and I thought that bruce springsteen’s sliding crotch was impressive…

My Thom Yorke Respect-ometer just nudged to the right. However, my one for Gwynlth moved further left than I thought possible.

the future?

I’ve just finished writing a manuscript that, among other things, wonders what the next 150 years will look like for Christianity. It seems to me that, like always, there will be good and bad examples of faith in action. But there’s more to come too, I believe. The cocktail of cultural shift, climate change, geopolitical unrest, technological advances and internal conflict within the church itself makes me (and all those people far cleverer than I whom I asked) convinced that this time next century we’ll be looking out on a dramatically different world.

I just saw this list of nations with the worst records of persecution of Christians. It’s from Open Door who, if you’re not already aware, are fueled by the lungs and heart of Brother Andrew.

I once heard him say that it is ‘easier to calm down a radical than to wake up a corpse’. I like that. And I’m thinking that there is probably a far greater density of Christian radical within these ten countries than there is round here.

While writing the book it was the stories of the martyrs that got me. It’s a nice idea, having a to die for kind of faith. But do I really want it?

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.

i’m with mike

Perhaps it’s because I spent Saturday night dressed up as a woman for a friend’s 40th birthday, and I am therefore far further down the slippery slope of immorality than I previously thought, but I can’t quite see what all this Phelps-Bong fuss is about.

Apart from the fact that it clearly explains where that appetite for those famous breakfasts comes from, it seems like a non-story to me. And as for spelling an end to his career, surely that’s going too far?

I’ve always liked pot – or, at least, the idea of it. I don’t touch the stuff now, but it seems clear that if you’re going to have a drug of choice (and I can’t really think of a society that doesn’t) then stoners are far more preferable to drunks any day of the week. Violent crime? Just pass the pasties over and I’ll be fine.

My mum used to come back at me with the ‘it leads to other things’ argument, seemingly unaware of the irony of her having started a charity that picked up the pieces if lives ruined far more by drink than drugs. Illegality? The law’s changed so much – and it appears to be at the discretion of individual police forces here in the UK – that we seem only to know that if you keep it quiet you’ll probably be fine.

So why don’t I smoke now? The reasons have changed over the years – but they’ve never been all that strong. At best I can only say that it was a phase of my life that I lived through and have done with. Like driving fast or dancing like a pimp, those days are gone. Now I’m a responsible 36 year old I’ll just stick to cross-dressing at parties. It’ll cause me fewer health problems, but no doubt I’ll look back and wince at some point in the future.

uganda, january 09

“Time and bad conditions do not favour beauty,’ wrote Ngugi Wa Thiong’o in ‘Weep Not, Child’.

Perhaps the Kenyan author was right. When you’re a thirty five year old mother of seven living in a remote, rural village without electricity, running water, flushable toilets or anything more than the basic crops your hillside strips of land can offer, there’s a good chance that life will have engraved its journeys upon your face. Lines carved deep into skin, eyes too used to blocking out sun or rain, back moving slow under invisible weight, hands and feet leathered and laced by groove and crease.

Bollocks to beauty. These lines and wrinkles and aches and this poverty and hardship and potential have captured my interest on a far deeper level than the cosmetic. This place – Kigazi – in the mountains that flow between Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo is captivating. 8,000 feet up where that last 10% of air seems almost impossible to inhale, the urge to drink it in and absorb the views and smells and essence is just as strong. I feel alive here – alive like the days around a funeral.

If you don’t count a seven nights half board in Port el Kantaoui in Tunisia some time way back in the early eighties, this was my first time in Africa. My companions were telling me how lucky I was to have ended up in so beautiful a part of the continent, and my internal narrator spent much of the 12 day trip wondering about whether I would do what so many of my other friends appear to have done and fall in love with what they all call ‘the real Africa’. What did they mean by that? Would I know it if I found it? And if I did, would breaking up be hard to do?

