic that is self-maintaining, self-perpetuating, and self-congratulating, as well as elitist and exclusionary. It will never create a just or happy world, yet most Christians never call it into question. Jesus came to free us from this lie, which will never make us happy anyway, because it’s never enough, and we never completely win.

Great Love and Great Suffering

Here's another meditation by Richard Rohr:

We must learn to be able to think and behave like Jesus, who is the archetypal human being. This becomes a journey of great love and great suffering. These are the two normal and primary paths of transformation into God, preceding all organized religion. This journey leads us to a universal love where we don’t love just those who love us. We must learn to participate in a larger love—divine love.

In this, God utterly leveled the playing field and made grace available from the first moment of creation when “God's Spirit overshadowed the chaos” (Genesis 1:2). Surely the God who created all things was thus available to all creation, starting with the so-called Stone Age people and the natives of all continents, and yes, even the barbarians. I can only assume that they loved and suffered too and thus met God, “who is love” (1 John 4:7-8).

Any journey of great love or great suffering makes us go deeper into our faith and eventually into what can only be called universal truth. Love and suffering are finally the same, because those who love deeply are committing themselves to eventual suffering, as we see in Jesus. And those who suffer often become the greatest lovers.

Second Anniversary of Occupy Movement

September 16 saw the 2nd anniversary of Occupy Wall Street...
here's a type of manifesto from Adbusters, the communication force behind the movement:

Hey all you still breathing out there,

On the second anniversary of OWS, here’s a manifesto to fill your lungs:

A Reboot of the Capitalist Imagination

Look outside your window today and admire how permanent everything is.

Cars faithfully zoom in and out of traffic without end. Financial skyscrapers frame the streets, investing your dollars and cashing your paychecks with ease. People pour out of apartments on their way to the office, to visit friends, to look for work. The social order, all the basic interactions of the day, are predictable, normal, most likely the same as yesterday. The sheer rigidity of the political system is not in question.

Now imagine that it all snaps. That everything you know is turned upside down. The coffee shop is closed. The bank door is shut. People stop following even the most basic prompts.

Looking out the window today, we have that same feeling we had on September 16th, 2011, the day before those first courageous occupiers packed up their tents and made their move on Wall Street. Only this time, as we gaze beyond the glass, there is an assuring upward tilt on our otherwise steady lips. We now have a confidence in this generation that we didn’t have before. There are still curveballs that can shock the financial and psychological order. There is a growing conviction that the things that can happen, will happen. The world is still up for grabs.

Revolution is a Rhizome

What we experienced in 2011 is still reverberating around the globe. Most recently, in Turkeyand Brazil, that feeling in the guts, that the future does not compute, is vibrant as ever. And because of that gnawing anxiety in the depths of an increasing mass of people, the new mode of activism, what Spanish journalist Bernardo Gutierrez calls a “new architecture of protest,” is spreading like a frenzy: what starts out as simple demands – don’t cut the trees, don’t raise the transit fair, don’t institute that corrupt judge – erupts into an all-encompassing desire to reboot the entire machine.

In the coming political horizon you can expect that wherever there is a crack, scandal, teacher strike or pipeline deception, you’ll find a hornet’s nest underneath. When you have a connected generation, all of their unique and individual demands are connected, too. Protest becomes a cornucopia, not a straight path. And the desire is not to destroy the system but to hack it, to re-code it, to commandeer it … to see revolution not as pyramid but as a rhizome … to see the system not as an unchanging text but as an ever changing language of computation, an algorithm.

More than ever we are seeing the actuality of the modern-day truism, “we are all one.” Now, as we have the technology to organize – who cares if the NSA is listening in, in fact we welcome them to listen in and to be inspired – this first-ever global generation will be able to articulate itself more clearly, more viscerally, more intensely and at a frequency like never before. #OccupyGezi becomes the call of Turkey. Brazilian flags are waved on the streets of Lima and Mexico. #idlenomore inspires indigenous sovereignty and environmental movements across the globe.

Take a look out the window today. It wasn’t always this way. It won’t be this way forever.

A Generation Under Pressure

This generation is under pressure. Leading American pundits like David Brooks and Andrew Sorkin laugh us off as ungrateful kids and milquetoast radicals, people who just aren’t willing to work like the previous generation. But these folks just don’t get it. The engine light of humanity has turned on. But no mechanic of the old paradigm can fix it. We’re experiencing a global system failure like never before. But no programmer of the old language can re-write it. The Earth is getting sick. The culture is in terminal decline. Mental illness is the number one cause of lost workplace hours in America. What other indicator does one need? Rejection is not ungratefulness, it’s a beautiful and sincere longing for a sane and sustainable tomorrow. But as the valves are twisted tighter … well … you can see the result everywhere.

Last July, as hundreds of thousands of protesters were marching in cities throughout Turkey and Brazil, Adbusters creative director Pedro Inoue skipped work to join the magic in the streets. He sent us this testimony from the center of São Paulo, a portrait that became the backbone of one of our most spirited and hopeful publications yet. We’ve long been accused of being too negative … yet here our readers saw a bright light:

It’s something you feel when the lover in your arms is laughing and you feel like your heart is going to break because there couldn’t possibly be any more room for good inside. The high begins to float you away. We were walking to the governor’s house, taking time along the way to talk, look at people waving flags from apartment windows, listen to chants coming and going like waves in this sea of people. I looked into this kid’s eyes. He kept talking but I only remember those eight words.

