The original cartoon by Kudelka had the words “Is our GPS working?” I changed the words to make it more personal – using words that my wife has used on more than one occasion – and to point up the fact that it is more than a question of technology. Many people see technology as the saviour of secular society. I do not. Technological progress merely provides us with a more efficient means of going forwards or backwards. I found it fascinating that it was social networking that increased the efficiency of the violence and looting in the London riots. We now have the ability to communicate at any time and any place – but that is not the point. It is what we communicate that matters.

The other point of difference I have with the cartoon is that the car has pulled up in time and can now retrace the route it took. In today’s culture I see no signs of the brakes being applied and it may well be that the end result will be a tangled wreck with no voices coming from it – a dead end so to speak!

Be these things as they may, I still see the cartoonists as the inheritors of the parable teaching method of Jesus – hence my great respect for their art and insight.

A Culture in Crisis

My contention this morning is that our culture is in crisis. I use the word ‘culture’ in the sense of ‘the way of living which is transmitted from one generation to another’. And I use the word ‘crisis’ in the sense of ‘a turning point’. I have in mind the medical use of the term crisis – ‘the point where a decisive change occurs leading either to recovery or death’.

The derivation of the word crisis is also of interest. It is the same word translated as “judgment’ in the bible – not in the sense of some oriental despot in the heavens sending the thunderbolt of Armageddon but in the sense of that magnificent verse John 3:19. “This is the judgment (krisis) that the light is in the world and people prefer the darkness to the light”
Let me now outline the argument.

Firstly, our modern secular society emerged from and is a product of the Christian West. Bonhoeffer and Bultmann and others made this quite clear in the middle of last century.

Secondly, that our culture has cut itself off from its roots and, as plants wither and die when cut off from their roots, so do cultures that forget their past. I am not for a moment suggesting a return to the Christianity of the past. Much of that belongs in a museum. What I am asserting is that to jettison the Christian faith completely is to cut ourselves off from our spiritual and cultural roots, and that the death of our culture is an inevitable consequence.

Thirdly, our culture really is in crisis. We have reached the crisis point, the critical moment that leads to life or death. The evidence for this is overwhelming and I literally could speak for hours on the way our culture is collapsing. I have a file of newspaper cuttings three centimetres thick giving instances of it. But for today I intend to limit myself to four examples which I see as epitomizing our cultural crisis.

Fourthly, the catalyst for life for positive change is what I refer to as “awareness” – known in the Christian faith as “Contemplative Prayer”. And at this point I would ask you to hold judgment as to the meaning of word “prayer”. It is certainly very different from trying to change God’s mind, or asking God for something, both of which I regard as concepts of the first century which are inappropriate in the twenty first century. The idea of a guy in the sky pulling the levers of life on request plays no part in my understanding of the word “God”.

Our Secular Society

That is an outline of the argument. Let’s now go back to the beginning and consider what we today describe as “our secular society”. The word secular is quite tricky. For many people it means “anti religious”. Not so. The word secular means this world as over and against some other spiritual world. The meaning of the word is very important as Barth and Bonhoeffer pointed out in the 1950s. They were the prophets of the secular society, and brought us back to earth as the context of Christian faith rather than some post mortem heavenly kingdom.

Culture and the Christian Faith

Karl Barth was among the first to spell out how Jesus differed with the religion of his day. You see this in Jesus’ attitude to the religious practices of his day. Sabbath observance was the core of Jewish religiousity, and Jesus made it quite clear that it was more important to meet human need than to observe the Sabbath. Similarly he opposed the Temple and the cult centred upon it. Jesus was “shockingly irreligious” as far as they were concerned. Barth points this up and maintains that the coming of Jesus was a secular event. He maintained that you cannot separate what is spiritual from the life of the world. Religion he maintained was man reaching out for God whereas faith was responding to the call of God within the life of the world. The Christian faith is about this world, not some other heavenly world. Bonhoeffer took it one step further and coined the phrase “religionless Christanity”, otherwise translated as “secular Christianity”. The key question for Bonhoeffer was not “What does it mean to be religious?” but “What does it mean to be human?” And he saw Jesus as, not the end point as Teilhard de Chardin maintained, but as the one who points the way to fullness of life, to homo humanus. Bonhoeffer pointed to secular society as humankind’s “coming of age”.