It was on the seven hour drive back to Kampala that things finally started to make sense. Our decision to miss the usual trip to a game reserve was taken on the back of the feeling that we had been privileged enough to have already seen far more than any tourist hike could offer. We’d danced with the Chiga – their feet welded to the rhythm of the oil-can drum, their arms and eyes reaching up for the setting sun. We’d walked the couple of miles to fetch water and carry it back up the mountainside in 20 litre jerrycans, exhausted and staggering while the 12 year old girls out-paced us ahead. We’d spent hours and hours in church, half smiles wiped over our faces as we witnessed at first hand the most real service any of us had ever encountered. Who wants to stare at zebra from a minibus when your clothes still offer up the scent of those early morning fires?

There’s plenty more to say, and I guess that it’ll all filter its way through over the coming weeks. But, for now, I’ll leave it here; time and bad conditions may not favour the sort of beauty that we chase round here, but they can be the brew for other things. Like massive contentment, aching poverty, incredible potential.

this christmas

Like second albums and last goodbyes, it’s the first Christmas after the death of a loved one that is supposed to be the hardest. It’s kind of obvious, I suppose. But it’s not my experience so far. With the tree still up and the recycling bin still ridiculously overfed on paper and plastic, I’m not so sure I can agree. This Christmas has not been the horror that it was meant to be. In fact, I’m wondering if it might just have been the best yet.

I’m not so sure that I was dreading it, but a couple of months back I was certainly anticipating a difficult Christmas this year. Other people knew it, too; all those cards that mentioned how the sender would be ‘thinking of us especially’ helped with the feelings of being on the verge of something potentially difficult. They were appreciated. Like loved ones waving from the crowd at the start of a long race.

I need to pause and digress for a moment. We moved into our house a couple of years ago, and what with it being one of those Victorian homes with high ceilings and just enough period features to go around it’s always struck us as having significant Christmas potential. So we were disappointed when we found out that the fireplace in the front room might have looked good, but the blocked and stunted chimney above the roof meant that it was unusable.

Anyway, this autumn we finally got it all fixed up, and we’ve been spending the last few weeks sitting, staring and feeling the warmth from the fires contained within its black iron walls.

And this has been the metaphor of choice; unblocked, built up and allowed to radiate warmth and light, our year has ended far better than I had feared it would.

Why? I’ve been unsure ever since the heavy snows failed to arrive on time. Thinking now, I’m wondering if the answer is far more simple that I might otherwise suspect; Christmas feels good this year because it’s far, far simpler. Last year, with its midnight phone calls and dark conversations with compassionate nurses, was far harder for the obvious reason that we knew it would be our last with my mother. It was a ritual that we had to get through, a game we had to play while pretending that it was like any of the other 63 Christmases that she had experienced on earth. We did presents and thank you cards and our Christmas eve rituals, and they tasted as bleak and as stale as the last meal served to the condemned man. Nothing was going to change what followed it, but still we had to pretend that everything was just as it should be.

This year has been different. There have been recollections and reminiscences, but the natural gravity of the time has been allowed to win out. So the excitement of the children has been heard the loudest, the future use of the presents has not been packaged up with such sorrow and fear, and the slow burn of the coals has left me feeling warm, not wondering how long it would take to cremate a body.

So, it’s been better. I got a wind-up dynamo keyring torch and it’s yet another metaphor for the way that somehow the resources I have needed this year are within me. The stirring and the winding needs to take place to bring them out, but there’s been just enough of both to see me through and out towards the end of a year in which death became a constant theme.

another me

I don’t know whether it started with death or not, but there’s every chance that it did. Somewhere this year I started thinking about the future, the past and just about everything else in between. This book outlined the science of beating death, and somewhere among the pages there’s a point he makes that has squatted in my brain ever since I first heard it; that if we can get around the problem of cell degradation (not such a ridiculous proposal after all, so the author suggests) then our thousand-year lifespans will turn up something extra intriguing. Just as we cannot fully recall what we were like as an infant, so will we at age 387 struggle to remember the person we were at 126. In that way we will become a series of people during our epic lifetimes, not just one.

