striving for mediocrity

Originally published

as a

COLUMN FOR MARKET-PLACE

DECEMBER 2004

Since 1980 business has taken over the language of mission. Mission statements take pride of place on walls and prospectuses. Since the early 1990s the once-called public service, including education and health sectors, has utilized the same process language. Since the late 1990s the community of faith has awoken to a bright idea, noticed that “relevance” is heralded by mission statements and vision statements the world over, and vomited them out willy-nilly.  Change a word here and a commodity there and the various statements could have been mass-produced in a Beijing factory. Lear jets, antitank missiles, super dooper fatburgers, grade six and the gospel all utilize the same bland idiom. 

“Process language” is a formal term given to language produced not by passion, but by, yes, process. This is not the language of the making of love or the making of hatred, but the language of manufacturing a carefully contrived outcome designed to please all comers.

The language of passion cries out “let’s make love.” The language of process multiloquates: “recognizing the existential state of human aloneness in which you and I coexist, and recognizing also the universal human longing for procreative and, as a possible by-product of the procreative, recreative encounter, we will, subject to mutual  acceptability, facilitate a personal encounter that addresses this existential bifurcation and thereby provides conjoined enrichment and satisfaction. We will maintain this co-operative encounter for as long as it is reciprocally edifying.”

Sure, it’s possible to reduce the number of syllables, but the pseudo-legalese cover-all-bases of mission statements bends over backwards, sideways and diagonal-ways to ensure that every possible dimension of every contributor’s perspective is affirmed and included in the final printed outcome. The desire to make love requires a very limited number of – (let’s avoid the trendy in-speak “players” and opt for a good old-fashioned noun) – participants. Provision of a commodity or a service will involve a greater number of participants – (let’s avoid, too, the ghastly “stakeholders”) – and the number of bases covered and egos satisfied suddenly seems to necessitate a broader, wider, more widely acceptable catena of non- or not-too-specific words, clauses, phrases, sub-clauses. Like a poem written by a committee, it eschews the personal and achieves the general:

this parish/school/retail outlet/factory/agency is committed

to produce the highest standard of worship/education/service/product/assistance.

Using a wide range of traditions/educational methods/suppliers/materials/networks

we will offer relevant/up to date/fiscally responsible/strong/wide-ranging

encounters with the Divine/whole-of-life formation/weaponry/prophylactic products/community service

to as wide as possible a sector of the community in which we serve. 

To establish such a statement it is desirable to incorporate the views and opinions of as many as participate in the planning. Staff, volunteers, all, are asked to submit phrases and to attain broad consensus. In that process of ultra-egalitarianism passion is lost. As mid afternoon migraines set in and we are still bogged down on whether our liturgy/weaponry/burgery is supposed to be relevant/uplifting/life-enhancing or world shattering a vocation to climb a pillar in the middle of a desert attracts.

In my case a certain nasty and subversive imagination begins to gnaw at my consciousness. I begin to pen an alternative mission: “Plastic burgers Inc. is sort of committed, perhaps, to producing sheer tasteless fat. Knowing that our customers live in a world of mediocrity we will endeavour to out-blasé the most tasteless of all plastic soggies.”  Or an ecclesiastical equivalent: “this parish will strive in a non-interested way to achieve mediocrity in all facets of its existence.”

When Jesus said “come, follow me”, I wasn’t turned on by his cautious egalitarianism or the inclusiveness of his vision. I wasn’t impressed by the manner in which he and his disciples – (who had previously tendered expressions of interest in facilitating his mission and presented a memorandum of understanding of their co-facilitationary role) – provided a well rounded strategy inclusive of all possible eventualities and impacts of their mission. I was attracted by the urgency of his challenge and the passion of his commitment (and that of his followers).

Ultimately we will generate more God-interest by imitating the heroic desert fathers – many of whom did opt out of meaninglessness to face the tumultuous challenge of pillar-sitting – or the impulsive disciples than by producing vacuous, if well intended and much-owned, mission statements. We have a mission statement – albeit one imposed on us: “go: make disciples.” I’ve yet to see an improvement on that.

Believing in a rational world

 

SERMON PREACHED AT WOODFORD HOUSE GIRLS COLLEGE
HAVELOCK NORTH
A EUCHARIST OF REMEMBRANCE

 

Reading:              John 6:37-40

 

Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; ³⁸ for I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. ³⁹ And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. ⁴⁰ This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.’