All this was fifty years ago. What has happened since then? Lloyd Geering is very perceptive on this. Like Barth and Bonhoeffer he maintains that our secular society “emerged out of the Christian West, is a product of the Christian West, and is motivated by the values, aspirations and visions of its matrix”. And then he goes on to say “Those who turn their backs completely on Christianity….are cutting themselves off from their cultural and spiritual roots. As plants without roots wither and die, so do cultures that forget their past” (1)

And that is I would suggest is precisely what is happening today. What I am suggesting is, as indeed is Lloyd Geering, that the modern, secular and humanistic world should recognize its Christian roots. “Values such as freedom, love, justice and the pursuit of peace were central to the Christian faith and the early years of the secular state.” (2) Such is not the case today. The plant has been cut off from its roots.

Our society has changed enormously over the last fifty years. So much so that even the Wall Street Journal is concerned about it. In the past “Inadequate parents could sort of say ‘Go outside and play in the culture’ and the culture could more or less be trusted to bring the kids up.” It goes on to say that “You can’t do this today because the culture will leave them distorted and disturbed.” This is probably the understatement of the year in that our society today actively promotes a culture of violence, sexualisation and politics so fetid that it is hardly recognizable as the culture in which we grew up.

The point I am trying to make is that the preponderance of the good things in our society flowed from our Judeo-Christian inheritance and that to try and live off the capital forever and ever is a pipe dream from which we are just awakening. We stand today at the end of an era, the era of Post Modernism – a phrase that first appeared in a book by Jean Francois Lyotard in 1979 in which he maintained there is no dominant view that overlays all others, that every view is of equal value. It was originally a response to totalitarianism but it soon gained a life of its own with every value system being of equal value to any other. Post modernism speaks of “your truth” and “my truth.” The problem is that truth is not a democracy and we are seeing the effect of this flattening of all values in the global warming debate where the life time research of scientists is being offset against pseudo members of the House of Lords. The net result of post modernism is a world without a rudder, a society without criteria and values, the ship of state going nowhere with conditions on board deteriorating at an alarming rate. Truth is not democratic. If it is, if truth is the sum total of all we read on the internet, then God help us. Our society is drowning in trivia masquerading as truth and desperately needs criteria by which to live.
Let me give some examples of the problems we face in our secular society:

(1) In the West Australian newspaper of the 3rd September there appeared a very large advertisement “Defence Chaplains needed…… Right now we need Chaplains to provide spiritual ministry and pastoral support” In other words “We are in a hell of a mess and we need to do something!” And within the advert is one of the strangest calls to ministry I have ever heard. “If you have a sense of adventure, enjoy keeping fit and like developing lasting friendships, then take up this opportunity today”. Some may find this advert offering hope. I find it pathetic, but then I must admit that I am not exactly a fan of the army and I see those killed in war not as heroes but as victims of a distorted and simplistic view of life. As Jonathan Schell says “Violence has become dysfunctional as a political instrument … it destroys the end for which it is employed ….. there is another way” Indeed there is!

(2) A second example is found in the riots in England. These have been described in many ways. The politicians, as might be expected, saw it in terms of law and order and criminality. The words of the Prime Minister of the UK sum up this attitude, “It is criminality, pure and simple…It is not about politics. It is about theft.” The opposition saw it in terms of “what we might expect from left wing mollycoddling.” Others saw as a form of protest but it bore few signs of it. Still others saw it in terms of the “recreational violence” which we are starting to see in Perth– some of it being alcohol fuelled and some of it being “pure” violence. These factors were involved, of course, but the malaise we saw expressed goes far deeper than that. It is about the lack of direction within our society at large.

Londoner Natasha Reid graduated as a social worker in July. Two months later she had a criminal record for stealing a flat screen TV during the riots – a TV screen she didn’t even want. She already had one hanging in her bedroom. To her aunt she said “I don’t get it, Aunty, why did I do it?” I can suggest some reasons, the first of which is that the things that normally restrain people are no longer there. If there is an opportunity then it is invariably taken. We are a generation bred on a diet of consumerism and sucked in by advertising. As John Pitts says “ We used to be defined by what we did. Now we are defined by what we buy”. Technology has taken over and to those who put their faith in technology I would remind you of the words of Aldous Huxley “ Technological progress has merely provided us with a more efficient means of going backwards”. We are a society without roots and devoid of direction.