Which brings me round to a reflection I had with a friend on Monday night. We were reminiscing about the Acid Jazz days – the phase that lasted the first half of the 90s. There we were, middle class, British and white and channeling the urban American black pimp for all we were worth. Being a lanky, long haired type I opted for brown suede safari jacket, 2 inch heeled hand crafted Romanian boots (which were impossible to dance in, but good for drug smuggling) and a viscose bowling/barbeque top that left me both drenched in sweat and severely restricted around the lung area. I looked, as you can guess, fantastic. Or, as one old schoolfriend who saw me dressed up one day en-route to see Primal Scream support Norman Jay at the Brixton Academy in Easter 1992, like a complete tosser.

The whole routine was based on the secret that we all shared; none of us were black, all of us wanted to be black, and if someone who was genuinely black turned up to one of our functions he would be greeted like a returning Spartan war hero, particularly if he had some new dance moves that we could copy and adopt like the rest of the second hand items we wore. Of course, if it turned out that the guy was unimpressed by our attempts to revere his cultural roots running numbers in Brooklyn during the mid 70s, then we’d just shrink a little like busted children.

So that was another me. I don’t recognize the person that was so captivated by the idea of being exclusive, and I’m not sure I remember quite why I thought I wanted to adopt an entirely new identity in the first place. It was only fifteen years ago, but it was seems now like a different me entirely.

If we met now, I wonder what I’d say. I’d probably just play it safe, compliment the boots and move on. It’s probably all that the other me could cope with.

faith and healing

Mark 5:21-43

A Good Story
What should we be making of this? Surely a good story, with effective elements included: suspense, dramatic tension as we are yanked from Jairus, made aware of the crush around Jesus preventing him from moving on to heal the innocent 12 year old girl. We might even share the sense of possible frustration that might be hinted at with Jesus when he has to stop and ask who touched him.

The second story then begins to reveal itself; a woman despised, unclean, used perhaps to making herself invisible. Her healing is instant and linked – we are told very clearly – to her faith; ‘If I could just…’ The touch – and are we therefore to assume, the healing – is the first thing that happens between her and Jesus – she grabs hold of his cloak and he heals her, almost involuntarily. The questions come later – his probing of her reasons, which strikes me as possibly a little strange; surely he knew this already? If Jesus is fully God, then why would he need to question who touched him?

We are then pulled back to the original story with the news that all this good stuff has had a negative consequence; the delay has killed the little girl. The finale is set up perfectly; fake, plastic mourners – the sort whose wailing turns to scornful laughter at a moment’s notice – a quietened room, a handful of witnesses and the words of a loving father that breathe life where death has threatened to settle.

A Good One… But Potentially Toxic
It’s a good story. It’s made for TV. And I think it has probably been the cause of pain, distress and abuse. How come?

[32] But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”

How great would it be to be alive here today with the sure-fire knowledge that our faith could heal us. How much silence do we need to compile a list in our minds of the things we’d choose have healed, fixed or just touched by the hand of God if we could?

If releasing healing itself it was only a matter of believing that God could do it I’d be waltzing around healing, helping and transforming lives in a way that would make Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother look like a self-cantered slacker. The only problem would be which destination first; the hospice, the African refugee camps or right here, in this town, in this church?

If only it were a matter of believing enough to reach out and grab hold of Christ… wouldn’t our lives look different?

Life’s Not Like That
Why is life not like this? Do we lack even the mustard seed amount required to see God work miracles? Is it our fault? Have we messed up? Were there other people in the crowd wanting to be healed, but lacking the courage, belief or conviction to ask Jesus for themselves? Is that who we are – the ones that Jesus walked by? The ones he ignored?

