Economics in a different flow

Posted on May 20, 2012 by

So Obama and the other high Priests/Priestess have declared a solution to our economic demise: more jobs and growth to be the focus. If our obsession with growth has brought us to this point of multiple crises, where will more growth lead us? Is the word re-distribution still in our vocabulary? Is it not time to wake up and re-measure and weigh up our economic system?

In the 1980’s (note the period) I attended an ecumenical gathering in Brazil on the theme `Democracy in Crisis and the New World Order: A Challenge to the Latin American and Caribbean Churches’. Capitalism and its high priests were running rampant creating penury for a whole region. What was known as Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP – true to the word) was the mantra of the financial institutions to “soften” a heartless system through which impoverished human beings and whole nations were seen as necessary collateral damages. Nothing much has changed with the state of Greece and the Spanish economies.

At that gathering voices from the grassroots (victims) and those in power were brought together at an open hearing and at the heart of the findings was the greed and inhumanity of the financial institutions, noted especially in the re-payment of massive external debts which resulted in the `mortgaging of the future‘, as country after country were handed over to the IMF, the World Bank and the International Development Bank. And if you are wondering, payment meant adjustment policies, reduction of wages, changes in labour laws, mass lay-offs, fewer investments in social programs, export oriented production, more flexible investment laws, price de-regulation and the selling off of state assets. All the so-called socialist governments were either destabilised or overthrown, and not the least by successive US governments’ fear of communism!

Have we learnt anything? Nothing actually and now that the demon has come home to haunt us the only response is more jobs and growth. We refuse to scrutinise the “economics” that actually shape our life together. We continue to insist on our worship of the idol of economic growth at all costs, the cult of `always more’, which must be pursued with absolute and ruthless devotion. The illogic of capital and market continues to battle with the logic of life. While the former emphasizes, competitiveness (survival of the fittest), money over human beings, and, as one of the new idols of the age, demands human blood and lives, the other, inspired by gospel values, places the human person and the whole of creation as the supreme value.

I recall Eric Fromm’s, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, in which he takes up the phrase of the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno and suggests that “necrophilia” is characteristic of modern human beings. So, “The world becomes a sum of lifeless artefacts; from synthetic food to synthetic organs, the whole [hu]man becomes part of the total machinery that (s)he controls and is simultaneously controlled by. (S/)He has no goal, no plan for life, except doing what the logic of technique determines him(her) to do…The world of life has become a world of no life; persons have become nonpersons.. a world of death and decay”.

And whose fault it is that we are here? I think Shakespeare in Julius Caesar offers the answer: “the fault dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Indeed! And it is not as if there are not alternative voices. All the way back into the 70’s (and before that) there were voices calling for different ways of organising our economic life together. There was the Dutch economist Bob Goudzwaard who employed two metaphors to point us to some concrete ways of change. He suggested that our present predicament is like that of a busy tunnel where vehicles have to move at the highest speed to ensure a continuous flow of traffic. Slow cars and trucks are excluded and the traffic flow is in one direction. Likewise in our societies (in market and planned economy) the basic orientation is to a flow. The goal is not the preservation of stocks, but the maximum flow of production and consumption at all costs -including people.

However, our societies need not follow the “rat race of tunnel life”. It can also function like a tree suggests Goudzwaard. A living tree does not grow endlessly. It reaches maturity when it has grown to a certain height, for its ultimate purpose is not to grow but to bear fruit. It will not overuse the soil on which it stands, and it can include all its cells in a living participation. Similarly, a society can give priority to the needs of the marginalised, to the preservation of the environment or to the meaningful employment of all if and only if it is willing to abstain from the desire to reach maximum production & consumption. This would mean the radical restructuring of society which does not eliminate markets but it does deprive them of their significance as the ultimate criterion. Then we can start experiencing a new heaven and a new earth!

jagessar© may 19, 2012

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Money and Faithful Living

Posted on May 13, 2012 by

I often wonder about the line from the group Abba: “Money, Money, can be funny in a Rich Man’s world!” For the poor farmer who interrupted me during worship so that I could explain why the returns from rice production continued to drop while the output had increased and more rice was then exported than any other time, it was not funny. If money was funny in this situation, it was when people had to purchase tyres with a rice bag full of the local currency. Money was worthless and scarce for the many living in penury. Yet, among these very poor people much joy and happiness overflowed. I am struck how little I thought then of pension, owning a property and other material provisions. In my present context anxiety has taken over with numerous bills to pay and a cash machine that informs me that I may need an overdraft. And do not even bother to mention all those things one is led to believe that one needs, and at the same time having to listen and read about the UK and Europe’s massive “structural adjustment” programme to its financial life. Welcome to the 3rd world in the 1st world!

