“Despair relieves itself at the expense of those in its environs.” How else do we explain the West’s willingness to expend the earth’s resources to such a degree that the rest of the globe is deprived of its share and the earth is endangered? This is a question Marva Dawn asks in her book Unfettered Hope – A Call to Faithful Living in an Affluent Society. It is from this same book that I re-read, earlier this morning, that in order to bring everyone on the planet to the same general level of consumption and well-being as the average Canadian; we would need the resources of four or five more earths -right now.
What is interesting about Marva Dawn’s analysis however is that she doesn’t simply blame callous greed and ambition for the present imbalance. It is more tragic than that. It is the profound loss of systems of meaning that causes a people to “ease its pain by means of production of more commodities (and the consumption of them), while the rest of the world suffers from an opposite kind of hopelessness – the inability to secure what is necessary to live.”
If that is true, who will take this painful thorn out of our paw? She quotes Raimon Panikkar: Human beings cannot live with a conscious, unrelieved sense of the “vanity” of their lives and endeavors. If their gods die, if their optimism is dashed by events, if the habit of hope languishes in them, they will likely construct bogus hopes out of thin air and sheer determination.
Jesus help us. The unfettering of hope, Dawn suggests, is the crucial work that needs doing in our numbing affluence. This is probably worth thinking through – especially for me as I continue to contemplate the nature of my work and calling. What kind of music, which stories, help to restore a practical “habit of hope” to a culture that has lost its sense of place within the wider context? A doctor friend of mine once explained that a cancer cell is simply a cell that has lost its sense of place in relationship to the rest of the body. And the result is catastrophe for the whole body.”
Everyone asks us, “Has the trip o Ethiopia changed you?” Well… sadly no. When I came back devastated from what I saw in Calcutta over a decade ago I told a friend that I’d never recover from what I saw there. “It’s amazing,” he said, “and disappointing, just how quickly you’ll recover.” But that’s the work now – the work of turning an adventure into a transformation.