(3) A third example. Janet Albrechtson is a lawyer/journalist who has a regular column in the Australian. She is my bête noire, my thorn in the flesh. Perhaps it is because you need to be a lawyer to react so negatively to another lawyer. Be that as it may, about two months ago she really hit a high spot in asserting that Hermione and Lady Ga Ga are the heroines of our day. I have nothing against Emma Watson alias Hermione of Harry Potter fame. She is a good actress. For Albrechtson, however, her great attribute is that she is about to study at Oxford and “being responsible for herself”. The same goes for Lady Ga Ga whom she praises for “being true to herself by being herself” – whatever that might mean. She praises Lady Ga Ga for her words “I was so far beneath and now I’m so far above”. Bully for you Lady Ga Ga! Albrechtson sees these two as “ as the antithesis of the sexed up narcissistic teenage that otherwise dominates their world”. Albrechtson is a gifted writer and portrays vividly, if unconsciously, a society without roots and devoid of direction. But let me not be too critical. She is but the messenger and, as we all know, little is to be gained by shooting the messenger.

(4) My last example of a culture in crisis – our financial system. I have a personal interest in this that I was born on the day the New York stock market collapsed (9/10/1929) and inaugurated the Great Depression. It could be that I might die on the date of a second collapse and second Great Depression. What a description of one’s life :“from Depression to Depression”. It is a sobering thought that I expect the stock market to collapse in the near future!

I am no financial expert, but you don’t have to be to see the cause and effect of the financial crisis we face today. After the first crash in 1929 legislators in the US passed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, the purpose of which was to separate the commercial and investment activities of the banks. And this it successfully did until it was repealed in 1999. After its repeal, the banks resumed their speculative activities known as investments but which are in reality gambling. Collateralised Deposit Obligations and Derivatives are in effect betting slips. It took only 9 years before the liberalized financial system came to a shuddering halt. The Global Financial Crisis was in effect a mountain of debt becoming unstable, or, to change the metaphor, a tsunami of debt thundering on to the shore of the world’s finances and “drowning us in debt”. We had been gorging ourselves in the financial restaurant and in 2008 the bill was finally presented. And what did we do? Instead of instituting remedial measures (such as the Glass Steagall Act) we issued government bonds to pay an unsustainable debt. Three years later, having done nothing to remedy the situation, the chickens are coming home to roost – to change the metaphor once again! The banking system will again collapse around our ears. We are as someone put it “debt men walking”. Sooner or later the bubble will burst. The Global Financial Crisis will be a striking example of a culture in crisis especially in the light of the fact that we are still being told that greed is good.

One could go on for hours with examples of a culture in crisis, including the parody of politics being played out in the national parliament, and the pathetic TV being shown on the ABC in the name of satire. I don’t object to the concept. It is the quality that leaves me gasping. If the ABC can put out stuff like this, we really are in trouble. I liked the letter in the paper the other day by one person saying that he found the programme hilarious and couldn’t stop laughing. He ended the letter by expressing the hope that his parents might give him the DVD for his fifth birthday!

There are many, many examples of our culture in crisis. The big question, of course, is what do we do about it?

Firstly, we must not try to reinstate Christendom – the exercise of power by the Church. Christendom is dead and all the Queen’s soldiers and all the Queen’s laws will not put Christendom together again. The past has passed and it is futile to try and unwise to try and re-instate it. It is a different playing field on which we play today.