Money may be “funny” for some people. For others, they just want to strike it rich. Just check out the percentage of people who will play the lottery with the hope of making money or more money! Or all those talent finding, celebrity hyped up and gaming TV shows. We all wish we had more money than we presently have: for more money means freedom or independence or self worth; it will open the world, remove anxieties and will make us happier. So we are led to believe. It may not be wise to ask the rich whether this is true – as becoming rich is no guarantee that the desire for more ends there. Personal happiness has become big business in spite of wealth. Which is the world’s happiest country, do you think? And who are the happiest and most contented people in the world?

The borderland between faith and money has not been a comfortable place to live: mammon still competes with the Divine for the loyalty of even the most devout. The message from religious institutions, that “the love of money” distracts the faithful from what is most important, while administering millions of pounds can sound hypocritical.  Talk about money is easily “dumbed down”, except “give us some of yours.”  Many will agree that our society is heavily materialistic, valuing products more than people and that “greed is still a distortion of the ways of God”. Yet, only a few of us seem able to decide when enough is enough. Greed may be a distortion, but how often do we see that it is wrong to want more money than we need. It is business as usual even after JP Morgan’s recent disclosure.

The prevailing culture wants us to believe that money is value free. Even if money is a neutral medium of exchange it does become something morally positive or negative, and something spiritually liberating or destructive because of the ways we use and misuse it. We need to make the connections between our faith, moral choices and the implications for our economic life – the whole of life. Then faith ought to make a difference to the ways in which we conduct our financial affairs. For, the bottom line is: where our treasure is, there will our heart be also.”

jagessar© May 12, 2012

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Cluttered Life & Letting Go

Posted on April 25, 2012 by

It is mind boggling how much stuff one collects over the years. We simply put things away hoping for that day when we will use them. Such a day usually never arrives. And if we are honest we would recognize that we cannot step into the same river twice. We move on in life, yet we cling on to things that simply pile up and take over our space and encroach upon our lives.

But it is not only material things that crowd our lives. There are our filled-up diaries. When I first arrived in the Britain (1999) from the Caribbean, it took me over two years to get used to sorting out diary dates years in advance. I am certain that I am not better off now by claiming to master such a habit. I find myself buying a bigger-sized diary each year and presently I have an electronic one! Then, there is the matter of one’s overloaded brain – bombarded daily by loads of information. One simply needs a sabbatical every other year to go through the ritual of unclogging the mind.

 Certainly a clogged up mind, filled up diary and cluttered space impoverishes one’s spirituality. And we are not short of coming up with ways to rationalising how the “cluttering” and “clogging” in fact nurture our souls. Purging, shedding, letting go and throwing away is never an easy act.  Saying “no” even to our “no’s” and yielding to a de-cluttered life takes a lot of pain and sacrifice. It is costly.

Why the pain and sacrifice when in the end the unclogging and shedding serves us well? There are a number of blatant, as well as subliminal, cultural messages that urges us to possess, to expand and to secure things. We are encouraged to believe that we need all that we have and that we would be sad, afraid, fretful, and bereft without them. When faced with the prospect of letting go and throwing away, we fall into a kind of default mode that persuades us that if we do not seem to need them now, we will certainly need them later. The requirements of our desires, often framed in terms of needs and the illusion that we should be in control of our lives, exercise a powerful counterforce to the inclination or opportunity to let go.

Life, whatever we may think, is a process of living and dying, attaching and detaching – an ongoing process. Letting go is at the heart of living and the spiritual journey. Like breathing, it is not optional. We need to entrust more of our lives to the Divine.

 copyright© April 24 2012

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Res-U-rrection Signs: Through Liminal Space(s)

Posted on April 5, 2012 by

I am writing this blog on Holy Thursday as we approach Good Friday and Easter and a colleague of mind has just reminded me that, like much of real life situation, Holy Saturday gets marginalised  (referring to the often neglected day in the Easer Vigil) especially among Protestants! My colleague went on to note that Holy Saturday points to entombment and despair bringing us to the end of words and into liminal (in-between) space as the only space where authentic transformation takes place.

