Out of the night that covers me
black as the pit from pole to pole
I thank whatever gods may be
for my unconquerable soul

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud
Under the bludgeonings of chance
my head is bloody, but unbowed

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
looms but the horror of the shade
and yet the menace of the years
finds, and shall find me, unafraid

It matters not how strait the gate
how charged with punishments the scroll
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul

“Invictus,”
by William Earnest Henley

The fool folds his arms
and wastes away.

Better one hand full and
peace of mind than both
fists full and toil that is
chasing the wind.

Here again I saw emptiness under
the SUN without son or brother
toiling endlessly yet never

—
This painting was found in McCahon’s studio, symbolically face down, after his death. Perhaps it offers us something to ponder – this man who created for us in these islands icons and images to live by.

“I saw something logical, orderly and beautiful belonging to the land and not yet its people. Not yet understood or communicated, not even really yet invented. My work has largely been to communicate this vision and to invent the way to see it.”

The text is inspired from Ecclesiastes 4. McCahon leaves us hanging – unfinished? But Ecclesiastes concludes:

“…never satisfied with riches. ‘For whom am I toiling’, they ask, ‘and depriving myself of pleasure?’ This also is vanity and an unhappy business.”

Outside the patient millions
Who put them into power
Expect a little more back for their taxes
Like school books, beds in hospitals
And peace in our bloody time
All they get is old men grinding axes
Who’ve built their private fortunes
On the things they can rely
The courts, the secret handshake
The stock exchange and the old school tie
For God and queen and country
All things they justify
Above the sound of ideologies clashing

God bless the civil service
The nations saving grace
While we expect democracy
Theyre laughing in our face
And although our cries get louder
Their laughter gets louder still
Above the sound of ideologies clashing

“Ideology”, Billy Bragg

Stringfellow gave a lot of lectures and bible studies. Some, like this one, were recorded. Over the course of the next few months I’ll be transferring those which have been rescued from various places (including the shower stalls at Sojourners, so the story goes) into digital form for download. Most are old reel-reel tapes, so they might take some time…

In the meantime, this one is a commentary on Luke 4:14-21, given initially to folks at Memorial Lutheran Church. It forms part of a series. To download it, click here.

A jealous person is doubly unhappy-over what he has, which is judged inferior, and over what he has not, which is judged superior. Such a person is doubly removed from knowing the true blessing of creation.

Desmond Tutu. An African Prayer Book.

The achievement of happiness seems to have been a topic of discussion that has occupied the media lately and a number of articles have recently appeared in our newspapers. The acquisition of wealth has been a particular topic of debate in respect of achieving this personal happy state of existence. This phenomena of happiness seems to grip the Western World and in the middle of last year, in Sydney, 3500 industry leaders, psychologists, company managers, consultants and personal development experts attended a four-day conference on happiness and its causes. Recently in the journal of Social Science and Medicine it was also reported that it has taken 35 years worth of data and two million people from 80 nations before the researches from Dartmouth College and the University of Warwick reached the conclusion that our level of happiness declines during mid-life. This apparently can translate to deepening levels of depression at around the age of 40 for women and 50 for men. It happens to everyone, the researches claim, not only those who have had to deal with loss or trauma. This being the case, one is tempted to speculate that the $NZ 4 billion per year market for antidepressant drug consumption worldwide (albeit that their efficacy is now being questioned) is to some extent brought about by this tendency to a high level of unhappiness in middle age.

The good news however, said one of the authors of this recent study, is that we do get over it and by the time that we reach 70, if we are still physically fit, then on average we are as happy as a 20-year old. The researches have claimed that during this mid life crisis situation, people have not learned to count their blessings as they might otherwise do when they get older or more likely they have not figured out that while they’ve been looking for happiness through career recognition, money, status and pleasure seeking activities, this is not where true happiness lies.

Currently in this country, such people when striving for these false levels of achievement, at the exclusion of everything else, may also be forced to forgo any possibility of happiness and adopt the mantle of doom and gloom when confronted with such things as the latest National Bank predictions about the state of the economy. In the news this past week, business confidence has apparently taken a nose dive and 30% of firms expect their own activity to fall over the coming year while only 24% expect it to increase. The conclusion drawn is that the net 6% pessimism is the worst since the recession year of 1991. When combined with the credit crunch, given our reliance on overseas funding, the resultant housing market slowdown, and the severe drought conditions in Waikato and Central Hawkes Bay, the impression might be gained that the country is being conditioned to accept a bad bout of depression and hence a very unhappy outlook.