Secondly, and this is not contrary to what I have just said, we have to recognize the historicity of the Christian faith. The Christian faith is a historically formed tradition. If you leave out the historical aspect, you leave out the central affirmation of the Christian faith – Jesus of Nazareth.
                  What then do we do? Keith Rowe states it clearly and succinctly. “We must “rethink Christian belief in the light of insights and understandings not available to earlier generations.”
                  How do we do this? And here I am almost embarrassed at the simplicity of my suggestion. The answer to the question of what we do about the crisis in our culture is – wait for it – to pray! And before you laugh me out of court let me explain what I mean by prayer, and my belief that more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.
By prayer I do not mean asking God for something, or expecting God to do something. That to me is a parody of prayer. Prayer to me is “being present to the presence of God”, which of course brings up the question of what do I mean by God? A quick definition would be “The Spirit of Life in which we live and move and have our being” –or as Paul Tillich put it seventy years ago “the ground of our being”. Or if you want to put it another way: “The evolutionary thrust towards fullness of life.” It is not a case of creation ex nihilo but that of creation being in the future and we being called to love it into being. My ideas of God have changed greatly over the years, and so have my ideas on prayer. I do not see God in terms of an extra terrestial all powerful ruler whose mind can be changed through prayer, but I do see prayer as central to life and until we learn to pray we will continue to mess up and our society will spiral down into chaos and destruction.

The best definition of prayer that I have come across is that of Simone Weil. “Prayer is attention taken to its highest degree”. In prayer we move to a deeper level of reality. We move beyond the rational. We move from the rational to the real.

And let me now repeat what I must have said fifty times in this place. There are I believe three forms of prayer – three forms of being present to the presence of God.

One consists of words – words in which we seek to relate to the ground of our being, to life itself. It is like looking at a painting and trying to relate to it by using words. “What a marvellous painting”.
The second form of prayer is meditation. This is when the lips are stilled but the mind is active, when we try and work out the intent and meaning of the painter. This is the rational aspect of prayer, using the mind to elicit meaning and purpose.
The third form of prayer is contemplative prayer when we still both the tongue and the mind and simply let the painting impact upon us. It is not irrational! It is beyond the rational – and this is why so many people have difficulty with it because we are such a rational society. “I think therefore I am” is how Descartes put it. No! “I love therefore I am”. Life is about being in love, and prayer is about awareness of it; experiencing awareness, enjoying awareness and deepening the awareness of what we sometimes call “ultimate reality” – that which really counts. Prayer isn’t a matter of achieving or earning or receiving. It is about seeing and from that seeing everything else proceeds. If the culture of fear, self centredness , and producing and consuming are the only games we play then they become our reality. What we seek to do in prayer is to break free from that reality and become aware of a deeper reality. Albert Einstein I believe pointed this up when he said “No problem can be solved by the consciousness that caused it”. Prayer is the cleansing of the lens of perception so that we can see things as they really are.

John Dominic Crossan has an interesting way of expressing this. He maintains that we as a culture have moved from the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Entertainment; so much so that the future clash is not going to be between science and religion but between both of them and fantasy land. We live today in a society where entertainment is the object of worthship – be it the DVD, the football match or the video game. The fact that the age of Enlightenment has morphed into the Age of Entertainment struck me like a ton of bricks when I returned from the Shock and Awe bombing in Iraq and realised that, for most people, the bombing had just been a fireworks display on telly and if you tired of it all you had to do was to push a button on the remote. For those of us who saw and smelt the mangled bodies of dead children it was no fireworks display. It was very real! As the poet William Yeats says “We have fed the heart on fantasy and the heart has grown brutal from the fare”.

What I am suggesting today is that in our culture today the real has become unreal and the unreal has become real.

People sometimes ask me “In the light of all this where lies your hope?” It is where it has always been – in the radical social implications of the way of life embodied in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus offers us “life in all its fullness”. At the moment we are experiencing it in all its frailness. As Richard Rohr puts it “Jesus gives us real eyes to realise where the real lies”. Apart from this I am without hope and I see homo sapiens becoming another dead branch on the evolutionary tree. Life will go on – there is no question about that – but it will go on without so called homo sapiens. When this will happen I have no idea but it is a sobering thought that one of the most brilliant scientists Australia has produced , Frank Fenner, puts it at the end of our present century. As Ronald Wright says in his book “The Short History of Progress”: “The future of everything we have accomplished since our intelligence evolved will depend on the wisdom of our actions over the next few years.” Our culture really is in a state of crisis!

Fifty years ago Eric Fromm wrote a book called The Sane Society. It is a good book and speaks of an emerging insane society. But what is indelibly stamped on my mind is the last sentence of the book “A small tribe was told thousands of years ago: ‘I put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose this day.’ “

It is a choice which is even more real than when it was spoken in the 7th century BC. It is the choice with which are confronted today– the choice of life or death.

