December 3rd 2008

Happy Birthday Richard...

It was reported yesterday that nearly 500 people have died in Zimbabwe from a cholera outbreak since August. A further nearly 12,000 cases have been identified over the same period.

Also, the man who murdered Vicky Hamilton some 17 years ago was jailed for at least 30 years.

Also, it is being claimed that there was an intelligence report warning of an attack not unlike the one in Mumbai in recent days...

There is so much more...

If that were not enough, the threat of unemployment is starting to become a reality to some of us as the credit crisis slides into serious recession...

And so on.

Advent is a season where the longings of the Christian and non Christian unite - these things have to stop. Things have to change. They must change. They cannot get any worse.

Back in 1966 the great German philosopher Martin Heidegger said, '...philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poeticizing, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering Untergang for in the face of the god who is absent, we founder. Only a God Can Save Us...' (Der Spiegel's 23 September 1966 interview with Heidegger, published posthumously, on 31 May 1976, translated by Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo in The Heidegger Controversy, edited by Richard Wolin.)

Heidegger's words lie at the very heart of Advent - we can try all we like by ethics, philosophy, politics, and force of will to stop the world and it's people being the way they are. Ultimately that yearning will be fruitless because, even the current round of problem could be resolved using these means, ultimately something else would 'pop up' to replace it.

Heidegger recognised that the only way of breaking out of that cycle, to discover what we all long for, was only by a god intervening.

This is Advent hope - longing for God to come to the world he made to bringing lasting liberation, freedom, justice and peace.

That would be a Christmas gift worth having...