Many of us do find ourselves in such places (between loss and hope) and the unpredictable and ambiguous nature of such space(s) may create fear, despair and anxiety. We also know (in retrospect) that such spaces have been/can be opportunities for renewal and new life.

From some of my readings over the last two weeks, here are a few random thoughts, statements and questions that I have found to open up vistas to hopeful and new possibilities.

  1. If you are like me, often struggling to go through a day free of any contamination with the internet, don’t panic: there is hope. There is a new application appropriately named “freedom”, that locks you out of your internet connection for a determined time and the only way to get reconnected is to re-boot your computer. According to the inventor, our computers are getting more distracting with a host of multimedia possibilities that keep us away from concentrating on our main task. And besides, the obligation to respond to messages is getting to become a problem given that we are social beings. If you do not wish to pay for the application, the best medicine is a gadget free or tomb-free office/work space!
  2. When dead is not dead caught my attention in a book by Dick Teresi. In The Undead the author contends that death is not a simple matter of one’s heart stop beating or when one stops breathing. For modern medicine can get the heart going again and we can communicate in different ways though trapped in a non-functioning body. Death is now defined by whatever makes me, the me I am, disappears.
  3. Individual responsibility gathering momentum into collective action is the only way there will be any real change to save mother earth and engage with the massive economic challenges before us. Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up” is a very appropriate Easter hymn, as we chant our way through the liminal spaces.
  4. As a Caribbean person and after Pirates plying in the Caribbean for colonial decades I do not endorse piracy. But I was taken by a recent piece of work by a scholar from one of our universities who researched the effects of Somali piracy, contending that piracy has led to widespread economic development (creating employment, more money in the community, more local cooks, producers and traders) in one of the poorest countries in the world. What kind of transformation will happen in the liminal spaces of places like Somalia? Or will it be a long entombment?
  5. Can we break loose from our obsession with the mystical substance we call money? Will our theology of creation come out of its entombment – that is, our venerating of humans as the pinnacle of creation, instead of the Sabbath as the ultimate act? Will our gaze continue to be fixated on predatory prosperity and dream of an illusionary economic promised land, and will we continue to worship an economic model that is embalmed in death? What transformation will happen in the liminal spaces?

It is not easy to dwell in the space of unknowing – that liminal place which can be disorienting. Because of our tendency to be in control and order things into neat parcels the in-between-spaces are uncomfortable. Embracing the divine at/in unpredictable borderlands is challenging, but for many already there – it is the only way of birthing something new, different and hopeful.

copyright © April 4, 2012

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Speculating on food, while millions die

Posted on March 20, 2012 by

It may not come as a surprise to readers of this blog that many die of starvation while financial institutions with its posse of speculators make a killing (an unfortunate pun) on food. Greed, that insatiable desire to get richer irrespective of the unethical ways we employ to pile up treasures, continue to be the number one cause for the death of millions impoverished by the lack of food. [Check out Barclays Shame Award!] Indeed, “the love of money is the root of all evil”.

 The vampires of hedge funds and speculation on the global market have now glided themselves into the tall grass of a new area. Having caused chaos from the sub-prime mortgage disaster, the consequences of which we are still reaping, these very people are causing food prices to rise, making billions from speculating on food while misery and penury continue to spread around vast parts of the developing world! Speculators now make up over 60% of the commodity markets (used to be around 15%)! Was it not Henry Kissinger who once said that whoever controls food controls people? History is replete with examples of how people are subdued when they see their children starve.

 These banking speculators are only after blood. The collateral damage (human beings) is insignificant. After their sub-prime initiated disaster they need another soft target to make a quick turnover. And what could have been easier than the food commodities, as we all need to eat. Hence, something such as a “futures contract” which in plain English means that that as a farmer I can sell my crops at a future date at a guaranteed price. The catch, however, is that these contracts can be bought and sold by speculators who have no interest in food or feeding people. They are only interested in the gain from the changing prices over a period of time. They gamble on the price of food, disconnected from the reality and with little care about fellow human beings.

 Now I can understand why a rice farmer member in Guyana interrupted my sermon on God’s economy to ask me a more fundamental question: why is it that in spite of the overproduction of rice, the price of rice is lower than any time he knew? The supply and demand excuse is pure bullshit! That is economics for the class room. Rice, sugar, or corn used to mean life for people: now it brings death even if output is greater than any other time

 This sort of speculation, while it is poor people who suffer the most, is just not good for any of us. Speculating motivated by an excessive desire of money, is more than a reflection of personal morality, as some may wish to argue. It has implications for the whole of society. Speculating on food commodities reflect a larger dependence on a model of economic growth that cannot be sustained and the model gives little consideration to social values and the common good. This evil needs to be exorcized. Whether it is regulation, changing of our economic system or reprogramming minds and hearts, the bottom line is that food is not just mere food or a commodity to purchase. It is a basic need and right for every human being: this is why we pray: “give us this day our daily bread”!