I apologise now for what I’m going to share. I’m not saying it to manipulate or make you feel uncomfortable. I’m saying it because I cannot talk about faith and healing without looking back on a year scarred by grief.

The last time I spoke here I mentioned that things were about to get tough. Here’s what I said:

If the doctors are correct I might well be attending a few funerals over the coming years. My step-father last week was told he has months to live as the cancer he was treated for a couple of years ago has returned to his face and lung. He’s talking about his funeral already, wondering whether family rifts will be patched over for the occasion. His life has been a catalogue of failed relationships and I know that sadly, many of those burying him with be dead themselves. I will be left feeling empty and hollow, wondering how different it would all feel I my step-dad or either of his sons had made the choice to follow, to reach and to take part in the journey with God.

My mother is also talking about her own funeral. Her battle with liver cancer looks as though it has longer to play out than my step-dad’s, but she’s aware that the end is a little closer for her than she thought. “I want my funeral to be a celebration” she says. I don’t know quite how well this will help us grieve, but I get her point: there’s something about having lived a life that followed Jesus that transforms the way we approach the rituals surrounding death. Death, it seems, is not the worst thing that can happen to us. Funerals too, are not the best.

It turns out I was wrong. It wasn’t years, it was months and there weren’t two but three funerals. Four if you count our next door neighbour and six if you count the two frozen guinea pigs we buried on Wednesday.

Mothers
Both my and Emma’s mother were women of faith. They had known unbelief and the glorious power of Christ’s redemption. Both found that in the midst of their deepest suffering – when they were young women, younger than I am today – God was there. Faith grew within them as they picked their way out of their own valleys of the shadow of death; for my mother it was the fear of being utterly overwhelmed when first facing life as a single mother. For Emma’s mum it was the grief of losing both her parents within the first few years of her marriage.

Despite the pain that drew them to take their first steps of faith, they both grew to become remarkable women. Women who found that their faith was the fuel to propel them out. They set up and ran charities, dedicated themselves to helping outcasts and underdogs and chased after God with incredible persistence and amazing results. My mum would spend hours sitting and immersing herself in scripture, scribbling notes and messages for others in her bible as certain passages jumped out. Emma’s mum would suck every last molecule of spiritual protein from the books she read, always ready to share her newly acquired knowledge over kitchen table tea.

So these women had faith. The believed that God could do amazing things – and they had the privilege of seeing such things at first hand, and in their own lives.

So, they had faith.

And they had cancer.

So they prayed for healing.

And yet they died.

Why?
I know this passage was on my mum’s mind towards the end. For the final year she would chime out the phrase:

‘one touch of the King changes everything’.

Emma’s mum likewise talked about taking pleasure in being in a place where the only chance of a prolonged future was if a divine miracle showed up. ‘Wouldn’t that be great?’ she’d ask. ‘Such a sign of God’s power to confound the sceptics.’

As the realisation of death’s imminence gradually settled on both of them, they struggled. Life – shortening by the week – got hard. Why were they not healed? Was it their fault? Did they lack faith? Why would God choose to take them away so early when there were so many unborn grandchildren yet to be held, so many people yet to help, so much life left unlived. Why, when they reached out again and again, did nothing happen?

Of course, there were other parts of their brain that knew otherwise. They knew that physical healings are rare for us, they knew that God’s ways are above and beyond our understanding, they knew they could trust him, and eventually they knew it was time to go.

But not before their faith had been stripped down, blow-torched, threshed, flailed and flogged. For women who had been living examples of strength, bravery and determination, they were left eerily silent, childlike with their lack of answers to what was going on. Like the bleeding woman in the story, part of them was left face down at Jesus’ feet. Fearful? Perhaps. Confused? At times. Angry? I never heard them say it, but who would blame them? Not God, I suspect. We shield far too often from our anger…

Guilt, anger, disbelief, frustration, disappointment – are these the legacies of our prayers to God? They may not define us completely – I certainly hope not – but are there traces that could be found within us if we looked close enough?

