Yves de Morsier

I read the comments of Geoff Stevenson in preparation for the next March gathering. They are very rich and stimulating. He writes about the edge as a dangerous place, about Jesus’ call being often harsh and challenging. He says rightly that we are afraid to go this way.

We know how much our wealthy western way of life is refraining us from answering the gospel’s challenge; despite our faith, we remain very attached to this form of comfort and security.

In fact there are two edges: the one of the gospel and the one of our present way of life. On one hand, we have to learn about the gospel way because it will show us where we have to go, although we are afraid of it, but, on the other hand, we have also to look at our way of life because it will show us what we should transform in our life. Luke seems very clear about it: in his version of the beatitudes, these two edges are well described: blessed the poor… / cursed the rich… Poverty seems to be life, and wealth to be death!

In our rich western countries we are also living at the edge, but at the wrong edge, even beyond the edge of sustainability. We belong to the 10% of the world population who consume 80% of the resources; it means we have to reduce our standard of life by 8 if we want to be “just”. Australia is the third country of the world (after the US and Canada) for its footprint on our planet. The ecological footprint is the national average of surface each one needs for sustaining oneself at current living standards, i.e. for covering all one’s needs (food, dwelling, work, transport, energy, leisure, etc…). The footprint of the US is 9.6 ha/capita, the one of Australia is 6.6 ha/cap.; in comparison it is 5.6 ha/cap. for the UK, 2.1 ha/cap. for Brazil and 0.5 ha/cap. for Bangladesh. The world average is 2.2 ha/cap. although the availability (available world surface per capita) is in fact only 1.8 ha/cap.. These data depend of course on the way one calculates this footprint which can never be precise, but it gives nevertheless a rough idea of the tremendous differences in our access to wealth.

Luke is right: there are two edges. We have to go from one edge (one of the highest consumption in the world - cursed the rich) to the other edge (the be-attitudes as you so beautifully wrote - blessed the poor). To brake our fears to follow Jesus’s call (the way towards life), it is worthwhile looking at our way of life (they way towards death). We will be shocked by the cruelty of our values and that will help us to detach from our insane comfort. Between death and life, we will feel called to choose life even if we are afraid of not knowing the way.

In fact we have too easily integrated the modern values about profit, property, comfort, security, technology, individual freedom, market, etc… We are using every day cars, mobile phones, TV, computers, credit cards… which are signs of our “wealth” and make us “privileged” (or maybe half dead) people. Before we walk the right edge, we have to leave all that or at least reduce our standard of life by 8. How do we come from one edge to the other?

Certainly this question is not a very nice one, but I believe it should be asked. How could we talk about the edge (the gospel’s edge) if we do not talk about our edge (the edge beyond sustainability and ethics).