 © March 20, 2012

image credit: www.BlackCommentator.com

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Information Overload & Shallow Existence

Posted on March 4, 2012 by

I was not surprised to read that the amount of information we received for the whole of 2002 would be equivalent to what we are bombarded with in just two weeks in 2012. Information overload is one of the many “crosses” we carry, the weight of which paralyzes us and restricts action/response from us. I am beginning to understand why I am producing less, even though I seem to be working longer hours!

Some of the thoughts of Neil Postman’s 1986 book Amusing Ourselves to Death (Penguin) which I read in the 90’s are making more sense for me today! Orwell (1984) may have been fearful of books being banned, but it was Huxley who was spot on in suggesting that the real fear should be that there will be no one who wanted read one. So while Orwell feared being watched constantly and being deprived of information, Huxley feared a system that which would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passive zombies locked in our egoistic worlds (incurvatus in se – wrapped up/bent up in self). Our insatiable desire for more and our appetite for distractions mean that what we have come to love will be the cause of our ruin!

The amount of time we spend before our computer screen, online, surfing, emailing, posting, blogging, tweeting, reading tweets and blogs of others has its costs. We are less available than we wish to admit. Try keeping a check on this and it would scare the hell out of us. Our attention span, reading and comprehension ability and contact with the immediate world around us do suffer and may be worse off than in in 2000. We may think that we have more information at our fingertips – easy and quick access – via our smart phones, ipods, ipads and other fruit named gadgets. But think (a privilege if you can) again. Huxley is right: what we have come to love or get hooked on is ruining us! For many of us information has become a distraction, quite entertaining and jazzy. Less and less people are empowered by the abundance of information. And, our over developed sense of multi-tasking seems to be bearing little or no fruit. We may have become less productive and sharp-minded!

Nicholas Carr, a technology pundit in his critical book, The Shallows suggests that “the net may be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use”. However, the troubling part is that humans “are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.” We may wish to dispute Carr’s take on the internet or whether google etc makes us any wiser. However, what we will certainly find interesting, convincing and even scary is his link his thesis with neuroscience and the notion of “neuroplasticity” to demonstrate what is happening to our brain as it adapts to new sensations and experiences.

What happens to our brains when we depend totally on our Sat-Navs, ipods, ipads, and modern media is no joking matter! For certain our brain cells will alter and find new neural pathways at the cost of weakening older ones. Soon those imgainative thinking cells of ours are being re-wired! In other words the internet is effectively re-wiring our brains, thus raising critical implications about our ability to think, the ways we respond to the challenges and crises around us, for our conversations, our views of the world and each other, our relationships, and our vision of a common good for all.

Given the present state of affairs, can it be that this re-wiring of our brains may be a contributing reason why we remain locked in an economic meltdown mode, why we lack thinking and decisive politicians, why we have a lack of leaders with the ability to “thin-slice”, why poor numeracy is blighting our economic performance, ruining lives and allow supermarkets make fools of us with their tricky pricing strategy, and why we work longer hours and yet produce less?

So let me now turn to sipping cups of herbal tea hoping that my ability to remember will improve, while contemplating what my next wood-working project will be and how I can throw off the shackles of information overload. And cheers to those willing and brave enough to give up all the so called benefits of our idolised internet. Existence (to step out) is more exciting and worthwhile in the deep!

© March 3, 2011 caribleaper

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Being Downgraded, Anomie & Fairness

Posted on January 15, 2012 by

All is not well with the “body”. I am not referring to my body, though I will do well with getting in shape and healthier. I mean our “body politics” and “body economics”, if I may coin these words. France has been downgraded, losing its triple A credit by the ironically named Standard and Poor’s (S&P) credit rating pundits. Italy, Spain, Cyprus and Portugal were made even lower (one notch lower than France) with Cyprus and Portugal given “junk” ratings. What have they been eating (pun) to get so out of (economic) shape?