When someone that we know as John wrote down a whole lot of Jesus sayings and wove them into the book we know as “John” or the “Fourth Gospel” he did so because he wanted his listeners (for such they were) to encounter the awe and the mystery and the hope and the joy that he had encountered in loving and serving one the Romans felt was no more than a crucified crim, but who he and his companions though had in some mysterious way overcome that most horrendous of deaths, not by not dying, but by dying and rising again.

Of course in a scientific rational world in which we love we know that dead friends don’t come bopping back a few days later. We are human: we wish with all our heart that they could or world, but the silent space they leave behind remains silent, the empty chairs and empty tables remain empty, and the ache of a human heart goes on. In our world we readily mock silly people who talk to their imaginary friend and hope things will get better.

Actually they did when John was writing, too. They didn’t really think that loved ones came back and sat at the table where we last saw them, even then. They weren’t dumb. Yet something had changed for them, and it was something so powerful that they were prepared to die for it. They felt that in the experience of worshipping and loving and serving the now unseen crucified, dead Jesus – and sceptics then would refer to them too as silly people who had an imaginary friend – in loving and serving and worshipping this person (that few if any of them had actually ever seen) they found supremely powerful hope. They found hope for themselves. They found hope for their friends – friends who they had shared life and love with but who now were dead – and they found and felt hope for their world.

They remembered Jesus talking about something called resurrection, and they felt his presence so powerfully in their worship and in getting together to pray and eat and sing that they began to understand what he had meant. They came to believe passionately that sadness and loss and even death were not the end, though they remain a passage through which they and we and those they loved and those we love must pass. They came to believe, against all the cynicism around them that even death was just a parenthesis, a break in transmission, a kind of brutal loss but yet one which would not end the experiences of love and fellowship.  People then talked about silly Christians and their Imaginary Friend, but slowly the compassion and the love and the hope the Christian community demonstrated began to attract others, too.

Sometimes in our rational world it’s hard to believe all that stuff. And yet every now and again I experience something so uncannily irrational, so utterly powerful in its rumouring of a life beyond the merely here and now, that I cling as those first Christians did to this weird thing called Christian belief. Through three and a half decades now it’s seen me through some pretty interesting times, and given me powerful experiences of love and hope and joy along the way. So I guess I get what those first Christians were on about as they remembered their loved ones, hoped for them in Christ, and dedicated their lives to believing in Jesus.

Da'esh and the compassion imperative

Last week Assyrian priest Fr Aprem Pithyou, of the Ancient Church of the East in Wellington, challenged New Zealand to take on refugees displaced by the atrocities currently escalating in the Levant. I am not quite a pacifist, but I am no fan of the George W. Bush approach to international relations, either. To be honest I’m not sure what the political and military response should be when a terrorist group act in the way Da’esh are acting. I suspect they are hoping to provoke a western ground troop reaction, hoping that will garner further sympathy from Sunni governments, and that this heightened sympathy will translate into increased military aid to their aims.

As it happens I doubt Da’esh will succeed in that outcome, and they have probably pushed too far too fast even by the standards of Sunni-favouring governments. International Islamic leaders have spoken out against their atrocities, and the major Arab nation most antagonistic to the West, Iran, is a Shi’ite nation alienated and angered by Da’esh executions of Shi’ite believers. Nations such as Nigeria or Morocco, potentially sympathetic to Da’esh’s Sunni claims, are likely to be the melting pots of dangerous but disorganized hatred rather than responding as unified political and military units.

We might ask whether a united military response to Da’esh will achieve anything but more hatred. Logistical and military support to Turkey and the Kurds is the best response, but leaders like Obama have access to far more information than I do, and even Key may know a thing or two I don’t. If he is merely chest-beating (the Thatcher technique, perfected in the Falklands) then he deserves total scorn, but I cannot yet be sure of that.

What I am sure of is that Fr. Aprem Pithyou is right. Whether or not we spend tax-payers’ dollars on SAS involvement in the Levant, we should be spending money to host the refugees, the must vulnerable of God’s people. Fr. Aprem has pleaded for a far greater international (and NZ) response to the growing humanitarian crisis now no longer limited to Syria but across the Plains of Nineveh, as fierce northern winters approach. Many of the refugees have fled at gunpoint, leaving everything.

Many of those fleeing are Christian, and while this should not alter our compassion it reminds the xenophobic in our communities, especially amongst the NZ Christian right wing, that this is no mere bleeding heart wish, but a gospel imperative.

Let’s spend more energy and money on compassion than on militaristic chest-beating or pissing contests. Let’s open our hearts to the needy—and probably be surprised at the talent and rich diversity they might bring.