Have you got magpies around you? They’re singing outside is a glorious chorus of joyfulness.
They made me think about birds and whether there was a story about birds that could be used to illustrate the tension we feel between consumerism and frugality.
David Jones is very concerned that we have gone off the boil as consumers. They want us to buy. It doesn’t matter what just anything at all as long as it moves stuff stuff glorious stuff out their doors.
But we’re not are we? We’ve all got a whole lot more cautious since the global financial crisis. We’ve all had a warning about the dangers of debt and living on abundant credit.
Saving and frugality and avoidance of waste are the new black!
Not something we here in Queensland are very used to. It is an abundant place in so many ways with all its sunshine sub-tropical food and great outdoors.
But here it is. We are doing it.
Talking about birds what came to mind was the gospel reference to the birds of the air from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.
Here is some of it from Matthew 6:24-28:
“No-one can serve two masters for either he will hate the one and love the other or he will hold to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.
For this reason I say to you do not be anxious for your life as to what you shall eat or what you shall drink; nor for your body as to what you shall put on. Is not life more than food and the body than clothing?
Look at the birds of the air that they do not sow neither do they reap nor gather into barns and yet your heavenly
Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single cubit to his life’s span? And why are you anxious about clothing? Observe how the lillies of the filed grow; they do not toil nor do they spin.”
This is strange stuff for today’s world where advertisers and marketers do everything they can to make us anxious and goad us to buy and consume.
It is not too much to say that we are encouraged to sign our lives away and enslave ourselves to long hours of work to pay debt to purchase consumer items. Our family life and health suffers and our communities are crying out for our involvement.
How can someone like Jesus tell us not to worry about food and clothing? Obviously we have to eat and we’ll be in big trouble if we don’t put clothes on.
That’s not what it’s about though is it? He is talking about our needs and although he was talking to people in a time when the world wasn’t bursting at the seams and running out of resources globally his message still makes sense.
He never tells us that we’re not ok if we don’t have a bigger vehicle a bigger house a newer couch a more trendy outfit or hairstyle another overseas trip.
Meeting our basic need to be adequately fed and adequately clothed is hardly the problem that most of us are facing. To be genuinely starving or naked we’d have to work pretty hard spending our money on pokies smokes or paying debts we’d be better off if we’d never gotten into. If that is the case our charities are generous in stepping in to help.
Even in the most utterly desperate places on earth such as the awful drought-striken areas of Africa right now humans are remarkable at mobilizing resources to provide some food clothing shelter medical help. I’m not saying it is enough. The problems of the world are massive and likely to get more extreme as climate change and resource-depletion get worse.
But that is a world away from consumerism. It is a world away from the driving churn of more and more stuff. Pumping resources in one end of the process moving it from factory to retail store to us and then on to the waste transfer station. In the meantime we run like frantic rats on a treadmill working to get the money to buy the stuff.
Can we ever have enough stuff? Where does all the stuff come from? The forests cut down. The mines mined out to the last bit of ore. The soil depleted. The oceans emptied of fish.
Much of what we buy is kept for only a time and may be hardly used. It becomes a burden to us to store and protect and clean and insure.
Meanwhile the magpies are out in the sunshine in their coat of black and white feathers fossicking on the lawn for grubs with hardly a care in the world.
Our business community would be horrified if we all started following what Jesus was saying in the Sermon on the Mount; if we abandoned our pursuit of consumerism and made our purpose doing what he said to do: “Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness.” (Matthew 6:33) Seek a way of life that is not material at all but getting right in our spirits and with our families and neighbours.
But if we all do that if we stop gross waste and consumption of stuff how will our economy our businesses our whole way of life survive?
The truth of the matter is it would be unlikely to.
But if we keep on with the frenetic consumption of stuff lifestyle how will our whole world survive all the people on it all the species? What will happen to us as we consume ourselves into oblivion?
As the storms of change gather we can only hope that we are carried through. Some of the people at Grantham were washed kilometres downstream but managed to stay afloat and eventually grab a tree and hold on. They are alive to tell about it.
This is a journey we are all on together.
Voluntarily embracing frugality shows we know the journey has started. There will be many stages when we don’t have choices or when the choices we do have seem impossible.
Those will be the times when all we can do is be like the birds of the air and rely on what is provided for us and no more.