I was really struck by The Age of Stupid movie on BBC4 last week (currently available in the UK on iPlayer). The Times, The Telegraph and Time Out all gave it four stars, deservedly so. It’s very provocative and obviously a dramtic scenario, but it looks at the issues of hyper-consumption and climate change in a powerful and helpful way. (The popular science documentary The Climate Wars episode two is also worth watching, for some of the arguments about global warming).
Watching these terrifying prognoses of earth’s future has left me with a question: would God allow climate change?
Anti-consumerism group Advent Conspiracy have been featured in Time Magazine. This is a good thing.
“But to a growing group of Christians, the focus on the commercial aspect of Christmas is the greatest threat to one of Christianity’s holiest days. “It’s the shopping, the going into debt, the worrying that ‘If I don’t spend enough money, someone will think I don’t love them,’ ” says Portland, Ore., pastor Rick McKinley. “Christians get all bent out of shape over the fact that someone didn’t say ‘Merry Christmas’ when I walked into the store. But why are we expecting the store to tell our story? That’s just ridiculous.”"
A good herd mentality can be a great ally in breaking out of consumerism
OK, this is the big question: how do you transform consumerism? How do you make it fairer, more generous, less damaging to childhoods and communities, and kinder on the planet and the poor?
A multi-pronged approach is needed. Some of the changes come from inside the system: fair trade uses people’s buying habits to change the way trade works (we’ve eaten Cadbury’s Dairy Milk pretty much non-stop since it adopted the Fair Trade mark!). Other changes alter the way the system works: regulation has a part to play in limiting the power of advertising, and government can help discourage a life of limit-less acquisition. But the real key is something else: us.
Yesterday it was my privilege to stand with over 40,000 people wearing blue and walking round the streets of London. There was a purpose to this: to send a message to those about to meet in Copenhagen that tackling climate change requires serious measures on the part of the international community. Of course, there’s no point expecting our leaders to do something heroic if we, the people they represent, don’t send a signal to show that we care. Hence giving up a Saturday, wearing outrageously blue clothes and making my walrus-like protesting shout as we marched round the streets.
You would think no one could make this stuff up and be serious about it. I mean really. Who actually falls for this? OK, where do we start? The premise of the advert is that modern life constrains us, forces and squeezes us into a generic bland consumer one-size-fits-all mould. It shows us all facing the dull hindrances of life, with dull jobs just like everyone else. Just like everyone else. read more…
Yesterday was ‘Black Friday’ in the US, which is both the biggest shopping day of the year and its subversive counterpart, Buy Nothing Day. It’s the post-Thanksgiving kick-off to the annual month-long shopping binge that is the modern Christmas. Christmas Day itself is increasingly irrelevant in this festival of consumption, not least because the shops are closed – it mainly seems to serve as a pause between the Christmas shopping and the January sales, which now start on boxing day.
As Christians, our response has usually been to ‘reclaim’ Christmas, ‘put the Christ’ back in, or at least encourage people to visit a church. That’s all very well, but if we’re all shopping like maniacs too, then our words and our actions are rather at odds with each other. We’re telling people it’s all about Jesus, but our lives suggest it’s just as much about treating ourselves. Our nod to Jesus’ birth could end up being an empty religious observance. If we want to speak prophetically into the silly season, and show the excess, inequality, and environmentally cavalier behaviour for what it is, we might need to do something a bit more radical.
Gary Gardner, writing on Transforming Cultures, has one such idea. “I think Christians should consider abandoning December 25 as our gift-giving day” he suggests. “Were all Christians to do so, the season would be deflated, commercially. And Advent, the season of restraint, reflection, and spiritual renewal, could recover its rightful place.”
It’s something we’ve done in our family in the past, using Christmas day to bless those who would otherwise be missing out. My parents would invite an assortment of ‘waifs and strays’, international students, and one memorable year, US marines, and we’d have Christmas dinner with them. We’d then celebrate new year’s day as a family. It’s my parents’ wedding anniversary, so it has an added layer of significance. That little tradition is more complicated now that we’re growing up and getting married off ourselves, so we’re all going to have to reinvent it in our own way, negotiating our countercultural awkwardness with the in-laws…
For those of us who want to live more considered lives in our consumer culture, the family Christmas tradition that we create for ourselves could be a real opportunity to communicate generosity, inclusion and welcome. So how does it work in your household? How are you doing Christmas differently? How’s it working out with the kids?
Advent starts now
Not when the gifts were stuffed into shops in warm October.
Advent starts with a voice crying “Get Ready”
Not with the coos and calls of comsumption.
Advent starts with hearts stripped bare, scaffolding down, empty and still…
Advent starts with a people humbled, desperate, dependent on Grace for the future unfolding.
It starts with a promise: God comes
The feast is not the goal; the feast is a promise:
He will be with us
So get ready
Advent starts today
29.11.09
Hallelujah! Blessed man, blessed woman, who fear God,
Who cherish and relish his commandments,
Their children robust on the earth,
And the homes of the upright—how blessed!
Their houses brim with wealth
And a generosity that never runs dry.
Sunrise breaks through the darkness for good people—
God’s grace and mercy and justice!
The good person is generous and lends lavishly;
No shuffling or stumbling around for this one,
But a sterling and solid and lasting reputation.
Unfazed by rumor and gossip,
Heart ready, trusting in God,
Spirit firm, unperturbed,
Ever blessed, relaxed among enemies,
They lavish gifts on the poor—
A generosity that goes on, and on, and on.
An honored life! A beautiful life!
Someone wicked takes one look and rages,
Blusters away but ends up speechless.
There’s nothing to the dreams of the wicked. Nothing.
Psalm 112 (The Message)
Imagine it: “cullinary tools for life”. This is the promise of a new range of kitchen products from Philips, The Robust Collection. OK, so the products are only guaranteed for 3 years (5 years on the juicer and food processor, and 15 years on their motors). That’s more like tools for the life of a small mammal. But it’s a step in the right direction.
Two and a half years in the making, this range represents an effort by Philips to make stuff that will last. It may be a bit more expensive, but a move in this direction prevents the waste of endless plastic replacements. It will also decrease our desire for the next ‘new’ feature. When both comapanies and consumers invest more in things that last, we all have a stake in slowing down the consumer carousel.
The website blurb about product capacity made me think, too: how often do I push appliances to the max – not using them carefully and thankfully, but expecting them to bear maximum load until the inevitable break-replace-break cycle continues? Maybe we consumers should also give our guarantee that we won’t be careless with the products we’re privileged enough to own?
When I first read these words from Jeanette Winterson I was struck by their beauty. Catch the full piece here. It’s not too late to savour Autumn!
Animals in autumn readying for winter will store what they need, just as bulbs and nuts and seeds are microstores that carry forward the coming crop. The fall time, the fallow time, the dead time are not wasted time; they are waiting time, which is very different. We have got into a crazy world of instant and always. The fashion is for “on demand”, which is as far away from the order and economy of the natural world as it is possible to be.
And “on demand” is not how happiness happens. “Instant” is not how to recover from sorrow. “Always” allows neither change nor variety. What autumn offers back to us is a model for living — it’s a harvest of many kinds; it’s how we learn to value the things that we really need, and to let go of what’s done.
The special beauty of autumn is not the springing exuberance of new growth, nor the ripeness of summer; it is a complex beauty, with melancholy in it. The richness of the sunsets, the shortening days, the intensity of colour hold the moment passionately because it is passing.
