hamsterwheel

…According to my widget, it’s currently -3 degrees. Which means that the UK is officially Unable To Function for a second consecutive day. It is a little nippy here in my shed, so I’m looking for a little keyboard exercise to get my digits warmed up before I move on to the serious business of the day.

Asking an African Bishop where he thinks the church in the West is going wrong may not have been my most tactful opening salvo while away in Uganda. But his response was both measured and unsurprising. Asking a couple of Pentecostal lads the same question a few days later while on the way to the airport brought a sharper, less politically nuanced reply. I think I’m going to wonder and write about the future for the Anglican communion at some point soon, but, meanwhile, I’ll pause a while here:

Yesterday The Children’s Society published A Good Childhood: Searching for Values in a Competitive Age did exactly what the church needs to do; held up a mirror and offered us all a look.

Here’s how The Times introduced its report:

Children’s lives are being blighted by “obsessive” testing, relentless advertising and a long-hours culture that contributes to family breakdown, the Archbishop of Canterbury says in a report published today.

In a scathing attack on a society that he says is organised around the needs and desires of adults, Dr Rowan Williams argues that people must change their ways if Britain is to become a better place for children to grow up in.

The signs of our living in the middle of a cultural shift are everywhere. The pace of change has accelerated so much that, as one futurist/pastor told me last year, ‘the pace and chaos caused by all this change makes it almost impossible to decipher. We may think that there are few defining moments going on around us, but we’d be wrong. The truth is that we’re surrounded by white noise and static as values, trends, ideals and powers shift with each rising sun.’

In my mind these words go well with those of Rowan Williams. In the middle of our obsession with progress, change and transition, we have found it too easy to ignore the potential consequences on our children. We have become isolated, insular, segregated and small. Our eyes have dulled and all around are family units that appear to be constructed on the sole, fragile belief that bringing up a family is a matter of holding your breath until normal service resumes.

I can think of many families who live like this. Long hours at work, crazy scheduling of childminders and pre/afterschool clubs, weekends where each partner carves out their allotted ‘me time’, trips to play-facilities where the two kids will happily wander off and be amused while dad takes a break, holiday-breaks anticipated with dread as the family are forced into the unnatural position of togetherness again.

Life like this is hard. Having it all – the career, the marriage, the body, the wardrobe, the bank balance, the social life, the Perfect Family Unit – is a fools gold. And because we’re fully signed up to the consumerist mindset we believe that just like personal trainers and cookery courses, our parenting can be taken care of if we just buy in the right resources. Cram the week with after school activities, bloat the weekends on sport, take holidays in places where the kids will be Taken Care Of and – according to the brochure – you’ve succeeded in being a good parent.

For some reason I’m now remembering the scene from Fight Club where the narrator gets his hand burned:

Tyler Durden: Shut up! Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers bailed, what does that tell you about God?
Narrator: No, no, I… don’t…
Tyler Durden: Listen to me! You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen.
Narrator: It isn’t?
Tyler Durden: We don’t need him!

It’s clumsy, but it makes a point; when all we have is what we can see, when our aspirations are printed on matt covers or in a million pixels, there is no need for God. And when life begins and ends with us, the sense of responsibility breeds the temptation to circle the wagons, trim the horizon down to size and use lame metaphors that indicate smallness.

I’m rambling. But I’m proud of Rowan Williams and the church for speaking out on this. I’m sure my friends in Africa would agree.

Filed under: we can do better than this