“Man, what a beautiful world we live in,” he said.

I was mesmerized by the shine in his eyes. Sparks. Flashes. Pulses. Bursts of light. When the global revolution finally arrives … it’s going to shine everywhere like that.

The conditions that spurred on the Greek anarchists, the Arab Spring, the Spanish indignados, #Occupywallstreet, the Chilean student revolt, Pussy riot, the Quebec uprising, #idlenomore, Yo Soy 132 in Mexico, and the insurrections in Istanbul, Lima, Bulgaria and São Paulo have only worsened. Inequality is reaching obscene proportions in America and many other nations. There is an ever-greater concentration of wealth, ever-bigger banks, a steady increase of high frequency trading (HFT), derivative confusion and outbursts of rogue financial algorithms that send markets dipping and waning beyond any human control. $1.3 trillion in speculative financial transactions keep swirling around the planet every day. The stage is now set for a much more catastrophic market crash than 2008. And inside each and every one of us, the desire for real is growing: Real economy. Real democracy. Real possibilities. Real humanity.Real leadership. Real horizons. Real interactions. Real things. Real life.

Three Metamemes for the Future

Here at Adbusters, we see three big tactical breakthrough ideas, three metamemes, that have the power to veer this global trainwreck of ours from its date with disaster. Make no mistake, the crash is a brutal world – a barbarian reality. It’s a happening that none of us should seek out joyfully. Yet we cannot just go with the flow, sing with the speed and trust the inertia of our current economic doomsday machine.

The first thing we can do is call for a radical re-think of our global economic system. Unbridled neocon capitalism has been riding the back of humankind without opposition for nearly two generations now. It has provided no answer yet and it has no answer for the most pressing threat of the future, namely climate change. Economics students and heterodox economists must rise up in universities everywhere and demand a shift in the theoretical foundations of economic science. We have to abandon almost everything we thought we knew about the gods of progress, happiness and growth. We have to re-imagine industry, nutrition, communication, transportation, housing and money and pioneer a new kind of economics, a bionomics, a psychonomics, an ecological economics that is up to the job of managing our planetary household.

The second thing we can do is usher in a new era of radical transparency … to add the right to live in a transparent world as a new human right in the constitution of nations and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Current events in Syria are a perfect example of how secrecy by the major powers of the world leads to confusion and the possibility of catastrophic failure. Assad may get away with a type of murderous appetite not seen since WWII, for no reason other than the fact that America can no longer be trusted to tell the truth. Radical transparency is the only path towards a viable global democracy of the future.

The third thing we can do is take inspiration and learn lessons from a new tactical breakthrough in global activism – the revolution algorithm. The internet has reversed a centuries-old power dynamic. The street now has unprecedented power. Through hacking, rhizomatic organizing, viral memes, it can paralyze cities, bring whole countries to a standstill … protests and uprisings can spook stock markets into plunging 10% in a single day, as happened recently in Turkey, and, if we the people are angry and fired up enough, we can force even the most arrogant presidents and prime ministers to the democratic table.

In the 21st century, democracy could look like this: a dynamic, visceral, never-ending feedback loop between entrenched power structures and the street. In this new model, corporate power will be forever blunted by sustained and clearly articulated demands for new economic, political and environmental policies, for visceral debates and referendums on critical issues, for the revocation of the charters of corporations that break the public trust and for new laws and constitutional amendments on democratic fundamentals like secrecy, corporate personhood and the rules by which nations go to war. Every government department, every minister and the whole political establishment, right down to the think tanks, media pundits and CEOs, will be under the gun, on an almost daily basis, to bend to the ever changing pulse of the people.

As this second anniversary of Occupy passes, perhaps with raging flames, perhaps with only a few sparks, we can take solace in one thing: Our current global system – capitalism – is in terminal decline … and while its corpse is still twitching, our jobs, yours, mine, all of us, are to stay vigilant and to keep working on our own lives … We shy away from the megacorporations, we refuse to buy heavily advertised products, we meticulously seek out toxin-free information, we eat, travel, socialize and live as lightly as we can … we fight for our happiness … we build trust with each other and play the #killcap game at least once every day … and most important, we focus our eyes on the horizon and wait for our next moment to come.

—  Kalle Lasn and Darren Fleet

There's still a long way to go...

We Surrender to Find

A meditation from Richard Rohr:

G.K. Chesterton wrote, “When a person has found something which he prefers to life itself, he [sic] for the first time has begun to live.” Jesus in his proclamation of the kingdom told us what we could prefer to life itself. The Bible ends by telling us we are called to be a people who could say, “Come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20), who could welcome something more than business as usual and live in God’s Big Picture. We all have to ask for the grace to prefer something to our small life because we have been offered the Shared Life, the One Life, the Eternal Life, God’s Life that became visible for us in this world as Jesus. What we are all searching for is Someone to surrender to, something we can prefer to life itself. Well here is the wonderful surprise: God is the only one we can surrender to without losing ourselves! The irony is that we actually find ourselves, but now in a whole new and much larger field of meaning.