Creating a habitat for humanity

Alain de Botton in his series The Perfect Home gives the example of Marie Antoinette who built for herself an idealised rural village - a false pastiche. She wanted to escape Versailles and the artificiality of court life and reconnect. The problem was it was nothing like a real peasant village. We may say what is wrong with living in a world of delusions?

The need, as demonstrated by the French Revolution, is to be able to connect with the world, deal with the issues and resolve the problems. Nietzsche made the point that often such coping mechanisms create a worse mess than the problem that they are trying to resolve.

So what has this got to do with the church?

The point that he makes is that the modern British house shows nothing about who we are and where we live, it represents an escape into a rural idyll that never existed. It is a form of delusion and it is created by our unease, our alienation from the modern world.

It is a sign of our insecurity with our actuality, our lack of connection - and it creates bad housing. What is interesting is the programme starts off to say how housing affects the soul, but talks more about how the soul affects what we build and where we live.

I was listening to a recording of Jeff Lucas today speaking about Joseph in Egypt and saying that we cannot keep God as a Deity who lives in the church car park. We need to escape the separation of the spiritual and the none-spiritual.

God is interested in where we live. He created a wonderful world, and I wonder if he puzzles sometimes at why we then choose to live in such small boxes surrounded by small gardens - that reflect little of the creators creativity.

Housing can be seen as unspiritual, we are just passing through, where we live now has no lasting significance. We can get excited about the poor and their need for good housing, but we seem to have lost our heart to dream of a better world. One that is better not just in terms of justice and equality, but one which has better houses, great art, wonderful books and terrific music.

We are not just called to reflect God love as if it can be distilled as pure love like some clear liquid with all the colour removed. We are called to reflect the creativity of a creative God. When we think of the coming of the Kingdom of God, when we think about Redemption we need to see that not purely in terms of the soul - but in terms of the whole of our being. Heaven will not be a pale distillation of what is good, but a fulfilment of what earth was created to be. Heaven will not be less, but more.

As Christians we need to think about whatever we do be great at it. Whatever our job and our role is be great, but we need to go beyond the roles that society defines for us. We are now the out breaking of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, we need to get involved in transforming the world.

We tend to shy away from the idea that the environment affects the person wanting people to take responsibility for their own lives - which of course is important and can be the beginning of finding liberation. However, we need to look at transforming the environment. Christians in all societies need to be fundamentally involved in making the world a better place, and sometimes we can help people more by working in business at creating jobs than we can by doing worthy things to reduce poverty. We can sometimes do more to help people by improving their environment, then by just looking at their problems. We need to do this in a partnership approach where everyone can participate rather than having a holy us approach.

It is easy to say that God could have created a black and white world with few pleasures instead he created an earthly paradise (which we then set out to spoil) - but I'm not sure if that is true. I'm not sure that God could have created a boring world - it would just be so much out of character.

There are limited resources and the plight of the poor must always be in our hearts, but it needs to be not either justice or beauty - but both.

The call of the church is not just to be just, but to make the world a more beautiful place for people to live in.