
It’s Hot. Get Over It.
Of course, heat stroke is not pleasant and, very sadly, two soldiers died of heat exhaustion while on an exercise over the weekend, but, really, “keep heat safe”? It reminds me of a paragraph in Michael Bywater’s provocative book, Big Babies:
It strikes you as out of kilter that there’s a notice at London Paddington station which says ‘Please be ready to move away with your luggage when you reach the top of the escalator’ because it implies that otherwise you wouldn’t be ready to move away with your luggage but, instead, would stand there like a moron with other morons piling up against you so that eventually something has to give and you all tumble back down the escalator in a melee of morons and get sucked into the mechanism and ground to hamburger and they’d hose the blood down and scrub the gobbets of stupid flesh out of the machinery and start it up again and the same thing would happen again… or, if not, why the need for the notice?
The thing is, we have grown so accustomed to redundant notices telling us the blindingly obvious that much of the time we do not object to them as we should – or worse, we start to feel we need them, like a junkie needs a fix. Oh, is it hot outside Mr Weatherman? What would you suggest Mr Weatherman? Some water and a sun hat Mr Weatherman? O thank you so much – I would never have worked that out without your input.
This matters, not only because it is highly irritating to have my twitter feed full of nonsense courtesy of Bournemouth and Poole councils, as if twitter wasn’t full of enough nonsense as it is. It matters because it reflects the way our apparently sophisticated society infantilizes us. This is a by-product of our consumerism – that like small children we want it all, and we want it now, and we need mummy to look after us and tell us what to do. And this matters because it also infects our discipleship. In Leadership magazine a few years back (I can’t remember the edition, I just filed the quote) Skye Jethani made this observation:
Could it be that the consumer values, both inside and outside the church, that form the uncontested foundation of our preaching, books and ministries are fundamentally designed to promote puerility and oppose maturity?
Self-denial, the surrendering of immediate desires, is the Christian life. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer so succinctly states, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” But this invitation is noticeably absent in the gospel of consumer Christianity. It promises joy and new life, a healthier marriage, more obedient children, a more balanced life, and less anxiety about the future – but nowhere do these promises carry the price of death. Never are we asked to deny ourselves. That is a value utterly at odds with consumerism: the sanctity of personal desire.
For people fully formed by consumerism, any God that expects personal sacrifice on the level that Jesus does cannot be seen as benevolent, and certainly is not worth following.
If the temperature goes up to a truly epoch making 30C and as a consequence we need to be advised by every news outlet and government agency to be “heat safe” it is likely that we are slaves to a culture that promotes puerility and opposes maturity.
Now, pour yourself a glass of icy water, have a siesta and whatever you do, don’t go out in the sun.