Reflections on the Kairos Gathering

Three weeks ago, Karri and I attended the Kairos Gathering in Waterloo (as avid readers of Ola! will remember). The Gathering focused on the theme of apocalypse, a rather apt premise for these times of economic and environmental crises. It was a good opportunity for learning, networking and worship. I’m a little late getting to this, but here are a couple of my thoughts from the week:

Apocalypse
I found the metaphor of apocalypse to be extremely powerful. In many ways, I think it serves as a description of what we do at CPJ.

The apocalypse tends to be a favourite subject for Christians of a pre-millennial dispensationalist bent, and virtually ignored by other Christians. One of the speakers, Sharon Ruiz Duremdes, noted that to people struggling with daily survival in the Philippines, such an apocalypse doesn’t mean anything. But apocalypse isn’t the story of God ending the world one day in such a way that nothing we do here and now matters.

Instead, Sharon described it as a call to faithfulness in difficult times. The book of Revelations reminds believers that God is always with them in difficult times. It is the story of the rupture of evil, and God struggling alongside us throughout history. Revelations ends with the sharing of everything – resources and power – by the River of Life.

Ched Myers explained that apocalypse is both seeing things as they really are, and being able to offer a new imagination to see the world as it could be. It is being able to see underneath the veneer of progress and civilization to understand how twisted and destructive our patterns of life under the Empire are. It is being awake to alternative ways of living and thinking, ways that are consistent with God’s values.

When we discussed apathy, and how hard it can be to convince people to change their minds and their lifestyles about their destructive habits, Sylvia Keesmaat suggested that we need to offer the power of an alternative vision. If people don’t really believe that things don’t need to be this way, they have no reason to change. Hope, on the other hand, inspires.

Biblical economics
I attended a workshop led by ROJEP, le Réseau oecuménique justice et paix, on Isaiah and Amos that looked at stories from today in the light of Isaiah and Amos’s critique of their world. In looking at passages from the first half of Isaiah, I was reminded of how much the Bible has to say about economics. So many of the practices that Isaiah decried involved economic exploitation and oppression. For instance, Isaiah 5:8 warns “Woe to you who join house to house, who connect field with field, till no room remains, and you are left to dwell alone in the midst of the land!”

At the Fair Trade Fair, I picked up a copy of the book The Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics, by Ched Myers. He begins the book with a quote from theologian John Haughey, “We read the gospel as if we had no money, and spend our money as if we know nothing of the gospel.” That quote summarizes a lot of what I was feeling that week – that we have tamed the Bible to the point of pretending it has nothing to say about our current economic practices. What Isaiah is talking about sounds a lot like unbridled modern capitalism to me!

Ecumenicism
It is an emotional experience to be among so many people who love God but come from different faith backgrounds, have known different experiences, and hold different beliefs. On the one hand it is powerful, a reminder that our God is bigger than anyone person’s conception of God, and that God loves diversity. On the other hand, it's tempting to feel threatened by different beliefs and different approaches. It can take wisdom and grace to truly appreciate and benefit from such an experience.

I was struck by something Denise Couture said during one of the morning plenary sessions, that we need multiple strategies of resistance to the current system. Working for women’s rights, fighting poverty, advocating racial justice and promoting ecological justice are different ways of trying to achieve the same goal of ending our current system of twisted values that oppresses people and the earth. I’ve been a social activist in one form or another since my university days, working on various issues, and I have noticed a constant tendency for self-righteous arguments between people working on good causes. People think their issue is the most important issue, and castigate others for not working on their issue. We need the wisdom and grace to make our social movements ecumenical, appreciating the value of what others are doing, even if they’re not working on our particular issue.

The two Ps/The two Gs
I found the Kairos Gathering much more inspiring than the Canadian Social Forum (and I think Karri felt the same way). The reason has nothing to do with the information presented, but with the element of faith. The Kairos Gathering offered hope, both because it reminded us that God is struggling alongside us in history and because it offered an alternative vision of how things are in the kingdom of God.

I liked Sylvia Keesmaat’s answer to the question of apathy, because it addressed people’s need for hope in order to change. But I think it also speaks to people’s need for a pastoral response to change.

I have an article by Will Braun, editor of Geez magazine, hanging beside my desk at work. He speaks of his days as a radical prophet of what is wrong in the world, something I can relate to. Prophets point out what is wrong and call for change. But Will shares how he’s learning of the importance of the pastoral as well. “Alarmist stats and moralistic procedures probably won’t help sensitize us. But a bold, pastoral word of solace might.” The enormity of change that is required to rid of us our guilty lifestyles can leave us paralyzed, unable to comprehend the depth of our guilt or discover the possibility of an alternative.

People need the prophetic to waken them to the reality of the world around us, as it really is and not as we would like to believe it is, but then we need the pastoral to help us to confess, to make changes, to find hope.

Or, as David Fines of ROJEP put it, we need the two Gs: guilt and grace. We need to be convicted of our guilt – to understand that we are doing wrong and to acknowledge the harmful impact of what we are doing. But then we need grace, to confront the enormity of what we’ve done and the challenge of changing our future, but to know that we are forgiven and loved by God anyways.