Those who reach out for happiness are forever unsatisfied; the more they strive, the less they find. Jealousy of others and their achievements is often a precursor for their deep dissatisfaction with life and their level of unhappiness. Despite therefore the apparent inevitability of enduring a mid-life crisis, self-awareness would seem to be the key to avoiding this pitfall. Happiness is a by-product, it is not something you find, but something that finds you. During World War 2 and particularly during the early years of the war, ordinary people living in Britain faced a formidable foe, food shortages and other severe restrictions, yet were able to go about their daily wartime activities with a smile and a courageous display of outward appearance that was synonymous with a measure of happiness. This could only be put down to be a byproduct of having a real common purpose to their lives. Mrs Mopp (Dorothy Summers), a tough, vital, indomitable cockney char lady character in the Tommy Handley comedy show Itma (It’s That Man Again), a wartime phenomena on the wireless (or radio as it later became known), typified the symbol of the enduring spirit of Britain at the time of London’s great trial by speaking those inimitable words in her dreary monotonous acting voice, “It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going.” Incidentally the script writer for this immensely popular broadcast; (listened to by some 12 million people every week in Britain and even enjoyed by Dutch families in occupied Holland, who whilst not necessarily being able to speak English, just wanted to hear people laugh), was a New Zealander, Ted Kavanagh.

One ancient secret of happiness that is particularly important to modern happiness research was revealed by Aristotle some 2,500 years ago. He argued that happiness lay in maximizing one’s personal excellence or ‘virtue’, and in using that virtue in the service of one’s community. In a paper published last month in the Journal of Research in Personality, colleagues from the laboratory for the Study of Meaning and Quality of Life, University of Louisville, Kentucky, also concluded that the more virtue-building activities people engaged in, the happier they said they were, both on the day in question and on the following day. Perhaps surprisingly, there was no relationship between pleasure seeking and happiness.

Happiness is usually grounded in love. It is grounded in our relationships with other people. It is grounded in self respect. A healthy, well-adjusted child, or adult, needs to have experienced unconditional love. A healthy, well, adjusted theistic spirituality needs to understand God as unconditional love. Being loved and spirituality can both provide a framework of meaning, a sense of purpose, friendship and help in developing compassion. Through interviews it has been discovered that people who are happy are those that focused also on the things they loved rather than an outside definition of success or something greater than momentary pleasure. Yet we are hung up on the rather superficial ‘outward vestures’. We are a society addicted to self care and displays of successful wealthy or popular people, often typified in the magazines and periodicals by fit looking 30 year olds. We are ensnared by the alluring advertising which seeks to convince us that we are not able to really enjoy life unless we buy some new commodity. We are led astray by the portrayal of the affluent ‘good life’ that TV programmes and commercials would have us believe is an achievable formula for success and happiness.

Dr. Howard Cutler, who co-wrote The Art of Happiness with the Dalai Lama in 1998, believes that money has little to do with happiness once basic needs are met. And he believes people can work on being happy by changing the way they think and react to the world. Furthermore he believes that there is a strong link between personal happiness and showing kindness and compassion to other people.

If we really are serious about the pursuit of happiness therefore, the focus needs to shift to caring for others, being kind and allowing grace. One of the truths of Christianity is never underestimate the power of grace. Wealth is no guarantee of happiness. Yet neither is poverty. We need a certain level of income in order to participate in society and the economic and social structures of society are important for happiness. Happiness is directly related to connection with people and God. Some of the happiest people are those who have been hurt but have had those hurts healed by the power of Christ’s transforming love. Having been healed themselves they go out to heal others, happy in the thought that they are doing something worthwhile and with the comfort of God, they find it to be positively exhilarating and enriching.