One cannot help but think of Durkheim’s idea of anomie to describe our present state of affairs.  The sudden change and breakdown of things, rules and systems that hold us as a society together cause a state of anomie. And this state can happen in both prosperity and in serious economic depression. Can it be that our financial crisis can serve as a necessary catalyst to mobilize us to initiate a different set of actions across all fronts? Or it may be that what we have before us is an opportunity to check ourselves from plunging into a state of anomie!

In the midst of all these developments, the notion of “fairness” is finding interesting ways to be raised in our consciousness by politicians, media reporting and by commentator. I am interested in the rhetoric around “fairness”, especially since it seems to be applied selectively and only in certain areas of our political and economic life. For those feeling the long end of the present government’s “castration complex” tend to be the most vulnerable in our society!

We need to scrutinise the use of “fairness” in these political conversations among the above. We may wish to ask: What is their understanding of fairness? Who determines it? Should it not apply across the board to all the other parts of our political and economic life? Is it fair that the taxpayers should pay for the follies of those who gambled away billions of pounds, and yet received (and are receiving) mind-boggling sums of monies for their incompetence? It is ironic that “fairness” (not justice) tends to be always articulated by privileged people (who rarely disclose their interest). Usually when those who are most vulnerable take to the streets or let their views be heard by protests they are branded as anarchists, selfish, ignorant of the complexity of issues and of not having the common good at heart.

Justice as fairness (Aristotle) must be affirmed. Perhaps what we need is to inject our “body politics” and “body economics” with more oxygen that will propel us to strive for fairness that is linked to the common good where the focus is on ensuring that the outcome is to the advantage of all. And perhaps what needs to underpin this is a virtue approach where we deepen habits that enable us to be and act in moral/ethical ways that will release and develop the best that is in all of us. This means that the Chancellor and all of us should be asking ourselves in these circumstances: what kind of person should I be? What will promote the best in me and hence my community and the common good?

Something is wrong with our politics and economics. And we can do something about it. As Margaret Mead once observed, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” In these anxious times, we need leadership that will calmly act to enable some radical reorientation to get the “body” back into shape and towards a more flourishing purpose. Can we live in such a way that when our children and their children (our grandchildren) think of fairness, justice and integrity, they will think of us and rejoice?

© jagessar January 14, 2012

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Saving Capitalism & Spinning Jargons

Posted on January 24, 2012 by

Capitalism is dead – long live capitalism! The funeral has been announced and postponed as there is a dispute over the cause of death and whether it is really dead And since no will or testament has been written, there is a problem of the estate and the many debtors lining up to make their claims. While we await an inquest, some of the key worshippers and high priests of this once mighty god is now calling for a “responsible” off spring to step in and “run things”. There is a strong belief in some form of a resurrection and theologians are wrestling about the implications of this for faith.

In the meantime the merchants of capitalism’s death – those very greedy earners of meteoric sums of money continue to grease their palms and pockets with extravagant amounts in bonuses. These are very happy people. Many others are unhappy having lost their jobs or source of income, unable find work and are faced with mounting debts. Would the bonuses make these human beings better bankers with a heart for the common good? Perhaps they will prove philosopher Jeremy Bentham right in his suggestions that if you want to know the right thing to do: ask yourself what will increase the happiness of most people, and decrease pain.

In the meantime, I have been wrestling with some of the economic jargons we are bombarded with and associated with the deep mess we are in. Here are some, with my own attempts at busting these, just to decrease pain….for the fun of it!

  • AAA-rating: means that there is still some time before the battery life runs dry. Or like the 3 A* you will need to stand a chance for Ox-Bridge: welcome to the world of the privileged!
  • Administration: means that when the crap hits the fan, rescue will arrive in a form of directed supervision to help you out of the mess. The courts will be calling the shots!
  • Assets: that which will provide income -cunning ingenuity to beat an oppressive system
  • Austerity: economic policy aimed at only one group of people – the already poor!
  • Bailout: frantic struggle to rescue that which is sinking or already sunk.
  • Bankruptcy: having you assets devalued in order to be liquidated (see administration).
  • Bear/Bull Market: has nothing to do with animals though they conjure images of altar and sacrifice.
  • BRIC: has nothing to do the construction business. It stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China – the rising [by the way not a new horror film ]
  • Capital adequacy ratio: can be compared to a sponge: it estimates the ability to absorb losses!
  • Credit crunch: has nothing to do with abdominal exercises, though its effect may spell forced starvation for some and natural weight loss/shrinking stomach for others.
  • Credit default swap (CDS) is a sophisticated way to speculate on the misery of borrowers unable to repay
  • Currency Peg: a fixed furnishing on which to hang out your devalued or worthless currency. This mechanism collapses when the currency in the central bank dries up!
  • Core inflation: is another way to underscore that we continue to be screwed, and with central bankers starting to eat more than fingernails.