Why Does This Happen?
Why is that for every miraculous instance of healing and transformative encounter, there are many, many more where prayers for healing and restoration go unanswered? Why are there so many seemingly unanswered prayers littering our lives like cold-war satellites. Remember that quote at the start? Is that what our life is like; surrounded by the debris of unanswered prayer? Each fragment may not be much more than a spec, but given time and the continued repeats of our faith feeling not quite up to the task, do we end up obscured, bogged down or clogged up?

But the truth that I wonder about is this: it’s not doubt that is the main barrier to divine healing. It’s God.

If I’m wrong – if it is faith alone that heals us, if it’s just about the quality – or quantity – of our prayers, then we’re into a very weird situation indeed. And God is not a slot machine any more than our prayers are the coins we pile into them.

For some, this is where the talk ends. We just need to acknowledge the disappointment, anger or disbelief that has settled within us since we told ourselves that God let us down.

For others, we might need more – an explanation, perhaps. A reason why. I don’t really know. I know what I’m supposed to say; that God’s ways are not ours, that it’s his grace that heals us, that our faith does matter – it drives us towards God, which matters more than the physical condition we’re in. Maybe we should follow James’ advice and:

‘Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.’

Back To The Story
Apparently NT Wright reads his New Testament straight from the Greek. His own translation of the lines “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed” and “My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.” Differ:

If I just touch his clothes I will be SAVED

Come and SAVE my daughter.

He writes about what salvation really means – how it includes elements of present, physical things like healing and rescues – not just what happens to us after we die.

So when Jesus heals he’s not just handing out goodies or extra treats for the ones he notices or who should loud enough He’s bringing to the here and now elements of God’s salvation of his people.

When we pray for healing, are we perhaps thinking too small? Should we rather pray for salvation – or more of it? I’m not sure, but I know I want to find out more about that one.

One Last Thing
In a book recently I read something that made me stop. It was the line about how Moses asked God to let him be seen. God declined, saying that it was not possible. However, he’d allow him to see ‘his back’. Is that right? Can God really have a back? If so, does he have a top, a bottom and a front? Surely not – surely he can’t be limited, hemmed in or tailored?

Here’s what the book has to say:

‘The Hebrew word for ‘my back’ is achorai…. The word achor also has a temporal sense. What God seems to be saying to Moses is that you can see ‘my afterward’. You can see just what it’s like after I’ve been here. But if you knew what it was like while I was still there, that would mean you were still hanging on to a little piece of your self-awareness that was telling you it was you who was there. And that would also mean there was a part of your consciousness detached and watching the whole thing and therefore not all of you was there. There are, in other words, simply some things in life that demand such total self absorption that you cannot know it’s you who is there until it’s over. Being in the presence of God is such an experience.’

I don’t know fully why this helps, but it reminds me of something I experienced frequently this year – the sense that I was very, very small, peeking behind the curtain backstage at a grand theatrical production. I don’t know what’s going on or where I fit in, but I’m glimpsing things that I shouldn’t really be seeing.

Death is connected to life. There’s sorrow and loss and loneliness as well, but there’s a sense of being connected to God that is very, very powerful. In a way All this death makes faith easy. It makes life bigger and bolder and the colours and the tastes better than ever. It’s easy to trust God when not trusting him means losing everything. Being so fully in the moment with God is the key.

What’s hard is coming back down to earth. Finding yourself out on the edge of the crowd, a spectator in your own faith, watching- detached – as others get closer but you do not. That’s when it’s tempting to let faith become a formula – the right sort or quantity of prayers being the way to get the result. But like the woman forcing her way forward, ignoring the pain from within her body and the elbows or ankles from the others crushing forward, she existed at that moment for no other reason than to connect with God.

I suppose that’s what true faith is. And surely that is the way to be truly saved.

it turns out that yes, you can.