It is interesting to note that in NZ, volunteers for the distribution of the ‘Meals on Wheels’ service, are becoming few and far between and also they are currently represented by people who are mainly in the over 70 age bracket, (those who we might add comprise the happiest of people) some of whom are considerably older than the people they provide meals for. Similarly volunteer drivers for transporting people with disabilities etc., are in short supply. One rather suspects that the situation with such organisations is that this is typical of an emerging situation where unpaid volunteers carrying out charitable work are becoming hard to find and it would appear that only mainly in our churches these days, is there a limited reservoir of people who are available for such jobs. The conclusion that one may derive from this is that we are becoming a nation of unhappy dissatisfied people by pursuing, often exclusively, the wrong goals.

Furthermore in the big scheme of things, are we guilty of neglecting our families and society by striving to achieve these elusive goals? The latest crime statistics for 2007 have just been published. Whilst they show that in 2007 there were 45 murders in NZ, which was some 10% less than the previous year, is this improvement something that we should be congratulating ourselves about? A further large increase in assaults, street disorder, intimidation and other drug and alcohol-fuelled offences have also occurred. Additionally there were 6000 more acts of violence during 2007, which it is alleged is due to a greater awareness of family violence (32% increase in reporting domestic violence cases due to such high profile national anti-violence campaigns as, ‘It’s not OK.’) Nevertheless even after considering the increase in reporting, The National Collective of Independent Women’s Refuges chief executive Heather Henare, has stated that even considering the increase in reporting, the figures are deeply alarming and represent an epidemic level which will require significant investment before they are able to be turned around.

Whilst therefore we can commend those that participate in achieving such levels of improvement, we need to ask ourselves, do these statistics represent a happy society overall? Indeed it has been reported that although real incomes for large sectors of the community have surged dramatically ahead in recent decades, happiness levels have remained largely flat within developed countries across time. Our society in NZ, like others in the Western World might be richer but we are certainly no happier. Global warming and our insatiable desire for progress and the problems that are arising with our unsustainable patterns of consumption and production, also poses a dire threat to our future success and happiness and unless we embark on sustainable practices, the future of mankind is at stake. Without proof that current levels of Western consumption have a positive effect on individual happiness and well-being, the question arises: what are the real risks to planetary survival when stewardship and environmental responsibilities are ignored? Lastly it is important to recognize that the word ‘happy’ (Greek Makarios) carries a far richer tone than we commonly attach to the word. It suggests a deep, abiding happiness, not just a temporary emotional lift.

A jealous person is doubly unhappy-over what he has, which is judged inferior, and over what he has not, which is judged superior. Such a person is doubly removed from knowing the true blessing of creation.

Desmond Tutu. An African Prayer Book.

    His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.

Most would have seen or heard media reports claiming the Vatican had released a list of seven new deadly sins. On the whole these reports missed the key point of Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti’s comments. As a senior member of the Vatican Apostolic Penitentiary, Girotti was attempting to name the modern face of social sin. The seven that he named – genetic modification, carrying out experiments on humans, polluting the environment, causing social injustice, causing poverty, becoming obscenely wealthy and taking drugs – he believes have an impact and resonance that is above all social.

Attempting to name sin in a way that is more than individual and personal has a long history and is not at all new. It can be found at the very origins of our Judeo-Christian tradition. The early Hebrew slaves named the legalised and structured Egyptian political economy as unjust and oppressive. The Deuteronomists and the writers and editors of Leviticus riled against the economic and political structures established by the Hebrew leaders after they arrived in the land flowing with milk and honey. Here, poverty and inequality soon became institutionalised and the orphan, the widow, the slave, the labourer, and the debtor became victims trapped by the way power was structured. And the theologians who contributed to the first eleven chapters of Genesis clearly were trying to demonstrate not only the social effects of sin but also that whole peoples can think and act in ways that are not of God.

This struggling to name the collective institutional transgression continued. The
various Hebrew prophets condemned not only individual unjust actions but also the injustices structured into the political, economic and legal systems. Jesus is recorded as using parable
after parable to name that the dominant institutionalised social, political, economic and religious relationships needed to be turned upside down. No longer would the bulk of the people be oppressed and excluded because God’s new reality would give first place to the least.

