Faith And Collective Trauma 4

I can't speak about other faiths, but in the Christian experience there is a long tradition of humility. This has nothing to do with lovely cathedrals and liturgical vestments and certainly nothing to do with the pious imbeciles who launched the Inquisition. It is said in many parts of Scripture that God has a preference for the poor, the humble, the weak, the marginalized. Those seem to be the pages that the academic egghead atheists who like to diss religion never seem to get around to reading but I suspect that none of them has ever picked up and actually read anything in the Bible in all their lives. But over and over, in the psalms, the writings of the prophets, and especially in the Gospels, like a platinum thread weaves that theme of humility. There is no getting away from it. Simone Weil famously wrote that Christianity is the religion of slaves. During the first centuries of the early church, it was largely the slaves and the poor who were the real practicing Christians. And they paid dearly with their lives for their courage and faith. Remember the words: the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Whoops, the atheists seem to have missed that one too. Christianity is the religion of the traumatized. We have been through so much in life that we know that only God can heal our broken hearts and sooth our wounded spirits. It seems that the most fervent believers are those with the least to lose. Those of us who have lost everything, or as in my case, have never really had anything. I am currently navigating my way through a new Anglican parish I began attending four months ago. We still don't really know each other. There seems to be a lot of mutual liking and good will and I understand that appearances can be very deceiving, so I am taking care to not categorize them all as well-off bourgeois who live inside a bubble of white upper middle class privilege. I suspect that there are some who are like that, but time will tell. Still, I want to address this sense of bourgeois paradise that everyone seems to accept as the ideal norm. People whose lives are untouched by trauma, poverty or unexpected calamity. People who all live in nice spacious homes with lovely lawns and gardens in leafy neighbourhoods, who have two lovely cars in the garage, healthy good-looking children who excel in school and will never be a burden on society, who will always enjoy nicely incomed meaningful employment, good health and stellar health care. People who will never want for food, adequate housing and loving family and friends and supportive community. I imagine that there are enough people who have attained that reality. Many more who do not and cannot, and for one very simple reason: if everyone on this earth had the privileges that our upper middle classes enjoy by entitlement, we would need five planet earths to sustain us. There is something tragically abnormal about our accepted normal and this is an elephant in the living room. We live in an era where we are moving into unprecedented social and economic inequality. Here in Vancouver, housing has become so unaffordable to most of us, that we have to import monied immigrants and investors to buy up luxury properties, and only now that the horse has been out of the barn for a long time already are we starting to address this. In the meantime, we have to expose this lie of privilege for what it really is. A lie. It keeps us cossetted, sheltered and safe, with a huge collective illusion of safety from the mean horrible world where bad things happen only to other people. So, we have a huge population of entitled bourgeois. People so chronically soft and spoiled that if we ever have a huge natural disaster, for example that huge earthquake they keep telling us should have struck and sunk this city last month, that they would be absolutely useless for helping others: they would be too absorbed in lamenting the loss of their wi-fi and would simply sit or lie wherever they happen to be whinging and whimpering in their trauma of stolen privilege, waiting for someone to rescue them.