Listen / Read
I went out with a Christian once, as I think I’ve let slip before. With the Church she went to volunteer in favellas and orphanages in Brazil. When she returned she behaved with a degree of superiority, holding aloft her noble endeavours in helping the rubbish dump scavenging street children.
And I always thought that was funny. Funny strange, but funny ha-ha at times also. Rather than humbling her to experience first-hand what the truly impoverished experience in this world, she became, well, a big-headed stupid twatface. She felt she was somehow better than the rest of us back home, because she had personally witnessed real poverty, and she would condescend to people rather obnoxiously.
I suppose she thought, because she had seen real hardship, that she had really lived, or knew what living really meant. Whereas to her, we didn’t, and so we couldn’t possibly understand. Combined with the fact that we didn’t share her faith, she held herself above the insignificant everyday lives of others who weren’t friends with Jesus and hadn’t spent time amidst the hardships of slum life.
So it’s ironic for me to hear Rev Tilby preaching at film goers and travellers for being perverse voyeurs of poverty, seeking the suffering of the slums as some sort of self-imposed guilt-trip to help them realise the value of living.
I think it’s just a good idea to try and learn about and experience the world. It’s full of good and bad things, far away and close to home, and we should try and open our eyes to the reality of it all.
As I’m sure others have, I’ve often naively wondered at what a simpler life would be like, with less comforts, more struggle, an appreciation for life born of survival in a real sense. I wonder at the parents of generations gone by who strove to make a better life for their children, and how that better life has become unfulfilling in many ways, strewn with meaningless luxuries that distract our time and strip it of purpose. And isn’t that more like the Church’s current definition of Hell? Separation from God; depravity of meaning.
As a globalized world gets smaller and smaller, and depleted resources struggle to support the continually greedy and the slowly prospering, it’d be nice to see an emerging world consensus that realises the need for balance between gross indulgence and extreme deprivation. So I think it’s important for that gap to be bridged in as many ways as possible. It’s not that we need to be shown how to live, but we do need to share our lives to make them worth living.