The following is an excerpt from God Has a Dream by Archbishop Desmond Tutu:
I once went to a garden party in England in the early sixties. I don’t know why, but we were expected to pay for our own tea. I offered to do so for an acquaintance I met there. Now he could have said, “No, thank you,” and I would have understood. But you could have knocked me down with a feather when he replied, “No, I won’t be subsidized!” Well, I never. As if we were not all subsidized, not only by all those whose graciousness and gifts have allowed us to become who we are but also by the grace and gifts that God has given us.
Because ours is a culture of success, the worst thing that could ever happen to a person in contemporary society is for him to fail- to need to be subsidized. We believe we must impress people with our success because this ensures that we can be taken seriously. Of course there is an appropriate setting when it is legitimate, indeed absolutely necessary, that we do impress certain categories of people in order to make our way through life. You would be silly not to want to impress your intended if you want her to accept your proposal of marriage. It would be quite disastrous for you as a student not to want to impress your examiners. And you have to succeed in your exams, your career. But it has affected our whole atmosphere so we find that stomach ulcers become a status symbol. (32-33)
Anything less than God cannot satisfy our hunger for the divine. Not even success. That is why everything else, if we give it our ultimate loyalty- money, fame, drugs, sex, whatever- turns into ashes in our mouths. (34)
We have tended to treat the weak, the poor, the unemployed, the failures with disdain because success and power have become the gods at whose altars we have burned incense and bowed the knee. (38)
[Desmond Tutu, God Has a Dream]
by Joe Kennedy
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