Chris Trotter writes well. While I’m not always in agreement with him, his clarity and insight are a tribute to this city and its educational heritage. His previous piece about the importance of maintaining some kind of hopefulness in the political process (ODT, 28.10.16), was important in this particular age of growing cynicism around politics. What interested me was the resonance with a particular Christian theme broadly called "vision".
Throughout the Christian scriptures, the importance of vision for a healthy and productive society is paramount. Unless people can grasp a vision, hope cannot thrive, and without hope, motivation is lost and right or good action becomes impossible. From the vision of Abraham which caused him to leave the then-known civilisation and march off into the desert to found a new people, to that of Moses who again had to lead his people into another desert in order to free them from slavery, to that of Jesus who sowed a vision of a God who was loving and forgiving — vision was paramount.
Proverbs 29:18 says "Without a vision the people perish", which when examined closely has the force of saying that without something to look forward to, without some hope, people become feckless and lose direction.
As Mr Trotter has pointed out so well, a vision which inspires hopelessness (in his case political) is dangerous because it paves the way for ruthless and impatient men and women to take advantage of a desperate and gullible public. And they can do so because we, the public, become willing to allow such people to take shortcuts to achieve certain widely desired ends. We see this at present in the case of certain of our political neighbours whose erstwhile leaders propose ridiculous policies with the promise these will promote internal security.
But there is a broader application for these principles which Christian ethics recognises. Individuals, men and women, also need a vision for their own lives. They need a sense that their future can be a good one and that there is hope. At present this appears to be in short supply. As one who has worked with young people virtually all my life, I find hopelessness particularly virulent within this group and the question is why? Why, when we’re richer than we’ve ever been as a nation and as a people, when we’ve more stuff to play with, more distractions to help us forget ‘‘the fog’’ of life, more options than ever before, are we becoming hope-less?
Can I posit an answer here, and let me say at the outset that what I suggest goes to the heart of the fact that we are a spiritual race; that is, we have a spirit and we are spiritual whether we know it or not. Christians believe we are made in the image of God and this is why we can say we have a spirit. However, unless we attend to our spirit, it becomes, for want of a better analogy, starved. We literally die inside.
Now, there are all sorts of theories from all sorts of religions about how to be spiritual people, but Christ suggested in his preaching that the very heart of it lay with how we treated one another — love was both the pathway to and the result of a healthy spirituality. This, of course, is neither easy nor obvious since we are often less than lovable creatures and, quite unsurprisingly, Christians are pretty sure we need divine help at this point. What is also clear, however, is that in the face of a world consumed by material goals and material things, any vision of a world redeemed by love is desperately lacking. Where this is missing, we will inevitably find that young people in particular lose hope.
Wealth hasn’t made things better. Instead it has robbed us of the redeeming power of a vision of a better future. We seem content today to see sections of our society struggle to feed and educate their own children. That would have once been anathema to the whole country. Now we seem content to ignore it.
The result is that a visionless society becomes a hopeless one and our young people become victims of that lack. Without a vision that touches and enlarges their spirit, something dies within and they can so easily become hopeless. Our spirits need something that helps us to live beyond ourselves, our needs, our desires — that enables us to be selfless in some way.
This is one of the reasons Jesus said: "Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."
● The Rev Richard Dawson is minister at St Stephen’s Presbyterian Church, Leith Valley, and moderator designate of the Presbyterian General Assembly NZ.
