Ten Tent Pegs 6: Confusion & Delusion

SELF-EMPOWERMENT: 

“The first rule of engagement: Know your enemy; know yourself.”

One of the earliest gifts my eldest grandson received was a pair of binoculars. Almost from the time he could walk, he was encouraged to climb on a kitchen chair, put his binoculars to his eyes, and survey the field adjacent to his farmhouse home looking for sheep in need of help. He was learning to be a farmer, like his Dad.

Some of the sheep, in search of ‘greener grass’ in the next field, would find their thick Welsh fleeces tangled in the brambles in the hedgerows. Others might fall into the ditch that drained the pastures. And some – don’t ask me how – would be lying on their backs with their feet in the air, weighed down with sodden wool, unable to right themselves. All were utterly dependent upon their master, the shepherd – first to see their plight, and then to set them free.

The Bible is full of analogies likening God’s people to sheep. “We all, like sheep, have gone astray” says Isaiah 53:6; and we’re “helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” Matthew 9:36. We’re told, in John, Chapter 10, to listen for the shepherd who “calls his own sheep by name” (v3) and we’re warned that “the man who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber” (v1).

We tend to think of sheep as stupid creatures, and overlook their other, more admirable, characteristics. For instance, they’re certainly not malicious, nor are they wicked. A positive attribute is that they live ‘in community’ with one another. In fact, many of their escapades come about simply because they have a herd instinct and are followers.

To my mind, this explains, rather than condemns, the ease with which we may be led astray. It is this tendency to follow that can lead us into trouble. Experiments in psychology show the ease with which one isolated, but reasonable, opinion may, ultimately, be converted to concur with the unreasonable view of the majority. In recognition of this, we’re warned, in Matthew 7: 15 to watch out for wolves in sheep’s clothing. But how – if people are merely well-meaning but godless - are we to know and recognise woollen-clad wolves?

If we are to live in community, who are we to follow? Whose are the good ideas when it comes to the economy, and whose are those that entangle us in the briar? Which political vision of 'greener grass' will be the rallying call that – inadvertently - leads us into a ditch? And what are we to do if we fall, as a nation, and find ourselves so weighed down that we’re helpless to set ourselves upright again?

This, then, is the ‘enemy’ we need to know, and it’s an ‘enemy’ within. No one can argue that well-meaning visions of compassion, tolerance, progressive welfare, and prosperity have not improved countless lives. But ultimately, godless visions of self-empowerment may leave us scattered, without a shepherd. This, then, was the context in which Jabez voiced his prayer to God.

ENLARGE MY VISION

Years ago, I was invited to be the Keynote Speaker for the Salvation Army Leaders’ Conference at The Heyes, Swanwick. The theme of the conference was to be Enlarge My Vision, based on Jabez’ prayer in the book of Chronicles. Hardly a new concept, but one which I found interesting, for two reasons:

• because the concept of enlarging personal vision is hugely in demand

• because the goals, and means of achieving vision, appear to be hugely misunderstood.

Here, I’m going to examine those two notions, to see how this demand for personal vision has grown, exponentially, and the industry that has developed around it. Later, I’ll be looking at the evidence – real stories from my life and other people’s – to demonstrate how this has worked out; and how none of us needs to have a string of letters after our names, be ultra-spiritual, or a big cheese in order to have a vision and enlarge it.

In fact, God takes ordinary people to achieve His extraordinary purposes. And simply by opening our eyes to see what He wants to do we can enlarge our vision and bring Christ-centred comfort and compassion to our community, through our:

• COURAGE – challenging any fear we may have

• CHARACTER - the strengths and weaknesses of our personalities

• CREATIVITY - the way we look at things and express ourselves

But first let me tell you how I arrived at these conclusions.

COURAGE? OR COMPULSION?

It takes courage to enlarge your vision – whoever you are. As an author for more than twenty-five years, I’d used a computer for word-processing for much of that time (remember the green-screen Amstrad?) but little else. Then came a time when I had to turn my back on writing in order to earn a ‘proper’ living, by taking up employment with a hymn and song publishing company, The Jubilate Group. My computer savvy extended to spreadsheets, e-mail and the like.

Throughout the early years of working for Jubilate I professed to have no interest in social media. Surfing the net was as appealing to me as sky-diving might be to anyone suffering from vertigo. Cyber-space was for extroverts and I was not one.

