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Anglican, Bapist, Methodist, 1 Cuddesdon Way, Tel/Fax: 01865 396241 |
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A week or two back, some were alarmed or awed by an experiment in a large circular tunnel under the Alps, accelerating unimaginably tiny particles to unimaginable speeds, attempting to recreate and observe some of what happened in the earliest split seconds of this Universe. Some alarmists feared everything would instantly be sucked into a cosmic Black Hole – well, it’s not happened yet! Alarming events have also been happening in the money markets and financial institutions of the capitalist world – heralded by Northern Rock and by jumps in the price of fuels, exploding in the collapse of the mortgage market and major financial bodies in the USA. The big bang had a force sufficient to make a Republican Government, believing in the free market, suddenly to make a breath-taking U-turn, to prevent the whole financial system going into melt-down. Those of us who struggle to understand the physics of the one or the economics of the other, just know that somehow nowhere and no-one is unaffected by the fall-out. It is the effect on people, people like ourselves, that takes up our prayers and concerns. Those who seem to come out worse from a catastrophe are the poor, those who have little and even what they have is taken away or becomes worthless. Their home is really owned by someone else. They have no savings for a rainy day. Their credit-rating is so low as to make debts unsustainable. They pay more for their energy costs. Perhaps, to look on the bright side, those who keep their savings under the mattress might have been wiser than we thought! Yet we are all shareholders in the earth, its resources and the use (or abuse) of those finite resources, shareholders of the corporation of The Human Story. From those to whom much has been given, more is expected by way of return. In the present bewildering, bubble-bursting crises what economists, political commentators and religious leaders seem to be agreed about, is that the financial institutions need to be moderated with a sense of (moral) responsibility. Suddenly we are hearing a lot of those old-fashioned (and religious) words, like Thrift (rather than wasting, or throwing away); Patience (waiting and working towards with hope, in place of instant-satisfaction); Work, a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay (rather than greed); that sense of vocation, that our contribution of effort, and labour, according to our strength and abilities, towards the common-wealth, is in part so that we have enough to share (through taxation/ charitable giving/ voluntary service) in carrying the burdens of the weak, the young and old, the vulnerable, the economically unproductive. We discover, as if we had forgotten it, that the whole banking system is built upon those virtues of Trust, good faith, and reliable honesty. The community teaching of the Bible, (e.g. the book of Deuteronomy), and the examples of the gospel, suddenly seem to have more relevance in the bewildering global City, than we had imagined. And what about science? Of course, because something can be done doesn’t make it the right thing to do. But we need to befriend science and technology to help humankind to dicover ways of sustaining life for all creatures, for whom this planet is their island home - finding ways of trapping our carbon emissions (responsible for much of ‘global warming’) in the way that nature trapped it long ago in fossil fuels; efficient ways of harnessing the energy of the elements, and safe ways of releasing that colossal energy that makes the smallest particles of ‘matter’. We are called, in a word, to live in the image of the Creator, who loves us so much as to invest in this enterprise His all. David Parry |
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Reflection |
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Thought for the month |
