I’ve been blessed and been chosen
for a life of sufficiency
needs met in an instant
through unfair prosperity.

There’s a mountain of wants
always one step ahead of me
and it’ll continue for years
through modern medical longevity.

A small god am I
with whims I must satisfy
then I’m on to the next thing
always searching for novelty.

The rat race keeps running
testing rodent ability
hoping that I don’t glimpse
the inherent futility.

When did we relinquish
our human civility
selling our souls
for more profit ability?

I’ve been burdened and cursed
with a life of sufficiency
no need for grace
and no place for humility

But there’s a voice from the outside
that questions me intimately
is this gospel prosperity
or is there good news in poverty?

And despite all my stuff
I’ve got a fear of inadequacy
I can’t love my neighbour
because I covet his property.

I’ve been burned and been broken
by a life of sufficiency
and my only outlet
is through my hipster poetry.

Whoah! – meta.

This is the work of Micah Purnell who’s been fly-posting non-advertising around Manchester for the last 3 years. You can see more here. It reminded me of Brian McLaren’s phrase “improvised encouragement devices” in Everything Must Change.

Love the text of this one…

If you don’t design the future, someone else will.
Produce nothing with your talent, be it art or hospitality, and you will receive nothing.
Generosity takes practice.
The bold will be humble and productive with it; especially in the face of our daily rights.
This will enrich our character.
Find favour in the eyes of God and lift a sweet scent.
It only takes a step to head in the right direction.

Imminent and absent
Found in our seeking
Yet lost in the finding
God is nowhere
God is now here

…Yet, most people believe love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty… Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object – and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of a man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he just has to wait for the right object, and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it.

In part a response to a comment Matt posted over here but also a distillation of my current thoughts about the way I spend my money.

I’ve thought a fair bit about the “big issues” of the world over the last year. We can see that things can be better and often how we might collectively get there with sufficient and coordinated “buy-in” but it’s that first hurdle that seems the hardest to get over.

We often feel defeated by the inertia of the status quo – that my small change will make no difference – but then I end up coming back to “the ocean is made up of drops” or, if you prefer Ghandi, “almost everything you do will seem insignificant, but it is important that you do it”.

Right now I have resolved that I can’t change the world but I can change myself so these days I try not to worry too much about whether my sacrifices are insignificant in the grand scheme of things and just focus in on each of my little purchasing decisions on whether there is a practical “path of greater love” that I can take rather that the obvious or conventional choice.

For example, not travelling anywhere ever is probably the “greenest” option (the “path of greatest love” perhaps) but assuming I find it unacceptable not to go on a foreign holiday, can I make decisions that are less harmful. I suspect that flying is probably damaging for the environment so if I can practically take a train then why not?

Or, I have enough clothes to keep me warm and dry but assuming I’m going to buy a new jumper can I buy fairtrade/organic or better yet second-hand from a charity shop. Being someone who doesn’t enjoy the thrill of the chase that some people get traipsing around charity shops, I’ve become a big fan this year of Oxfam’s online charity shop.

I suppose then it comes down to my definition of what is practical. For me it is practical to spend more time or more money on taking a less harmful path but I am relatively resource and opportunity rich. If you haven’t had to walk for a few hours to get water today then you are too.

Sure my sacrifices may make no difference but all we can do is try to do something rather than nothing and not feel too bad when we don’t even manage that much – “I do the things that I don’t want to do and I don’t do the things that I wish I would” – this is human.

If I can learn to see things as they really are, understand the me and the us and the interdependence of the two, hold on only lightly to my possessions and let go of my feelings of entitlement then perhaps the sacrifice won’t feel like a sacrifice at all. How can you feel the loss of something once you realise it was never yours at all?

I totally agree with Matt that communities and social capital are important and that through these things we find our motivation to change. For me I find that in understanding that I’m just another human, another brother in the brotherhood of man (if that’s not too cheesy) but one who has more than most, and being separated from the hurt and suffering only by the geography of my birth, my identification with the “global community” motivates me to change and to give. I feel quite inspired by the idea that I can show love to someone I’ll never meet by ensuring they were paid a living wage for whatever I’m buying half way round the world.