Christians have continued to struggle with the complex reality of sin. The social dimension is clear in St Paul’s sense of the world and of the reign of sin and in John’s Gospel’s pejorative use of the term the world. Early theologians like St Basil, St Augustine and St John Chrysostom attempted to name that the gross economic inequality that existed in their day was unjust and that God’s intention was for a radical egalitarian redistribution. And over the last century or so, Catholic Social Teaching, in particular, has attempted to address the collective sin, be it dominant ways of thinking, unjust institutions or systems or policies and decisions that harm human beings and/or the rest of creation.

So there is nothing new in Archbishop Girotti’s attempt to name the contemporary face and challenge of social sin. And there is nothing new in the sins he named – John Paul II had already named each in a variety of ways and a number of them are just modern attempts to name the very concerns found in our biblical heritage. But we cannot leave it only to Church leaders to be talking about social sin. Girotti’s challenge is that it is the responsibility of each of us to have some sense of our own participation in and support of social sin.

Even just to take a few of Girotti’s seven social sins is very sobering and challenging. From the perspective of hundreds of millions of people earning just a dollar or two a day we are, in this country, excessively wealthy. We are amongst the ones who have the largest ecological footprints and contribute to a far greater level of pollution and carbon emission. We are amongst the ones who benefit from the way the economic and trade systems are structured. We are the beneficiaries of the capitalist siphoning up of wealth and thus we are a party to causing greater poverty. And on the whole we do not see the injustice (the sin) in all of this.

Girotti’s challenge is for us to take social sin seriously. The painful task is to admit that we benefit from the way global political, social and economic power is structured. And thus the call to repent is a call to change our ways, our power relationships and our institutional structures.

Article written by David Tutty and reproduced with kind permission from Living Justly in Aotearoa, a justice, peace and integrity of creation newsletter from the Justice and Peace Office and the Bicultural Desk of the Auckland Diocese and Pax Christi Aotearoa New Zealand.

“State of the World 2008 makes it clear that our planet and every individual on it face substantial environmental challenges. From the buildup of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere to significant water shortages and a wide range of pollution and natural resource management issues, the road to a sustainable economy is full of potholes. But there are signs of hope. As documented throughout this volume, the pace and scale of environmental innovation is extraordinary.

Most notably, there has been a sea change in business attitudes toward the environment over the last several years. Companies large and small, in manufacturing and in services, in the old economies of the United States and Europe as well as the emerging economic powerhouses of the developing world, have come to recognize that the environment is more than regulations to follow, costs to bear, and risks to manage. As society steps up to a wide range of pollution control and natural resource management challenges—and commits substantial resources to finding solutions—there will be significant market opportunities for those who can bring solutions to bear.

Chapters include:

Chapter 1. Seeding the Sustainable Economy
Gary Gardner and Thomas Prugh, Worldwatch Institute

Chapter 2. A New Bottom Line for Progress
John Talberth, Redefining Progress

Chapter 3. Rethinking Production
Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism Solutions

Chapter 4. The Challenges of Sustainable Lifestyles
Tim Jackson, University of Surrey

Chapter 5. Meat and Seafood: The Most Costly Ingredients in the Global Diet
Brian Halweil and Danielle Nierenberg, Worldwatch Institute

Chapter 6. Building a Low-Carbon Economy
Christopher Flavin, Worldwatch Institute

Chapter 7. Improving Carbon Markets
Zoë Chafe and Hilary French, Worldwatch Institute

Chapter 8. Water in a Sustainable Economy
Ger Bergkamp, IUCN, and Claudia Sadoff, IUCN and International Water Management Institute

Chapter 9. Banking on Biodiversity
Ricardo Bayon, Ecosystem Marketplace

Chapter 10. The Parallel Economy of the Commons
Jonathan Rowe, Tomales Bay Institute

Chapter 11. Engaging Communities for a Sustainable World
Erik Assadourian, Worldwatch Institute

Chapter 12. Mobilizing Human Energy
Jason Calder, Future Generations

Chapter 13. Investing for Sustainability
Bill Baue, Socialfunds.com

Chapter 14. New Approaches to Trade Governance
Mark Halle, International Institute for Sustainable Development

Below is a recent item from their email newsletter which might be of interest to some.

Struggling for Sustainability in China and India

In a recent exposé, the Washington Post reported that many solar panels that adorn U.S. and European rooftops have left a toxic legacy in Chinese villages. China’s solar PV manufacturing sector now has the country scrambling to grapple with a mounting waste problem. In the meantime, the industry continues to tread the traditional path of ”pollute first, clean up afterwards,“ writes Yingling Liu, Worldwatch China Program Manager.

