Climate change prayer

Holy God,
earth and air and water are your creation,
and every living thing belongs to you:
have mercy on us
as climate change confronts us.

Give us the will and the courage
    to simplify the way we live,
    to reduce the energy we use,
    to share the resources you provide,
    and to bear the cost of change.

Forgive our past mistakes and send us your Spirit,
    with wisdom in present controversies
    and vision for the future to which you call us
in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

©Anglican Church of Australia Trust Corporation. Used by permission This text may be reproduced for use in worship in the Anglican Church of Australia

Economic crisis and what to do about it

This little animation (complete with Australian accent) is a great summary of one narrative gaining steam in certain circles. It outlines an analysis of economy, energy and environment that draws a picture of three converging crises as shaping the coming decades in quite dramatic ways that are likely to take the form of a global sustained Greater Depression, complete with economic deflation, energy supply constraints and political instability. As a positive response it suggests re-localisation, social resilience, trust building, and power-down innovation (such a permaculture). This is what the Transition Movement is all about and this animation is in many ways one accessible and cogent expression of that movement.

I am very attracted to certain elements of this account. I accept that there are grave threats in these systems (though I would characterise some of them differently) and that they could interact in complex ways. I also agree that rebuilding local communities of trust is a critical part of a health response to our present predicament. Where I'm perhaps most hesitant about an account like this is that I feel it is somewhat naïve about the likelihood of larger political events overwhelming merely local efforts. That is, very often such localism involves an explicit ignoring of national and international entities as doomed to fail anyway. I think that while such entities gain their legitimacy through acts of collective imagination (and so a widespread adoption of re-localist principles would indeed see them hollowed of clout), the path from here to there is never going to be smooth. Government and corporate powers hold sufficient cards to make life very difficult for localist movements if and when they are perceived as growing to a point where they might begin undermining their legitimacy. And even beyond such deliberate opposition, the capacity of a globalised economy and wounded ecological order to deliver sudden and catastrophic blows to a local community is easily underestimated.

So let's get serious about nurturing local communities of trust, about adjusting our expectations away from high energy consumption, about building resilience into our economic and social systems. But let's not take our eye off the ball of the macro-scale political and economic order or abandon the field to the plutocrats, deniers and techno-optimists.

Who killed economic growth?

Whether economic growth is over now or in another decade or three is a matter for debate, but the point of the video remains valid. Endless growth on a finite planet is a dangerous delusion. In its place, we have the opportunity to imagine a future that doesn't rely on more and more stuff - more and more water, fish, trees, soil; more and more finite energy from under the ground making a more and more unstable climate; more and more advertising for more and more unnecessary toys bought with more and more debt; more and more fear, greed and frustration.

Sometimes less is more.

Lent: Simplicity and contentment

Lent is a time for the deliberate discipleship of our desires through refraining and focusing. Often this is portrayed as a somewhat arbitrary burden to be carried, as though the carrying of a burden were itself good. But fasting (or refraining from some regular activity) is not an end in itself, but a means to sharpen our hungering and thirsting for righteousness, for God’s justice. Such disciplines as we accept for this period are not meritorious works of supererogation earning divine brownie points, nor do we seek out pain so as to enjoy the relief from it all the more at its end. We are, in Rowan Williams’ evocative phrase, setting out on "a journey into joy". Lent is a time of preparation for the good news of Easter, but in the light of the cross and resurrection, we discover that the very disciplining of our desires is already good news, not merely preparation for it. The gospel does not add ethics as an appendix, the fine print of obedience you sign up for when you accept the gift of forgiveness. No, ethics is already good news. The disciplining of desire is also the liberation of desire; by learning self-control, we become free. We are learning to love rightly and so learning to be more human.

I submit that a key aspect of this joyful journey for many western Christians is an exodus of liberation from consumerism, the state of bondage in which we are consumed by what we consume. Our toys so often own us. In such a context, learning to delight in less is an affirmation of a life with more of the things that matter. The simple life is not only a matter of justice (living simply so that others can simply live) – though it is certainly that in a world of ever more apparent ecological limits – the simple life is also the good life. Receiving all God’s gifts with thanks enables us to let (many of) them go and to let go the desire for more that makes us discontent. Let us instead become discontent with our discontentment, which robs of us of peace and perspective.

The pursuit of justice, insofar as it is woven within the Christian good news, is also part of this same joyous adventure. It is not a fight, but a dance. We do not create it or establish it; we share from what we have ourselves received. Our goal is not the spread of consumerist “wealth” to every member of society and every corner of the globe. Our goal is that in walking the way of the cross, all may discover it to be the way of light.

