Poverty, Hunger, Compassion and Empathy

There was a very large crowd of very hungry people, several thousand men, women and children. Their need for food and drink was desperate, and there seemed to be little or none available for them.
And then a little lad came shyly out of the crowd and offered his five loaves and two small fish to the leaders of the group to share amongst them all.
And the loaves and fishes were blessed and broken and shared amongst the whole crowd, who were not only satisfied but there were 12 baskets of food left over, gathered up by the helpers, so as not to waste any.
This was the reading in our Anglican churches today, and of course here is the story of the feeding of the five thousand by Jesus. It is told in all four of the gospels in the Holy Bible, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, although the detail of the young boy appears only in John. Otherwise the stories are remarkably similar in detail, showing the importance that all four of the gospel writers attached to this miracle, and demonstrating the compassion and empathy of Jesus for the feelings of the crowds around him.
Its significance is in the sermon He preaches afterwards, in which he proclaims “I am the bread of heaven,” using the Hebrew word for God, YHWH, meaning “I am”.
And here we have the great love and compassion of God, through Jesus, for mankind, manifesting itself in the feeding of the multitudes, today as then, through us as God’s servants.
Only today the crowds that are hungry number in the hundreds of thousands, even millions, and their hunger has not been for just a day or so but for weeks and months and years, and babies are dying before mothers can travel the miles needed to reach the food sources, and the greatest tragedy is that this could all have been prevented.

Ten million people are said to be affected by the current food crisis in East Africa, and agencies and charities like Oxfam are working around the clock to provide relief where it is needed, but the problem is huge. The Chief Executive of Oxfam, Dame Barbara Stocking, was interviewed by Rachel Sylvester for The Times recently, telling us that compassion and solidarity with people is the essence of Oxfam’s hugely successful activities. And for those who criticise charities for spending too much money on administration and the like, Dame Stocking is clear that in Oxfam 83p in every pound goes on the relief work on poverty, only 10p on support costs, and 7p on the all essential fundraising. So I for one count that as jolly good value for the way my gift is used.

And she reminds us, as if any reminding is needed, that the relief of such poverty and suffering should really challenge us all and our consumerist society. This is a matter of faith for some, but a call for us all to find compassion in our souls towards all of humanity. When we can buy so much so cheaply, at whose expense are these goods made? And would it really hurt to look at our diets, when eating meat is a wasteful use of valuable grain resources? I’ve now been a vegetarian for several years, and it really is no hardship when there are so many fresh fruits and vegetables available (always watching air-miles of course – much of my food I do grow myself on my allotment – but there are many excellent farmers’ markets up and down the land even in our towns and cities and lots of imaginative land projects where more can grow their own vegetables). And a vegetarian diet of fresh healthy ingredients is infinitely cheaper than a diet heavily dependent on meat. Add to that the appalling statistic that we apparently waste 30% of our food, and there is huge potential for savings that we can redirect towards the aid agencies.
So let’s all look at ourselves a little more critically and do all we can individually to help aid efforts and to perhaps alter our consumption patterns – of food and goods – to help others.
Let’s, as the saying goes, live simply, so that others may simply live.

The cult of celebrity

“We think more highly of people such as Simon Cowell than we should do – we’re talking about someone who is essentially trivial. There’s no harm in pop music, but think of the status of classical musicians who earn £70 a gig.”
This is what Lord Robert Winston – Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College London, popular TV Science programme host and author of more than a dozen books – said in an interview for The Times Magazine for the 4th June 2011.
This celebrity cult, he said, he found depressing.

And I think it is depressing because it has become a huge problem, particularly in the upbringing of our kids, who see celebrities as role models and look up to them in awe, yearning themselves for the same fame and fortune when they grow up.

Sadly this emphasis is also seen too often in the self- help and self-development genre of book that is so popular today. I suspect that quite a few of us have reached in our time to those sections of a library or bookshop tempted by books that promise to ‘change our lives’, or help us ‘succeed’. Many of these are excellent. I have quite a few on my own bookshelves!
But too often they feed the petty ego of self, the selfish desire for individual improvement, the seemingly endless drive for power and wealth. And this style of self-development is often measured by the values of material gain, promotion, or celebrity status. And incidentally the authors are often extremely wealthy and part of the celebrity cult themselves!

Should we not be wary of a self- help industry if it becomes so self-centered on the individual at the expense of others? Doesn’t this approach fuel greed and envy, eschew vulnerability and threaten genuine altruism? I think so.

Unfortunately a huge and profitable industry has built up around this ‘success’ culture. What is more, many such books actively discourage contact with those who are wounded in our society, the vulnerable, the loners, the unhappy, the unsuccessful, the disadvantaged, those who are damaged emotionally. Such weaknesses are too often seen as inhibiting to our own ‘development’.
By not helping such people don’t we dig ourselves deeper into a less attractive future? Don’t we risk divorcing ourselves from experiencing and displaying that empathy and compassion so essential for a better world?

Anglican Bishop Peter Selby observed that ‘the obsessive search for personal growth and inner wholeness without concern for the health of society is distorting.’**
Nowhere is this distortion more obvious, and more potentially harmful than among these books that fuel what has been dubbed the new egocentric ‘Me-Millennium’.

