Praying the psalms

This morning, when I was praying about the political crackdown in Syria, I found myself thanking God for crushing the oppressors there.  I was a bit surprised at myself: even asking God to crush oppressors is a relatively new development, and I'm pretty sure that thanking Him for something He hasn't done yet is a first.

I know where both bits of this way of praying have come from, though.  As I've mentioned earlier, I now pray through a list of people and situations most days, and I've also read a psalm a day since near the beginning of this year.  Often I've seen the psalmist pleading that God will bring down or crush those who are oppressing the poor, the weak or the righteous.  More surprisingly to me, the psalmist also frequently thanks God for doing whatever he is currently asking God for - i.e. he is thanking God for doing something God hasn't done yet*.  It seems that these ways of praying have gotten into me and are coming out in my own prayers now too!  Yay :-)


* one example I've read in recent days is Psalm 39

A request from our brothers and sisters in China

I originially wrote this for my friends but am putting it up here too in the hope of spreading the message more widely.

I would like to pass on to you a request from Chinese NGO the Institute of Public and Environmental affairs (IPE) and the women of Tongxin village.  Please don't buy electronic/IT gadgets from Apple, and please write to both Apple and the supplier of the gadget you buy instead, explaining that you are boycotting Apple because its factories are poisoning people in China.  Kiwis can contact Apple here, and the international contact is here (you'll need to click on the actual item you would have bought before you can give feedback).  The IPE hopes that this will pressure Apple into having a transparent supply chain (so that complaints regarding the actions of its suppliers can be made to Apple), and that the suppliers will thus be able to be required to protect worker safety and the local environment.

I was first made aware of Apple's record in China by this interview on the bilingual website China Dialogue.  In it, Ma Jun describes the work his organisation has done tracking down the various companies that supply Apple, as well as those supplying many other major Western IT companies.  They have produced a report [pdf] on both the openness of these Western IT companies to investigation and their responsiveness to reports of environmental violations by their suppliers.  Their investigation found that Apple was the most secretive and had the worst environmental and worker safety records of all the companies examined.  They are thus asking consumers to boycott Apple in order to pressure them to do better.  The report also includes a table ranking all of the IT companies examined.

This report appears to be reputable.  It was picked up by both Reuters and the Associated Press and the spokesperson for the report, Ma Jun, is a former South China Morning Post journalist and was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2006.

To finish, a story from the report that helped me to see the human face of this 'environmental pollution'.

According to the villagers’ comments, Tongxin village was a once a prosperous model village. Ten years previously Kaedar Electronics [an Apple supplier] constructed their plant, occupying the arable land and giving the villagers very low compensation. According to the villagers, in these ten years, the village’s stream that once had relatively clean water has now turned inky black. In the past few years, these electronics companies have been discharging wastewater and emitting waste gases, along with noise pollution. Over the ten year period, many people have fallen sick, with a sharp increase in the village’s cancer rates. The villagers had hoped to take this matter up with the factory, but they could not find a means to do so. They have reported the problems to the local government but the company seems to very quickly become aware of this and so before someone goes to carry out monitoring at the factory, the smell often disappears.

During the investigation, the villagers spontaneously took water from the stream, pouring the water into a plastic bottle. Suffering from gastric cancer, Zhu Guifen, who has already had her stomach removed due to cancer, clutched a plastic bottle; along with more than ten middle-aged villagers they assembled in front of us. At that time, we were astonished by the scene in front of our camera. These 21 ladies, with an average age of 55 suddenly and simultaneously fell to their knees, clutching the bottle of polluted water and pleaded “We beg you, help us! Help us ordinary people!”

Awesomeness :-)

Things that make us smile?  This audio clip made us laugh out loud!

It's from This Way Up: a consumer issues magazine-style show on Radio New Zealand National that we both enjoy.  In between the articles they generally play random bits of historical audio.  The clip that found its way to the beginning of this article was just fantastic!  You can listen on for the actual article about LED lighting if you want, but it was the historical audio that made us laugh :-)

Daffodils and stained glass biscuits

We're staying with Martin's sister and her family at the moment, and there's lots to make us smile :-)

 

Daffodills from their garden.  I look at these all the time when I'm resting.  In the background is 'Tom', made by Sandra (Martin's sister) and her daughter Kayla.

Stained glass biscuits, more or less from this recipe.  Sandra, Kayla and I made them on the weekend, with intermittant help from two keen but over-excited 10-year-old boys.

I love stained glass biscuits: easy to make, beautiful to look at and yummy to eat!

Good news to the poor

Near the middle of the Bible is a collection of 150 'psalms' or poems.  I've never really known what to make of them, but I while back I decided to try and read one each day and see where that took me.

