Heroes in Waiting
It's all very well to hear that you can 'make a difference where you are', as the LICC publicity states. But who really believes it?
Sometimes, it seems we simply don't have the chance. Aside from keeping your cool when the photocopier packs up at just the wrong moment, or not swearing at your children when they poke you in the eye, or confessing at the checkout when they've given you too much change, when do we ever truly get to make our mark on society?
'Patience!' urges the emeritus professor of psychology at Stanford University, Philip Zimbardo, in an intriguing article in last week's Guardian. He suggests that while most people 'conform, yield and succumb' to the negative power of many social situations, 'there are always some who refuse and resist.'
That, if you like, is their - and, hopefully, our - orientation: aiming to walk a different path when called to. While some situations spark a 'hostile imagination' in many people, Zimbardo maintains, they provoke the 'heroic imagination' of the few. 'We must teach people to think of themselves as "heroes in waiting",' he says, 'ready to take heroic action in a particular situation that may occur only once in their lifetime.'
In the meantime, it's worth taking heart from the psychologist Oliver James, who believes that though 90 per cent of the English-speaking middle classes are afflicted by 'affluenza' (his term for the mental and emotional dis-ease that results from our relentless materialism), 10 per cent resist - and have a disproportionately positive influence on the rest.
In a recent interview for Church Times, he said he was 'startled' to find that the healthy one in ten had either enjoyed a very good childhood ('extremely rare') or experienced an awakening, often through trauma, that was spiritual in nature.
Christians (as well as 'those who are spiritual and ethical'), he suggests, 'quietly infect everybody else'. It only takes a few people 'who embody, by the way they live their lives, a good way to be, to push the others back'.
Whether or not we feel, as followers of Christ, that we are making a difference, according to James we almost certainly will be: not always through what we achieve, but simply through who we are. Salt of the earth. Lights of the world. A smattering of ordinary people who can awaken to their new identity, as heroes in waiting.
Brian Draper
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