The other week was anti-slavery week in the UK and right at the same time my facebook feed exploded with #metoo as females all across the world spoke out against all the ways they’ve been treated with horrific injustice and objectification by men. These things are not ok. It took me back to wrestling with the propensity of the human heart to use people for our own ends. Not exactly the typical definition but I think it’s sadly true that we all practice usury in one form or another more often than we realise.

At its most extreme we see humans bought and sold like property or females (and males) man handled and used as an assumed play thing but every day we use the people around us in much smaller, much subtler ways. Power plays of control and dominance in our marriages or workplaces, constantly bolstering our egos at the expense of others, determining our relationships and setting our calendars for maximum return in our own lives. We place value on those people who can give us a return; a leg up, an open door or at the very least a good time. Well why wouldn’t we? We live in a culture where our worth and our very identity is determined, it seems, by what we can produce, what we can achieve. Every decision must be filtered through the lens of maximum return, maximum impact.

Henri Nouwen argues that most of us live most of our lives in competition. Competing with those around, reaching for the next accolade, the next promotion, the next achievement, the next honour. Me, I find myself competing to be liked. I want to be seen by those that I think are important, I want to be liked by the successful and the popular. I want to know that I’m seen to matter, that I’m seen to have something of significance and value to say (yes I see the irony in writing that in a public blog). Power and money have never been a huge draw for me but I fear that I will quickly compete for significance. That I will use people around me to bolster my own standing. I catch myself walking in to rooms and assessing who is the most popular or influential person here and how do I align myself. How do I compete? Who or what can I use to win in that competition? In this context compassion gets skewed and twisted into something more akin to pity. Nouwen writes “to be compassionate [in a competition mindset] then means to be kind and gentle to those who get hurt by competition.”

Inevitably there are those who can’t or won’t cope. Who don’t have the skills to play the game, to carve out a win, to stay in the competition and when that happens we should pity them, we should look compassionately upon them and maybe throw some charity their way and hey that actually makes me look like a pretty good guy and helps me compete a little more (usury) but the competition is still on. My life is still going places and I can’t stay compassionate for too long or I’ll get taken advantage of, my place in the game will begin to slip. True compassion, the kind of heart and life posture called for in Luke 6:36 “Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate” isn’t some token gesture pity to those who can’t cope with the cut and thrust, the competition of life as we know it. It’s a completely different view on life. It’s an intentional stepping outside of the game and positioning ourselves with people in ways we can’t ever expect a return. It’s the emptying ourselves of all, like Jesus did, to truly be present with people rather than using them for all we can get.

Nouwen goes on to write that competition and true compassion are mutually exclusive, they cannot go hand in hand. As long as my identity is measured by the standards of culture around me, as long as I need the approval of the watching world, I will be locked in competition and the outcome will be usury. True compassion allows us to sit with the very rich and the very poor in the same breath. It allows us to be present wherever we are and receive the gift of friendship without using those around us. When I’m not in competition, when I know who I am in Jesus, my actions are free to be genuine, generous and sincere.

Slavery and misogyny are never ok; neither is usury in all its subtle and seemingly insignificant forms. What will it take to stop competing and start simply enjoying life together?

Marathon Update

“don’t ask”