Everything changed when my husband sold his business and began job-sharing with me. I returned to writing, and launched a website in order to market my latest book, A Painful Post Mortem. Suddenly, of necessity, I found myself immersed in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and a variety of networks and social media. The need to learn the intricacies of blogging, keywords, and search engine optimisation revealed a whole new world to me, and with it the realisation that a whole lot of people had a way of looking at life which, whilst alien to me, appeared to be completely and utterly compelling to others.

From all sides, I was bombarded with declarations of How To Get Rich Quick; How To Have Three Million Followers; How To Attract A Huge Audience . . . Invitations inundated my InBox, asking me to subscribe to this theory, that blog, another marketing process. Everyone, it seemed, had but one message: Empower yourself!

It might be couched in different terms, but it was a variation of the topic on which I’d been asked to speak at the Salvation Army Conference. What these internet marketers were urging me to do was to Enlarge My Vision – in selling techniques, money making methods, traffic to my website, numbers of followers, and so on.

It seems that self-empowerment has become the mantra for our age; and Information Technology the means of conveying it.

So by the time I received the invitation from the Salvation Army, I had already begun to look into this new phenomenon. And what I found was that it wasn’t so new after all. The concept of personal empowerment stretches back to the beginning of time, when Eve accepted the devil’s invitation to empower herself by taking an apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For the purposes of this blog post, however, I shall confine myself to twentieth century factors, and beyond.

A CHANGE OF CONDITIONS & A CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVE

It was when I was researching a book I was writing – an as yet unpublished novel about abortion – that I discovered how empowering the two World Wars had been. Social history books show that, in a class-defined society, men who had never before travelled abroad, who had, perhaps, never left the village in which they had been born, now had their horizons broadened: physically, and psychologically.

Having previously accepted the authority of their ‘masters’, they now learned, in World War One trenches, that those masters were no different, no better, than themselves. Living in close proximity with their ‘superiors’, and reduced by the same hardships and misery, certain truths were exposed to these ‘ordinary’ men in a way that they had never been before. The eyes of their minds were opened. They saw afresh. Their vision was enlarged.

What they learned was that beneath the skin we are all the same. United by the atrocities they witnessed, they found that the same hopes and fears, courage and cowardice, sacrifice and self-preservation that burned in their hearts was present, also, in their officers. These men of rank and authority were not some superior beings, after all. The same blood flowed from their wounds, the same oaths from their mouths, the same longing for loved ones from their hearts. War, was the great leveller.

Women, too, exchanging the confines of their kitchen-sink lives, experienced the empowerment of enlarging their vision. Taking on the work once done by the men who had left to fight overseas, they became bus conductors and tram drivers; clerical workers; land girls; engineers; workers in the highly dangerous munitions industry. In recognition of their contribution, they were, at last, given the right to vote.

World War Two expanded horizons further. With the arrival of forces from the USA in WW2, American liberty (some might say liberties) made itself known. The declaration of independence that: all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness was self-evident, if not always appreciated. Overpaid, oversexed and over here was how the British summed it up! And so began what, in a lifetime, was a rapid expansion of self-empowerment.

The opportunities offered by this period have been immense. The destruction of the officer class in war meant that a new one had to be found. Grammar school boys and, ultimately, girls were in the ascendancy, and social mobility saw unprecedented escalation. Aspiration became something to aspire to. Ambition, accompanied by hard work and dedication, was seen to be achievable.

Perhaps, however, in historical terms, the expansion of self-empowerment has been too rapid. A mere hundred years when set against the millennia of human progress, is as fleeting as a puff of wind; the last thirty years of information technology but a gasp. We have hardly had time to assimilate the wonder of it all; to catch up with ourselves; to learn the complexities of these new freedoms; to understand, and to apply, the Wisdom of Solomon to their ramifications. Thus, sadly,

Sadly, because of the failings of human beings, the benefits and opportunities ushered in by the twentieth century are open to abuse and misuse. Sometimes, it seems to me that it’s almost like watching a collision in slow motion, and hearing the accompanying warning voice via transatlantic cable. The delay in our comprehension of where self-empowerment is leading, and in teaching our children to cope with these new freedoms, has its consequences, as we'll see in my next post.