Christianity and brokenness

I often wonder why 'broken' is such an in-vogue noun in the Evangelical Church. Apparently, we are broken and the logic in this thinking would suggest that we need mending to whatever state we were in before we were broken. The understanding to be inferred here is that we have made such a mess of our lives and that our thinking is so limited that we have ended up in a state that can only be described as broken. Indeed, we are taught that we can only make a success of our lives if we allow God to determine every single hour of how and what we do. It is thus a grave error to be independent and free thinking individuals lest we fall victim to our own sinful limitations. 

However, this is not a phrase that I'm too enamoured with when used outside of context. Life for the majority of people is normal, ordinary and is not subject to a  painful reality. Having a job, a mortgage, children, a marriage, a social life is part and parcel of an ordinary every day existence for most Christians. Yes, we have all had our emotional hurts and have been battered by the storms of this life. Yes, life can be painful but a great deal of people can sail through life without drowning from the varying severities of trauma that afflicts the more unfortunate.

As part of my day job, I deal with people who are unfortunate enough to suffer from alcohol or drug addiction and sometimes both. Such behaviour can be construed as a mechanism of coping with previous and current traumas or symptoms arising from a natural susceptibility to mental illness.  The needle or the bottle represents a temporary numbing of toxic emotions that are awakened by pondering on a troublesome past and a very bleak future. 

Quite often, the cause of a destructive addiction is a painful trauma during the childhood years which can result in depression, anxiety, personality disorders and delusional thinking in adolescence and adulthood. For the many people who suffer from or have second hand experience with mental or physical health problems, brokenness is a very real day to day reality and thoroughly inhibiting and isolating the sufferer from engaging in an ordinary existence. Walking through a ward in a mental health hospital or visiting a palliative care unit  is an experience in what it truly means to be broken. 

University and the rise of youth unemployment

It is largely indisputable that post-war Britain, thanks largely to American post-war bail outs, enjoyed a level of economic peace, financial growth and socio-economic certainty that hitherto had not been the case during the previous two hundred and fifty or so years of free market capitalism. The NHS was created, jobs were available and thus the dream of working and saving money for a house, a family and a comfortable retirement. The country had prosperity and economic certainty aside from the fear of being blown to smithereens by the arms race. We certainly do not have this now and this is no more true than for my generation; the offspring of the baby boomers who in the words of Harold Macmillan 'never had it so good'. Aside from a few recessions, the rot well and truly set in with the credit-crunch and the longest lasting economic downturn since the Great Depression. However, it would be easy to blame the greed of the bankers and the incompetent spending of debt drunk politicians that resulted in this mess. To be honest, the rot set in way before this unhappy seismic shift from capital to debt to bankruptcy. 

My focus is not so much on the socio-economic circumstances that have affected every strata of the British public, rather I am more keen to look at the quickly diminishing hopes and dreams of those of my generation. The twenties and thirties who are racked with persistent job uncertainty or stuck in mind numbing spirit crushing jobs which fail to compensate for the investment of hard work in a sound university education.   Indeed, many of us are bucking the trend of our parents generation; sky high property prices, unreasonable rents, outrageous competition for even the most soul destroying jobs and long term entrenchment in kidulthood; the realm of adulthood whilst being forced to live with the parents owing to sky high rents and equally unaffordable mortgages. 

When I Graduated in 2004 I was fairly fortunate in that there were many opportunities laid out before me or so I thought. I was led to believe that sound academic credentials would open doors into corporate law, accountancy and other such high powered careers. Indeed, that was the case except no one told of us of the horrendous competition, the work placements and the euphemistic CV's that would be required to get us there. For the lucky few who managed to land internships, interviews and contracts in the realms of finance and law the good times roll with sixty hour weeks and the occasional all nighter to please the bosses and keep their jobs. It was the competition that flabbergasted me, on average I worked out that there were one hundred or so applicants going for every position, whether that be marketing, law or finance. Personally, I blame the Labour Party for this with their emphasis on education and the desire to get fifty percent of people into a University education. All rather patronising and bourgeois to think that the only suitable way forward in life was to gain a university education rather than opt for an apprenticeship in a trade and all the other non-university options out there. The flip side of all this wasteful emphasis on University was the cold reality of realising that several years of hard work amounted to a sum of nothing.

Temporary contracts in call centres, admin posts, other such jobs with salaries that didn't even hit the student loan repayment threshold was more than humbling. It was deeply frustrating and took a long time to get my head round it. Then again, a student loan is somewhat relative against monthly rent that can hit nearly eight hundred pounds for a one bedroom flat and near double in London. It would be fairly easy to afford all this if you never take a holiday, eat out, spend on clothes and so forth and eventually you'll be able to afford a deposit for house with mortgage payments running at seventy percent of net pay. Oh well.