Do I really think we as humans will ever get over greed and our need to out-do each other? I don’t know. I know I’m part of the problem – a bigger part than most if we look at the global scale. I see that as a generation we have a crisis of telos at this time – as Western civilization or at least British middle-class society a lot of us are a bit miffed – we don’t know where we’re going or why. Whether it was World Wars to fight, the dream of a hippie utopia, the “American Dream”, the 80s boom that was going to make us all rich or the 90s boom that was somehow different from the one in the 80s and was going to make us all rich, previous generations have had a plan for a better world (and revolutions to back them up) that I’m not sure we have right now.

I suppose it’s because we’re at a point right now where we feel that the system is broken but we don’t know how to fix it – that the train has come to a halt and we’re not sure whether we’re supposed to wait for it to spring back into life or get off and find our own way or even if the destination was such a wonderful place after all (or even existed).

With the access pipes to information and world news that we all now have in our homes, we’re perhaps more aware than any previous generation of just how complex the system is. Perhaps it is the awareness of this complexity that is starting to bring many back to a vision for our immediate physical communities – to the small and local, the sharing of life, getting stuck into the nitty gritty, the down and dirty of our hurts, our baggage, our imperfection, letting go of the façade of togetherness. Perhaps the new dream is for us to understand our connectedness to the people we pass on the street and in our day-to-days and to the people we never meet who make our clothes and grow our food whose hardship currently pays for our luxury. To understand that their loss is our loss and that through investment in the lives of others we build a community (local and global) that makes us richer ourselves.

I still have a long way to go. I’ve come to believe that ideals always make hypocrites of those of us that try to have some but I think it’s still important to try because our principles inform our journey by giving us an idea of where we’re trying to go what our destination might look like.

Neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands.

What a great way to end any and all arguments! Kind of what I was trying to say here. We’ve all got something to say and we’ve all got lots to learn.

Also, as a complete aside, I was thinking about how often the best books and films are the ones that teach you (or reveal to you) something new about yourself that was already there. Pretty cool.

Our faith is faith in some one else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other,—what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up?

Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, “Do not decide, but leave the question open,” is itself a passional decision,—just like deciding yes or no,—and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.

To claim that certain truths now possess [objective evidence], is simply to say that when you think them true and they are true, then their evidence is objective, otherwise it is not. But practically one’s conviction that the evidence one goes by is of the real objective brand, is only one more subjective opinion added to the lot. For what a contradictory array of opinions have objective evidence and absolute certitude been claimed! The world is rational through and through,—its existence is an ultimate brute fact; there is a personal God,—a personal God is inconceivable; there is an extra-mental physical world immediately known,—the mind can only know its own ideas; a moral imperative exists,—obligation is only the resultant of desires; a permanent spiritual principle is in every one,—there are only shifting states of mind; there is an endless chain of causes,—there is an absolute first cause; an eternal necessity,—a freedom; a purpose,—no purpose; a primal One,—a primal Many; a universal continuity,—an essential discontinuity in things; an infinity,—no infinity. There is this,—there is that; there is indeed nothing which some one has not thought absolutely true, while his neighbour deemed it absolutely false; and not an absolutist among them seems ever to have considered that the trouble may all the time be essential, and that the intellect, even with truth directly in its grasp, may have no infallible signal for knowing whether it be truth or no.

We must know the truth; and we must avoid error,—these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws.

Believe nothing, he tells us, keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies.

He who says, “Better go without belief forever than believe a lie!” merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe.

Wherever the option between losing truth and gaining it is not momentous, we can throw the chance of gaining truth away, and at any rate save ourselves from any chance of believing falsehood, by not making up our minds at all till objective evidence has come.

But in our dealings with objective nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth; and decisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and getting on to the next business would be wholly out of place.

if you want an absolute duffer in an investigation, you must, after all, take the man who has no interest whatever in its results: he is the warranted incapable, the positive fool. The most useful investigator, because the most sensitive observer, is always he whose eager interest in one side of the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become deceived.

Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for man.

The desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special truth’s existence; and so it is in innumerable cases of other sorts. Who gains promotions, boons, appointments, but the man in whose life they are seen to play the part of live hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other things for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them in advance? His faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, and creates its own verification.

Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted.

There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.

Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error,—that is your faith-vetoer’s exact position.

We have the right to believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will.

What do you think of yourself? What do you think of the world?… These are questions with which all must deal as it seems good to them.

We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? ‘Be strong and of a good courage.’ Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes…. If death ends all, we cannot meet death better.