Thinking Anew: IN THE immediate aftermath of the Twin Towers attack, one of the news channels interviewed an expert on Afghanistan. It was incredible that such an expert exists. Expert marksmen, oncologists and clock repairers have always existed, but their fields of expertise were always quite specific. Now we employ the term to describe anybody with any authority of subjects ranging from education to economics, from psychology to politics and from racism to religion.
The word expert has become synonymous with the older accolade of being an important authority on a particular subject. The change implies a seeping insinuation of infallibility that is attached to the word expert.
Yet despite the preponderance of available experts on almost anything; we find our society in a complete mess. The years of boom are over and we have little idea of what to do with our new-found poverty. As we look forward to a decade of trawling through the accounts of semi-State bodies we will only discover something that we already know. Where power and wealth prosper, honesty and ideals fade. That is how it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.
The death of idealism is one of the greatest gashes in our national psyche and nobody is organising a competition to suggest ways of rekindling it as we did recently for the economy.
Having a job in order to pay an outlandish mortgage and struggling to keep bread on the table does not necessarily constitute a good life. Sadly our principal definition of ourselves is normally our labour. We define ourselves as anything from an accountant to a zoologist. For a Christian this poses quite a dilemma. Did God really die for my personal salvation in order that I might simply abandon my God-given will and reason to be a job?
While many of us have individually held on to a sense of our intrinsic value and worth, we have collectively lost all sense of our humanity. Every problem and crisis in our society is met with expert demands for prohibitive legislation or judicial tribunal.
We ban substances, erect fences, draft framework documents and institute inquiries for every delinquency and then contradict ourselves by claiming to have victims’ needs addressed first. If we are really interested in victims, surely we should be addressing the victimhood of our own personal dispossession? As we pace out our lives in the, mostly pointless, occupational therapy that we call employment we lose the sense of our true worth. We become pawns in an economic game, struggling to pay bills and anxious for some form of escape.
We become victims of our own success when we realise that the ownership of a myriad of electronic goods does not truly add any meaning to our lives.
Christ was also an expert. His particular expertise was in life-coaching.
His proclamation of the Kingdom of God is often conveniently confused with pie-in-the-sky-when-we-die concepts of the afterlife. In reality it was a challenge to build an open and caring society that valued each and every one of its members here on Earth.
Most practising Christians subscribe to the dream of a just and fair society on Earth. Collectively, and despite our involvement in the education system, we have proved ourselves weak in this one area that is so dear to most of us as individuals. Too often we hide behind weak arguments from authority and shy away from taking Christ’s challenge to be a genuine leaven in society. Throwing an addict in jail is far easier than facing the challenge of a criminal-led black economy which controls the unfortunate’s life.
Surely restricting movements and substances causes more of the alienation that made them necessary in the first place? Quote an expert, make a rule, avoid the issue and never rise to any challenge; the Kingdom of God is a step too far for most societies – and Jesus wept!
FMacE