Monday, May 20, 2019

A bizarre story offering a deeper way of seeing




The story she told went something like this. 

Once there was a village living beside a river. One day the people of the village saw a baby floating down the river, and as expected, motivated by compassion they quickly mobilized to rescue it. One family offered to care for it whilst trying to think what the next step should be. However there was not much time to strategize as the next day more babies were found floating down the river, and more rescuing needed to be done. This continued every few days and soon, most people in the village were helping either to rescue or to care for the babies.
Then someone had the idea to find out what was going on upstream that was causing the babies to be in the river. So a group left the village to investigate. After walking a couple of days, they came across a large contraption, a big machine that was snatching babies from upstream villages and throwing them into the river.

I heard this rather disturbing story at The Justice Conference in 2017, where it was shared by speaker, Lisa Sharon Harper, in order to highlight the importance of, not just dealing with the symptoms of  social problems, but to find the root causes that might be driving the problems. It was a call to dismantle the systems and structures that were oppressing people.


This concept of tackling the underlying reasons for injustices was not new for me, but the way the story worked, the image of this bizarre machine snatching babies, was hard to forget. So I allowed the story to sit with me, to mull around my mind, and in join me in my conversations with Jesus.

One night I had a dream, in which the metaphor continued.

In this story, I was part of the group that had traveled upstream and had discovered the monstrous machine that was cruelly kidnapping babies and throwing them into the river. In my dream we were standing around this apparatus wondering why it was doing this? We couldn’t see much purpose. It was puzzling.

I started digging, I was determined to unearth its foundations and to shut it down. I couldn’t bear to see another baby ripped from her mother’s arms only to be thrown in the water. It seemed so senseless. Others joined me, also aghast at this system. After digging until we were deep in the ground, we saw something that made us all turn cold. We froze, spades midair, just staring. Now being a dream, I can’t remember exactly what it looked like, but it was very clear that we had discovered a connection between our own village and the machine. We realized that this machine powered our village; that life as we knew it was tied to this machine’s existence and performance. We became painfully aware that if we shutdown this machine, we would shutdown our village. There was no denying that our way of life would be deeply and detrimentally impacted.

Each of us responded differently. Some stood paralyzed, too astounded to do anything. A few people started spading the soil back over the foundations of the machine, muttering that we needed to cover it up again, we could just tell everyone at the village that we never found anything and we should just leave it alone. Others started to protest, reminding us about the babies, the river and the broken hearted mothers. In response, others pulled out weapons, commanding us to leave the machine, that is was too costly, that our village would suffer. Others agreed that we should leave the machine, arguing that we should focus on rescuing the babies and looking after them; that surely that was enough.

Frightened, I backed away. I headed home with a heavy heart for I now knew the cost of justice, of making it right. It would require our village to change our whole way of being, our whole way existing. 

Were we prepared to do that?


Am I prepared to do that?

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