**(Selby, Peter, Liberating God, Private Care and Public Struggle

, London: SPCK, 1983, publisher’s note, back cover.)

Shopping to Drop

So we have a hike in our UK VAT rate to 20%, the highest we have known. People have rushed to the shops, seduced by retailers promising to absorb the increase, not passing it on to the customer for the time being. But how much more stuff do we want? Are we shopping for personal need or greed? There is one easy way to avoid the increase in VAT. Don’t shop!
One of the joys to me of going away is not being cluttered up with possessions. It is amazing just how comfortably one can live out of a small suitcase, or in a basic tent, surrounded only by what we really do need. Alice Thomson said just this in her Opinion in The Times on 5th January, only for her the realisation came when the plane took them her and her family away on holiday without their suitcases, left languishing in the snow at Heathrow and they were forced to buy the basic essentials when they arrived at their destination.
What is it about us that we are obsessed with shopping? It is a national pastime. Why do we eat too much, consume too much? Mass consumerism is a disease of our overly comfortable Western lives. It is as if we are always feverishly looking for something to satisfy us, to fill some kind of hole in our lives. And the media are far from blameless. Driven by profit motives, they shamelessly exploit us in advertisements and articles to pamper ourselves, to treat ourselves, to have whatever we want at all times. This fuels greed rather than need. Competitions reward us with a supermarket trolley dash: the winner fills a trolley with as much as possible from the shelves in a frenzied grab over a given time. Color supplements publish glossy images of items we must have. Surely the fostering of pure self-indulgence is an affront to our humanity while so many starve and suffer elsewhere in the world.
That is not to say that we should deny ourselves an adequate standard of living. But neither should we live extravagantly. We should strive to live responsibly and sustainably. We should minimize our own footprint and always have regard for the needs of our fellow human beings as if they were living with us under our same family roof.
‘We need an expression,’ mused Alastair McIntosh to The Honorable Sir Maxwell MacLeod of Fuinary and the Isles as they shared a car journey in Scotland back in 1992. ‘We need something that describes the way people mask their misery by going out shopping.’ ‘How about,’ Maxwell pondered, ‘how about ‘retail therapy’?’ And that, according to McIntosh in his wonderful book Soil and Soul, is the origin of the phrase now so widely used today across the globe.

NEETS and technical colleges

At last. I have been saying for years that our schooling in the UK is not for everyone; that by the age of 14 kids should be allowed to leave the conventional school, geared as it is towards exams and university entrance, if they are not suited to academic learning. It seems to me that the less academically gifted children often feel they are failures at school, and this leads to low self-esteem, and boredom. And that of course can result in all sorts of behavioural and social problems. Surely it would be better for such kids to learn a trade instead – perhaps be apprenticed to tradesmen, learn a practical skill, even start earning a living during training, whilst their more academic peers stay on at school to gain that cherished place at university.
Now at last something is happening, as reported in The Times of 7th January.
Lord Baker of Dorking used to be the Education Secretary. Now he has founded the Baker Dearing Educational Trust, which is behind the proposal to open up to 70 technical schools, focusing on engineering and vocational skills. Children will be able to join these at 14. What a brilliant idea!
It is also planned to have a network of smaller “studio schools” which would have links with employers and teach functional and practical skills.
When I was at school, there were Technical Colleges, which served the same purpose, but those were closed down or converted to Universities. Lord Baker blamed the demise of these Technical Colleges on “snobbery.”
It is absolutely imperative that our youngsters are made to feel of equal value whether they learn a trade or a profession, go to “Tech.” or to “Uni.”
On the same day that this plan was announced we are told on the news that 1.5 million young people in the United Kingdom – yes 1,500,000 young people – are not in employment, education, or training. We call them NEETS! See the link for the Mail Online comments on this, and it makes very worrying reading. Is it any wonder that we have such serious problems with anti-social behaviour, gang warfare, graffiti, yobbish behaviour, etc etc? Surely there can be nothing more dangerous to an ordered society than youth, particularly male youth, testosterone charged, who are bored, disaffected, angry, marginalised and unable to feel they have a value, a role to play, in that society?
So come on. Let’s get cracking on addressing this problem – and for my money I think technical, practical education for these non-academic youth from the age of 14 has to be the key.
And whilst all this has been about the youth of Europe, is there anything similar in the United States I wonder?

The Cat That Reads The Times

Books - New York Times Bestsellers v The Times own lists

Hi everyone

I've read somewhere recently, although I do not recall where, (perhaps someone could give me a lead to find the source), that the Americans are astonished generally at the frivolity and frothy celebrity bias of our Times book bestselling lists! The New York Times bestselling list is apparently composed of much more serious stuff! Is this really so?

Then let's look at our mind/body/spirit genre. So many of these actually confuse material success with spiritual development - but that is all the publishers want to see because that is what sells. Can we really be so self centred? There is a growing band of those who find the egocentricity of the 'Me-Millennium' repugnant.

'William Bloom is one of the UK's most experienced teachers, healers and authors in the field of holistic development.'(quote from his website!)

He calls the authors of such books the 'success-and-happiness' authors and says such books will actually disappoint in the long term.

If you do not know of Cygnus Review- 'written with love to guide, uplift and inspire you' - Visit Cygnus where he writes a regular column.

I write these blogs with love and prayers for a better world!