With the credit crunch in full swing the job market dried up and I remember one plucky young Graduate being interviewed by the BBC for the evening news. Unfortunately for him, he was an ex-Lehman Brothers employee, carrying a cardboard box with his belongings and only started his contract the day before. It said it all. Not quite sure what happened to him, hopefully he didn't end up back with Mum and Dad and signing on. The banks shed jobs as did all the major firms, the Civil Service froze recruitment and at some point in 2008 at least half of all new entrants into Architecture were redundant. It wasn't a great time for me to be studying a Graduate conversion course in Building Surveying after realising that my Upper Second in History made me as useful as an umbrella salesman in a desert.

It all went quite well until I was made redundant and got to the back of the queue with all the other construction Graduates. Thankfully, I'm now in a job that I enjoy although it took several years and I look behind me at all the million or so Not in Education, Employment or Training eighteen to twenty four year olds and feel desperately sorry for them as the opportunities in our overcrowded and stagnated economy are few and far between. Been there, done that and got the T-shirt and yet my experience was no where near as bleak. However, a glance across the English channel is even more disturbing.

Youth unemployment in Spain is running at fifty six percent and rising and the picture across the continent is also bleak with Italy's youth unemployment at forty two percent and France in a more fortunate position of twenty six percent which is still inexcusably high but no where near as outrageous as their Spanish and Italian neighbours and there is no real end in sight with continued 'deficit reductions' and 'efficiency savings' and weariness by major investors. The good news is that the British economy is beginning to pick up but I've yet to experience the evidence.

What is the actual answer to this? The masses becoming class concious as Karl Marx would want it, state control of the economy a la Soviet style or as Adam Smith would put it; the removal of the "dead hand" of the state? The attempt to create Marxism last century killed well over a hundred million people, the Soviet economies of Eastern Europe were a mess and took a long time to recover. The live and let live of the free marketeers appeared to be the only sensible solution until the bankers and our own insatiable demand for debt threw us of the economic cliff face and into a stagnant sea. Yes, there are town square demonstrations in Madrid by disgruntled youth but nothing as forthcoming as an all out revolution. Wherever crowd power leads therein will lie the answer albeit for a fleeting moment. As Desmond Tutu once put it, 'we learn from History that we do not learn from History'. It will be interesting to see where Europe is at in Twenty Years time.

The choice of no regrets

I've often recalled what it is like to work a nine to five job where one is incarcerated in an office all day long, manacled to a keyboard and a near constant focus on the computer screen. Whist I was pedalling my way into work at nine in the morning I was casting my eye around the  morning commute unfolding around me. I caught a glimpse of a man pushing through the door into the reception of a fairly standard office building. It occurred to me that he would most likely be in there, sitting at his desk for the next eight hours and his mind delving into the complexities of e-mails, spreadsheets, reports, ad infinitum. It suddenly struck me that spending eight or nine hours in the same building, on the same chair, with the same people and the same computer for eight hours a day for five days a week must be incredibly frustrating.

I once had a normal nine to five role; turn up, sit down, switch on computer and a life wasting wait for five pm to come round and yet there was life going on outside; fresh air, clouds racing across the sky, trees swaying in the wind, busy roads and busy motorways and yet all this is lacking in the conventional office. There is the gentle hum of the desktop fans, the flickering glare of a monitor, stale air, the faint hint of brewed coffee, photocopier fumes, phones ringing, gossip, false pleasantries and so forth. It was like a straight jacket as all that I wanted was beyond the double glazed façade of the office building and thus beyond reach for eight precious hours of life. 

Thankfully, I have now found my freedom through pure chance and am where I want to be and how I want to be and it has taken a very long time. On my way into work I breathe the fresh air, watch the clouds chasing across the sky and watch how the wind moves through the trees and so the life that I once yearned for is now with me. I cycle into work and vary my commute through the rural and pleasant surrounds of the local university, I look at the clouds chasing across the sky and refresh myself with the sensation of the wind in my face and it is the perfect way to start the day. I may take a detour or two as whether I am ten minutes early or twenty minutes late has absolutely no bearing on what I do or how I do it. Yes, I am office based but for only so much of my time. I have appointments to keep and places to be and all of them require the use of my bike and thus the refreshment of the wind, the excitement of not quite knowing what to expect on my journey and being on my own in my own little world whilst the world on four wheels speeds past me.

By four in the afternoon, I am usually finished and I pedal my way back home through the fresh air, the trees swaying in the wind and the bird song of the late afternoon. It's a good life and a life that I did not choose but chose me instead. I don't earn a great wage and yet I could if I had chosen the route of a lawyer, an accountant, a software engineer and the many other hundreds of jobs that involve the gentle hum of the desktop fans, the flickering glare of a monitor, stale air and the faint hint of brewed coffee. If I had chosen this route, I may even have had my own house by now, a pension, a nice car and decent holidays. I do not have any of these, but one thing I do possess is my freedom and that doesn't come cheap and nor does the rest.