I've begun to notice unmistakable signs that the world is getting worser and worser.
You go to park in the supermarket bay and someone has abandoned their trolley because it would be a life threatening inconvenience to take it to the trolley bay.
A litter control executive at the roundabout is on a pair of steps using a litter grabber to reach into the high bushes and retrieve plastic carrier bags flapping like ripped sails or birdless synthetic wings.
Jogging along my favourite path (where the yellowhammer sang for a few weeks during the summer), there are seagulls in the flowering currants – that's because someone left their half eaten fish supper, complete with polystyrene tray dumped into the bushes.
All three of these actions betray a profound ingratitude, and therefore a deeply pervasive selfishness. No, I'm not a grumpy old man, nor a disillusioned moralist, nor an anachronistic Pharisee, nor someone whose primary research is into other people's bad habits. The connection between selfishness and ingratitude is confirmed if you consider: having had the money to fill the trolley with food, and the convenience of wheeling it out to the car, which is parked in a bay that wasn't obstructed by someone else's trolley – why? – tell me why – would you decant your food into the car and drive away and stuff the next person who needs the car bay? Sometimes I ask myself, "How can people do that?" or "What goes on in a mind that, if its lack of thought were universalised, would make the world unworkable, and community impossible?
How do carrier bags get snagged on trees in the middle of a roundabout? Somebody first took them from a supermarket. If you could follow the paper trail – in this case the plastic trail – all the way back from roundabout, to household or car, to shop – somebody somewhere was careless, or couldn't care less. Unsightly on a roundabout, carrier bags are deadly near animals, in rivers and especially the sea. These are all places from which we get food. So the trolley and the carrier bag are reasons to be grateful – glad and thankful that we have the money, the food the transport and the security not to be hungry. Would we be more careful if we were more grateful?
Which brings me to the half eaten fish supper, the waste of food, the messing up of the countryside, and the thought once more – what actually goes through a mind at the point of jettisoning food and rubbish where someone else will have to clean it up? I know, it's a quaint slightly daft question, but, how easy woulod it be to throw food away if we had first said Grace and thanked God for it; or if we thought that the world is gift, responsibility, its beauty to be nurtured, its life to be respected, its health to be protected?
Amongst the important practices of Christian witness is embodied demonstrable gratitude, a disposition of thankfulness, an evident awareness of life as blessing, a carefulness and carefreeness with food that both relishes its taste and respects its necessity – for us and for everyone else.And not only gratitude – because out of gratitude flows generosity, which is fatal to selfishness!
Returning the trolley is an act of consideration for the community; abandoning it is one more act of community corrosion.
High profile litter is really a waving of our carelessness in our faces, a symbol, perhaps even a sacrament, enacting the way we waste our world.
The calories of a jumbo fish supper would be enough to keep two people alive for another day if they could somehow be transferred digitally to refugee camps and famine areas elsewhere in this rich but unequal world, and turned back into food.
So here's a missional question – how do followers of Jesus demonstrate in a world of abandoned trolleys, high flying carrier bags, and half eaten fish suppers, a life of grateful generosity and careful responsibility and imaginative compassion?
By the way, a flower like the above is a reminder of how much in this beautiful world is gift – gratuitous, generous, gratifying gift.
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