If you've read much of this blog over the years we've been travelling along here on and off in each other's company, you'll have come across posts where I've written about a prison fellowship I used to attend in the first half of the 1990s. Here's one of the places where I mentioned it.
And in this post I touched upon something counter-intuitive that struck me in being part of that Tuesday night fellowship at the prison — the freedom a person finds in losing everything.
Everything that most of us value — our homes, families, pets, occupation, place in society, liberty to come and go as we please, to have what we want (according to our means), to spend time with friends, to go for a walk in the country, to eat what and where we like — all this you lose if you go to prison. Your freedom is taken away from you.
So I found it very striking to encounter this sense of freedom as I interacted with these men — that they didn't need to pretend or live up to anything; they were simply appreciative of the opportunity to meet together and spend time with us. We met them at the place of least pretence.
The memory of that time was recalled for me today as I turned over in my mind the relationship between simplicity, freedom, truth and vested interest.
It seems to me that wherever there is vested interest — something a person is concerned not to lose, something to defend — then simplicity, freedom and truth quietly diminish.
The crucial components of this are belonging, money and shelter.
In the modern world, it is almost impossible for anyone to do anything without money. It can be done — Daniel Suelo, Peace Pilgrim and Heidemarie Schwermer have all borne witness to that — but for most of us it is so difficult as to be unthinkable; you need a powerful sense of call to manage it.
So if you can hook up a person's ideology to their income stream — as happens with clergy and politicians and (perhaps less obviously) health professionals, among others — their freedom flatlines. They are on a leash. They have to toe the party line. There is too much at stake if they don't.
If, in addition to their income, you can link their home to their ideology and their avowed perspective, it allows you to embed and establish them in that declared outlook on life for ever. Nobody wants to lose their home, and if they also have children and a spouse financially dependent upon them, the imperative to preserve the status quo substantially increases.
But even people whose home and income don't depend on adherence to a particular religious/political/moral/conventional/scientific stance can be brought into line by the desire to belong, to be included, to have others think well of them.
People don't want to lose their followers, their good standing, their status, their friends. The Amish practice of shunning is a most effective way of maintaining adherence to a world view and silencing dissent or scepticism.
So, to my way of thinking, part of the practice of gospel simplicity is abstaining from allowing vested interest to accrue. St Paul touches upon this in the first letter to the Corinthians, as part of his directions concerning marriage — he points out here how freedom diminishes as vested interest increases when a person accepts the responsibility of marriage relationship.
If being part of an ideological tribe is in the mix, or adherence to a scientific world view (often manipulated by commercial forces); or if a preacher of the gospel is committed to a theological standpoint if he wants to keep his house and job; or if political allegiance is linked to remuneration — then of one thing you can be absolutely certain: you will never hear the honest truth from that person again. They will not even be able to access it. There is too much at stake.
The bearded man in this video explains well the kind of thing I'm thinking about — the corrosion of freedom, truth and simplicity brought about by vested interest.
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