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‘So it was, before the flood’ said Jesus of Nazareth to his friends: ’people were eating and drinking, buying and selling. And then the flood came.’

The image of human beings – the implication is thoughtlessly - getting on with our trading, drinking, selling and building – while all the while impending disaster looms – is a powerful one. It implies that two contradictory things are going on: at an individual level daily life continues – but collectively, the end is coming. At COP 27 countries such as Barbados are challenging developed economies over the loss and damage they’re suffering not of their own making. And consumerist culture in the largest countries, is often held accountable for the planet’s crisis of climate.

In these times, the ‘buying and selling’ itself is changing too. One credit card company produced its monthly assessment of consumer behaviour yesterday. With inflation for groceries at a record 14%, individual families are making choices. 57% are wearing more layers at home, 54% not boiling a full kettle.
And in a related survey regarding the high cost of living, 9 out of 10 retail workers said that they had been subject to abuse, sometimes physical, from customers at least once a week. These statistics may or may not be linked, but indicate sleepless nights, worrying about money, and powerful debilitating feelings of anxiety, anger and shame. There is a macro story – and a micro story, and both are true. At the same time as leaders are meeting in Egypt, the micro story is that an individual can’t put the heating on and struggles to feed children in those same consumerist societies like the UK. The ‘buying and selling’ then might need reform on a large scale, but for many individuals today in the supermarket, it means the choice between hunger and heat.

Christian spiritual practice will insist that the practical choices made by us every day have spiritual and moral implications. And will hold together the two sometimes contradictory perspectives: that an individual’s struggle is to be honoured and each person showered with boundless compassion, while at the same time realising that this same compassion must be harnessed as rocket fuel to challenge the systems that confine those individuals in poverty.

And, crucially, addresses each human being with the question: what is enough? Because there is enough resource for everyone in the world that Christians believe God has made: it’s the equitable sharing that is not happening. Which makes our current situation a moral crisis as much as an economic one.

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