Ambrose Bierce (The Devil’s Dictionary) observed that “there is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don’t know.” It may be the case that the jargons we are bombarded with merely serve to cover up our ignorance and our inability to name the monster before us. Fancy and technical language aside: one word – greed – sums it up!

© jagessar January 24, 2012

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Buffet, Piling Up & Table Grace

Posted on February 14, 2012 by

Would you ever consider a buffet spread, as a place for considering insights into human behaviour? Perhaps not, depending on the occasion! Before I came across the word “buffet”, I knew of lavishly spread tables growing up in a context where people hadn’t much, but when they came together for a social gathering, it would always be a mouth-watering and delightful experience of plenty, where each knew what amount to have so that all can eat, with enough left-overs to come a second time round.

Some researchers have been studying “buffets” and their observation suggests that there is more going on at a buffet table than just diving into the sandwiches, wraps, samosas, sausage rolls, vegetarian quiche, nicely sliced pizzas to fit one’s mouth size, salads, and fruits etc. Buffets are “a microcosm of greed, sexual politics and altruism” (New Scientist December 2011) a site where our journey to the table and the choices we make are dictated by factors we may not even be conscious of.

Will certain choices lead to a delicious plateful when food has to be divided up? Of course that will depend on the sort of food on the “spread”. We would assume that in heading towards the buffet table people will pile up their small plates with their preferred option (meat for instance for the carnivores) rather than going for the vegetarian option. We should not rule out the possibility it may not pay to take your favourite food first. From a mathematical point of view if you are aware that the other diners hate chicken legs or sweet and sour chicken wings, then this is what you may go for lastly as there be more of these, the second time round. In others words if you are aware of the other’s preferences then you may be able to work backwards from your least favourite to maximise you intake and how much you can get on your plate. Of course, there is the small matter of eating more than your money’s worth so why not start with the expensive stuff?

And what about the predictable approaches: those we know who will go for what they always had (the boorish approach) or those who in their selection is mindful of what others delight in (gallant knight approach). What researchers discovered is that if the eaters act “boorish”, everyone ends up with a less satisfying meal, than if every person acts gallantly. Hence, their suggestion that it may be wise to be generous providing that there are not selfish eaters around: wishful thinking perhaps given human inclinations and ways in which we can be original in our transgressing!

We do know from experience though that there are those of us who rush headlong to the buffet table and who see satisfaction not in taste or favourite food but in the art of engineering piles of food on a small plate especially if you can only go only once at the table! The art of piling up food as high as a meter on small plates may serve you well. One software engineer even worked out equations, diagrams and online instructions as how ‘eaters’ can maximise their haul at the buffet table and these special meal deals. The art of such ‘high piling’ calls for creativity. So one may wish, for instance, to build a tower using a base of carrot sticks balanced around the rim of one’s plate in order to extend it and then start the piling. The important thing is that the foundation needs to start with strong and dry stuff. Insights of the parable of the wise and foolish builders may be helpful here!

But what about the patterns of our behaviour when it comes to the buffet? Are you surprise to learn that those of us with a high BMI index may locate ourselves closer to the feeding point than those with an average BMI, and that 71% of the former will face the food in comparison to 26% with an average weight? This is beside the point that the latter may also be back in seconds for a second helping! And what the group size – would this influence how we consume? Indeed, the group size will dramatically affect the number of calories consumed (35 % more than if you dine alone and in a group of eight perhaps a 90% increase). “Where two or three are gathered in my name…” does have a comforting ring!!! You can imagine how gender, ethnicity and other factors of socialization will influence our intake capacity. And try imagining the soul –searching that happens as we head for the dessert! One may have to take Luther at his word here: “sin boldly, grace abounds”!

Our location from or walk/run towards the buffet table is not some value-free exercise. The next time we head for the buffet table and start to “dig into” the offers before us and are faced with the “eat as much as you can” offer we may wish to think otherwise. It may be wise to offer grace before, during and after the “buffet run” as we remember those hungry mouths who cannot even reach a table, the source of our food and contemplate the importance of well-being. Eating faith-fully is quite a challenge!

© February 13, 2012

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