Even down to the presence of death and grief in the campaign’s final hours, this election stayed close to the script that started out in the brilliant mind of Aaron Sorkin. The coming days will more than likely see the two plots continue to twin, with a high-ranking Republican being announced for Secretary of State.

But the closest link in my mind comes from the mouth of Bartlett, not Santos.

What’s next?

What’s next for America? Will you navigate the chaos of two wars, a recession and a freshly-legitimised minority now finally finding a voice? If we can guess anything, sorely it is that the past two years that have bruised Obama are nothing compared to what follows.

What’s next for the rest of us who – noses smearing the screen – have hoped that you Americans would take such a giant leap forward as this? Will we get over ourselves and allow you out of the box? Will we allow you to become something other than the cliche of hefty buttocks and narrowed perception? Will we let you lead?

Lead? Isn’t the era of the American Superpower over? No way. There’s a reason that we’ve all been captivated by the election, and that’s because – however begrudgingly – we in the rest of the world still look upon the US as the best candidate for superpower number one. Four more years of a Republican White House might have brought that to an end, but maybe, just maybe, there’s life in the old dog yet.

I was talking with a friend today about how the split Christian vote was a sign of real health. When either party secures the God Vote it surely can’t be good. Perhaps Christians disagreeing with each other isn’t so bad after all.

which way is up?

I’ve read two different versions of the same statistic in the last week. It seems that these days everyone’s looking for a yard stick against which to measure the state of the spluttering economy. One of the measurements in fashion right now is this; the ratio of household debt to GDP.

If, like me, you virtually flunked your economics and have a little difficulty telling your macro from your micro, some explanation is in order. Household debt to GDP (Gross Domestic Product – a fancy title for the effective income of any given country) simply shows how much on average households are borrowing against what the whole country has coming in.

Last summer, according to some reports, the UK broke through an invisible – but significant – barrier; we started borrowing more than we were earning.

A few months later and the whole thing has gone crazy. We’re now in a situation where the world’s ‘wealthiest’ countries are caught up in the chains of debt, as the stats reveal:

Household debt as a percentage of GDP

(2005)

France 56.2%
United States 98%
United Kingdom 104.2%
Netherlands 116.5%

Another, more up to date, version put the UK in overall lead, with about household debt now at over 170% of GDP.

Yikes.

Here are a few more shockers for you…

The freshly-bailed out Royal Bank of Scotland’s liabilities alone exceed the total national income of the U.K. So far this year UK debt has grown at a rate of £1million every 8.5 minutes. The current rate of 104 house repossessions every day is sure to rise as is the fact that 1 person every 5 minutes is declared bankrupt.

There are  a couple of questions that line up behind this; what does all this debt say about us? And what’s all this credit crunching going to do to our new-found passion to change the world and eliminate poverty?

We’ve all heard greed blamed as the number one fuel for the current financial crisis. But I doubt it’s really as simple as that. Why? Because – as I found out when I opened the results envelope and saw a shiny ‘D’ next to A level Economics – nothing ever really is that simple. Yet what we can be sure of is the fact that the current threat of Depression 2.0 tells us this; we really ought to be a little more sceptical of the hype that we pump out here in the wealthy west. All our strutting and strolling and summiteering (Ok, I just made that up, but you get the drift) is worth far les than we assume. We think of ourselves as the global leaders and yet we can’t even manage our own interests properly, let alone deal with the fact that 2 out of 3 people on this planet will be forced to try and get through the next 24 hours on less than £1.

Right now, if you ask me, we look a lot less like global leaders and a lot more like the prodigals taking our first look at the pig-sty which pretty soon could become our home.

But what about the other question; is this the end of our brief attempts to be the first generation in a while that makes real efforts to correct the problem of global injustice? Are we going to be too busy licking our own wounds over the coming years to worry about anyone else’s? Has charity got to go back to basics and start over again at home?

Opinions, please.