(1) p69 “Coming Back to Earth” Lloyd Geering, Polebridge 2009
(2) p7 “The Unconquerable World” Joanthan Schell, Metropolitan 2003

APPENDIX

For your personal reading and reflection (prayer!) I am appending extracts from Richard Flanagan’s closing address to the Melbourne Writers Festival Sept 2011 :“The Decline of Love and the Rise of Non Freedom”. I regard Flanagan as one of Australia’s greatest orators.

Democracy suffers when it is wrongly presumed that its guarantees are to be found in the State, or government, or party, in history, or in myths of national goodness. Democracy may be the best antithesis to tyranny, but it is not necessarily wise or good. It can even at times be an obscene spectacle, guilty of great and historic crimes. It is often stupid, frequently wrong and not given to great leaps and it is in all these things intensely human. But democracy does allow for power and non-freedom to be held in check and it is in this sustained by the courage of dissent and the wisdom of heresy. It is in the preservation and extension of the liberties of the people, that the guarantee of the strengths and worth of democracy is to be found. Democracy at its best is the ongoing movement of humanity toward a better world. And we see all around us that movement stalling, unable to name, far less address central challenges. We need to look the disease of Australia in the eye, this disease of conformity that is ill preparing us for the future. Does Australia still have the courage and largeness it once had when it pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage? Or will it simply become the United Arab Emirates of the West? Content to roll on for a decade or two more glossing over its fundamental problems, while brown coal and fracked gas continues to keep the country afloat? Does Australia have the desire to move into the 21st Century, or will we continue to retreat into our past, as a colonial quarry for the empires of others, our public life ever more run at the behest of large corporation, our people ever more fearful of others, our capacity of freedom and truth with each year a little more diminished.

“When reading the gospels”, wrote Oscar Wilde at Reading Gaol, “I see the continual assertion of the imagination as the basis of all spiritual-material life, I see also that to Christ imagination was simply a form of love.” This idea of love as being the basis of all progress seems to me a beautiful and very true observation. Yet in recent times we seem to have lived through not so much a crisis of politics, as a collapse of that most human attribute, empathy. A collapse so catastrophic it sometimes appears to be a crisis of love, manifest in epidemics of loneliness and depression.In recent years I’ve come to think more and more about Vasily Grossman’s two final novels. Perhaps our homeland is simply the people we love and who love us? Perhaps the only Party of honour is the Party of one. Perhaps the world advances to a better place through the countless acts of everyday goodness shown by millions of people too easily dismissed as ‘everyday’. None of this amounts to a politics or ideology, or a comprehensive answer to any of our problems, I know, but as Rilke said “live the questions”. Questions lead to poetry, science, freedom. Certainties lead to Andrew Bolt’s blog-site.

We need politics like we need sewerage and, like sewerage, we should want it to work properly and well, but we should not make too much of it. Not create of it a fetish, by glorifying it daily with celebrations and watching it incessantly on 24 hour TV stations. We make too much of our political leaders and their work, their failings their strivings, their successes, and we make too little of ourselves. For if we take our compass from power we will inevitably arrive in despair, but if we take our compass from those around us, we will arrive at hope.

There are so many forces in the world that divide us deeply and murderously. We cannot escape politics, history, religion, nationalism, for their sources lie as deep in our hearts as love and goodness, perhaps even deeper. In a world where the road to the new tyrannies is paved with the fear of others, we need to rediscover that we are neither alone nor in the end that different. That what joins us is always more important than what divides us, and that the price of division is ever the obscenity of oppression. We need to once more reassert the necessity of witnessing and questioning as the greatest guarantee we can have of freedom.

And if I am left believing in anything it is something very simple, that truth matters above all else. Anything that honours and guarantees the truth is not just good, but necessary and anything like mass conformity that threatens the truth, needs to be challenged. For the road to tyranny is never opened with a sudden coup d’etat. It is a long path paved with the small cobbles of silence, lies and deceit that ends inevitably in horror. In Australia, we stand at the head of that road, only history will tell us if as a people we chose the terrible folly of choosing to walk down it.