I've recently completed my first cycle through them and finally, just in the last week or two, Ive noticed thing that a great many of them seem to have in common.  Psalm after psalm celebrates or holds onto the notion that the oppressors won't get away with their oppressing forever.  God cares for the poor and downtrodden and one day he will crush their oppressors and set them free.

Good news for the poor, indeed.  But what about for me, a follower of Jesus but also a member of the priveleged elite responsible for most of the oppression these days?

Sobering stuff.

What price security? What price life itself?

Vinoth Ramachandra, who works in Sri Lanka for the parent organisation of the Christian group I was part of at university, has written a reflection on the US response to the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Centre 10 years ago.  Most of it agreed with my own view of that response (the internet's good at helping you find material that demonstrates what a right-thinking person you are...), but the ideas in this paragraph were new to me:

It is incumbent on governments to provide security for their citizens. But when “national security” overrides all moral considerations, one is forced to ask whether such a society is actually worth defending. If my “security” is obtained at the cost of harming, degrading or endangering the lives of innocent others, then I should be willing to forego that security. Security obsessions are inexhaustible and insatiable; and once we go down that path, whether as individuals wanting to live in “secure environments” (e.g. gated condominiums) or governments pursing every potential “security threat’, it is difficult to change direction. Groups and persons targeted as “threats” are turned into objects and excluded from the moral universe. They can be the targets of “pre-emptive” eliminations, unilaterally undertaken.

I'm familiar with the idea of foregoing conventional chocolate because of the cost it imposes on others, but I've never thought of foregoing security for that same reason.  I wonder what else in my day to day life "is obtained at the cost of harming, degrading or endangering the lives of others"?  And, in this interconnected world where I am so priveleged (and rather like the life this gives me¹), do I really want to know??

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¹ After all, without this privelege, my CFS would have killed me years ago.  Few families in this world can support an adult who is not only completely non-productive, but who requires others to significantly reduce their own productivity to care for her.  Faced with the choice of abandoning me or us all starving together, I don't know what my family would have done.  On the BBC I've heard stories of families in contemporary India, China and the Congo who have faced similar choices.  Sometimes the sick person has chosen to starve themselves to death, other times the family abandon them at the hospital (even though this means they will never see each other again) in the hope that this will save their life.

Political violence in the Ivory Coast

This was intended as a comment on this blog post, but it became too long so I've posted it here and linked it from there, instead.

I've been praying for the political situation in Ivory Coast a lot since their elections earlier this year.  I've come to understand that a major contributor to the violence we were seeing back then was the strong belief all Ivorians seemed to share that there just aren't enough resources to go around.  People were fighting for political power for their tribal group so that they themselves could be confident that they would have access to the simple necessities of life.

I have been praying that the people there - and especially those who know Jesus - would dare to believe that there were enough resources for all.  I have also been praying that the global Church would be willing to do whatever we can to make that true.  And that has led me back to Fair Trade cocoa and cocoa products.

I'm pretty sure that cocoa is the major export earner in the Ivory Coast - if not, it's a very significant contributor.  Many Ivorian cocoa farmers use slave labour (often kidnapped Malian children) on their farms.  Like the cotton farmers of the old American South, they believe that they couldn't make ends meet if they were to hire adults and pay them liveable wages.  Unlike the old American cotton farmers, it looks like they may be quite literally correct: they probably couldn't earn enough from their crop to send their own children to school without enslaving someone else's children on their farm.  In other words, like the political violence we've seen in the Ivory Coast earlier this year, slavery on cocoa farms also has it's roots in the belief/knowledge that there simply aren't enough resources to go around.

But what if the church in the West was prepared to pay those cocoa farmers enough that they could afford to send their own children to school and hire adults to work their farm - adults who they, in turn, paid enough so that they could send their own children to school, too?  We have that power: that's what buying Fair Trade means.  Other cocoa (even the fancy stuff) is sold at the lowest price the farmer will accept and so favours those who have the lowest costs: the slave owners.  However, if all Christians in the West decided to only purchase Fair Trade cocoa and cocoa products then the slave owners would lose their market.  They would have to move to paying a decent minimum wage if they wanted to sell their product.

That's what Martin and I decided to do about five years ago.  I wrote a bit about why, and about our experiences in doing so, last Easter.

If the Western Church decided to do this - to pay a fair price for the Ivory Coast's biggest export - then there suddenly really would be enough resources to go around.  Obviously foreign income isn't the only thing they need to sort out their problems, but it'd be a big start and it's one that's easily within our grasp.

If you do this, you may find that you have to cut down on your chocolate consumption a bit: that's certainly been our experience, both because of the slightly higher price and because the range of products available is still quite limited.  But it could be worse: many of the people who campaigned for the end of American slavery in the 19th century did completely without sugar for years on end!  Back then, the only sugar available was produced by slaves, whereas at least we can buy fairly produced cocoa at most local supermarkets.