India, meanwhile, is struggling to deal with its rising energy demand. Energy efficiency is critical to the country of 1.1 billion as it seeks to expand access to electricity into rural regions. But India’s efforts to improve energy efficiency have been slow and often frustrating, writes Worldwatch Staff Writer Ben Block.

Read:
• The Dirty Side of a ”Green“ Industry
• Can India Improve Energy-Efficiency as its Economy Booms?

Prophetic Histories (OP)
The People of the Māramatanga
Maori prophetic movements from the late nineteenth century are widely known. Men such as Te Whiti, Te Kooti and Rua Kenana led their people through periods of despair and challenge. Some of their teachings continue today. Less well known is a movement founded at the beginning of the twentieth century, based on the teachings of Mere Rikiriki, a prophetess from the Rangitikei River whose words inspired both T. W. Ratana and Hori Enoka Mareikura.

It is the work of Mareikura and his followers that this book discusses. Today the movement quietly continues, centred on the Ruapehu district. The prophetic sayings of Mareikura and other voices guide the lives of the people of the Māramatanga. Their work is recently associated with the Maori renaissance; their belief is closely linked to the Catholic church; their main purpose is one of spiritual adherence.

Karen Sinclair has spent thirty years working with the people of the Māramatanga. From oral histories, documents, and songs, she has carefully recorded some of the key parts of their story. Prophetic Histories is an account written for the movement itself, with the purpose of also informing a wider readership. It records some of the paths by which Maori traverse their own land (and landscape) in post-colonial New Zealand.

Telling Stories
Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand
Indigenous histories not only challenge the content of conventional national and colonial histories inasmuch as they tell a different story, but they also challenge the nature of history itself.

Recent decades have seen a tremendous upsurge of interest among the indigenous peoples of Australia and New Zealand in their history. Life stories, land claims, genealogy, song, dance and painting have all made new contributions to the recovery and representation of the past.

Telling Stories looks at the place of life stories and of memory in history: who tells life stories; the purpose for which they are told; the role of story and history in the politics of land claims; and the way language impacts on research and writing.

Ann Parsonson writes about ‘stories for land’ in the oral narratives of the Maori Land Court; Deborah Bird Rose retells the ‘saga of Captain Cook’; Andrew Ereuti and Alan Ward examine Maori land law in the context of the Treaty claims process; Jeremy Beckett looks at the autobiographical oral history of Myles Lalor; and Bain Attwood discusses the stolen generations narrative.

With Judith Binney, Fiona Magowan, W.H. Oliver, Basil Sansom and Penny van Toorn, these contributors explore the questions that arise when different kinds of history meet: different kinds of evidence, from different cultures, sometimes telling the same story from conflicting perspectives. Telling Stories is a timely book that explores the multiple forms of indigenous history in New Zealand and Australia.

The Fabric of Welfare
Voluntary Organisations, Government, and Welfare in New Zealand, 1840-2005 (Due December 2007)
Throughout history, the ‘welfare of the people’ has been a contested area. Is it the responsibility of the state? The churches? The extended family? Organised charities or informal community groups? The Fabric of Welfare is about the many points of contact between voluntary welfare and government social services, and the complex pattern woven by these different threads.

The country’s welfare history is shaped by its colonial past, with the predominantly British influences transmitted by an immigrant society in the nineteenth century; by its Maori population, with a strong communal ethos; by the shaping forces of the welfare state; by two world wars and economic depression; and by both free-market policies and rapid social change in recent years. In tracing the interdependence of state and voluntary provision of welfare from 1840 to 2005, Margaret Tennant offers new perspectives on New Zealand social history.

This is a rigorous analysis, but it is also a history illuminated by people. The text is illustrated with stories about the people who were moved to save, to reform, to care, to support, and the people who needed that essential sustenance. From the nun who sees a distraught woman about to throw her child into the sea, and sets out to care for ‘foundlings’, to city missioners, community-minded public servants, businessmen philanthropists, and the entrepreneurial organisers of floral fetes and telethons, these accounts tell us much about the history of welfare, in all its interconnections.