A New Way of Seeing

 

This week in TFG we reflected on the ways in which we choose not to see what is around us.   

Our Gospel reading from John 9 told of Jesus' encounter with a blind man.  The disciples' immediate concern was to ask whose fault the man's blindness was.   By contrast, Jesus' was to heal the man and make him see.  That is where the trouble started.    Because Jesus did not fit into the religious leaders' understanding of who had the power to heal people and when, they refused to admit that the man had been healed.  In the end, Jesus accuses them of being blind because they could not see and accept what he was doing.

We too have our blindspots.  And one of the blindspots we seem to have as a society is poverty.  The recent repoprt from the churches Joint Public Issues Team The Lies We Tell Ourselves: Ending Comfortable Myths About Poverty identifies 6 myths about poverty, which though prevalent in British society, are just not true.   The report itself as well as various additional resources can be found here.   The Applecart Theatre Company's short video which we saw can be seen here.

As I said in the talk, the message of Easter is all about God's love.  Faced with the blind man, Jesus did not see a puzzle to be solved but a person to be loved.   The disciples, however,  saw someone to be blamed  ...  although they weren't quite sure who !   

In much the same way, faced with the poverty we see around us, many of us find it easier to hold on to the things we read in the papers or hear from our friends and work colleagues than  to ask the difficult questions about ourselves and our society.

Thank you to all who contributed to our discussion.   Whether you were with us or not, you are invited to read and reflect on the report itself, or the accompanying resources, and do what you can to speak the truth about poverty.   

The report closes with the following call to the churches (that's us !):

Churches have a special interest in speaking truthfully about poverty. Both the biblical warnings of the prophets and the example of Jesus teach us to pay special attention to the voices of the most vulnerable and underprivileged. The systematic misrepresentation of the poorest in society is a matter of injustice which all Christians have a responsibility to challenge.

As a coalition of major British Churches, we want to create a new story; one grounded in truth, compassion and hope. Part of our calling as Christians is to seek after truth, and that means facing up to our own blindness as well as calling others to account.  Collectively we have come to believe things about poverty in the UK which are not grounded in fact. We need to develop an understanding of the depth and breadth of UK poverty that is compatible with the evidence available. Just as importantly we need to match the language of public debate with the reality of people’s lives. It is a task we must approach with humility; one which puts the lived experience of poverty at its heart, and one which is committed to truthfulness – no matter how uncomfortable we find those truths to be. Please join with us in this challenge.

 

Peter King