Not yet concrete enough? Go and sell your possessions, then come follow Christ.
Originally posted at Theopolis.

Tunisia, Egypt and the food in your shopping trolley

Popular uprisings as seen recently in Tunisia and currently underway in Egypt usually have a complex network of contributing and enabling causes. One of the triggers in both cases may well have been a spike in food prices. Both Tunisia and Egypt import much of their food and have large segments of the population for whom food purchases comprise a hefty chunk of the weekly budget. A similar price spike in 2008 likely contributed to protests, rioting and unrest in at least sixteen countries.

Why the spike in food prices? That too is complex, but significant elements in the present mix include speculation, high oil prices and a string of weather-related disasters affecting crop production around the globe. Why speculation? Partially because of the cheap money being poured into major economies (or rather, into the financial system) and the unattractiveness of some alternatives in a downturn, that is, such speculation is one manifestation of the ongoing debt crisis that first publicly reared its head in 2008. Why high oil prices? Again, partially due to financial speculation, but this coming on top of long-term supply issues related to the peaking of conventional oil. Why crop failures? Many reasons here too, but among them are a string of destructive weather events consistent with predictions of climate change.

Yes, there are many other causes: repressive governments, rising economies shifting the balance of economic and political power, trends in global consumption patterns, biofuel and agricultural policies, local population growth and migration patterns, corporate interests, and of course the particular contours of various national histories and the actions and beliefs of certain influential individuals. But the triple converging crises of debt, depletion and degradation (also known as economy, energy and ecology) are likely to continue to contribute to these kinds of headlines.

So if you've noticed that some of the food in your shopping trolley has jumped in price recently, don't neglect to join the dots. What is a mild frustration to me in my wealth can mean the straw that breaks the camel's back for a nation closer to the edge. What can you do about it? All kinds of things, because it doesn't have to be this way.

Life too complex?

" [...] the best place to start backing away from an overload of complexity is in the daily life of the individual. What sustains today’s social complexity, in the final analysis, is the extent to which individuals turn to complex systems to deal with their needs and wants. To turn away from complex systems on that individual level, in turn, is to undercut the basis for social complexity, and to begin building frameworks for meeting human needs and wants of a much simpler and thus more sustainable kind. It also has the advantage – not a small one – that it’s unnecessary to wait for international treaties, or government action, or anything else to begin having an effect on the situation; it’s possible to begin right here, right now, by identifying the complex systems on which you depend for the fulfillment of your needs and wants, and making changes in your own life to shift that dependency onto smaller or more local systems, or onto yourself, or onto nothing at all – after all, the simplest way to deal with a need or want, when doing so is biologically possible, is to stop needing or wanting it."

- John Michael Greer

How much freedom do we have to simplify our lives? It depends how strong our desire for simplicity is. As I said yesterday, sometimes less really is more. What couldn't you live without?

Williams on Augustine's Confessions

"The Confessions provide a unique testimony to the fact that it is God and God alone who can give shape and meaning to a human life. The struggles of men and women to make their own lives and build their own securities end in despair, and this is equally true for the believer and the unbeliever. Conversion does not signify an end to the chaos of human experience, it does not make self-understanding easy or guarantee an ordered or intelligible life. What is changed in conversion is the set of determinants within which the spirit moves; and there may be as inaccessible to the mind as they were before. Thus the confidence of the believer never rests upon either his intellectual grasp or his intellectual control of his experience, but on the fidelity of the heart's longing to what has been revealed as the only satisfying object of its desire."

- Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to Saint John of the Cross, 84.

This is an important point that Williams highlights in Augustine. Christians can often give the (false) impression that the good life of obedience and trust to which we are called is an easier, simpler one, as though the painful ambiguities and frustrations of life could be exchanged for uncomplicated simplicity. The evangelist then appears as a shonky car dealer offering an unbelievable product at discount prices. The desperate are taken in; the discerning, suspicious.

But the desire to build our own securities - whether we pursue it in a militant atheism safely unruffled by rumours of God, in an isolated individualism sheltered from the demands of real relationship or in a shallow Christianity that thinks all the answers are written down in the back of the book - will "end in despair". Life is not safe. There is no escape from this fact either in God or in flight from him.

The eager expectation associated with Christian belief does not come from discovering an exhaustive explanation of life's mysteries, a satiating of desire in ultimate answers, but from an encounter that deepens, affirms and subverts our desires.
For those confused, concerned or cross at reports of comments made by Williams about sharia law in the UK, check out Faith and Theology for some intelligent comment and discussion.