Famine

For the last few days I’ve been choosing words that almost chose themselves, and despite the negativity (of some or all) today is no less true. OK, I could have chosen faith, but let’s be honest, I prefer not to be too obvious (other, perhaps, than ash…). It might not be thought of as an especially Lenten or penitential word, but let’s see where my brain takes us today.

So, famine. Why? Well, the Old Testament reading at Morning Prayer is taking us through the story of Joseph. Yes, that Joseph, he of the Coat of Many Colours. (It’s actually an inaccurate translation: it seems more likely to be a coat with long sleeves, a sign of favour in the manner it signifies the wearer doesn’t do manual labour, where the sleeves would be an impediment. I stand open, of course, to correction by newer scholarship!)

Joseph is in Egypt, the right man, in the right place, at the right time, and his interpretations of Pharoah’s dreams lands him the role of Right Hand Man to the monarch. Seven years of plenty are coming, to be replaced by seven years of famine. Bumper crops followed by collapse – and he is a man with a plan for dealing with it all. (That’s Genesis 41: 25-45, if the scene from the musical isn’t imprinted on your memory!)

If fasting is a response of faith, setting aside luxury or plenty for more spiritual ends, then famine is that dearth of supply that leads to abstinence, whether wanted or not. One is a choice, the other an affliction, and not one most of us are ever likely to have experienced in the contemporary world of interconnectedness and efficient logistics. At worst, most of us may have had to manage with product substitutions or a plainer diet. Maybe the nearest current equivalent state is that lack of money that drives people to foodbanks (themselves a mute indictment of consumer and capitalist society).

Most of us understand hunger though. It is moderately obvious, a grumbling hole in the midriff (as opposed to the results of gluttony, which is a grumbling whole in the midriff!) Hunger is hard not to notice. Should we consider whether famine might not be obvious either? Not the lack of physical food, but of other sources of sustenance?

When I feel that desire to create, to create and explore that which is not, and often can never be, beyond the paper or the computer file, frustrated by a dearth of imagination, is that not a famine? Maybe even more, the lack of the ability to see problems from a different angle, and so fail to make a difference in new insights or praxis.

Or, despite the material that floods the internet and social media, what about a famine of reliable information? Stuff that is not merely credible but credited, nor only asserted but assured. News reviewed and recognised, rather than hyperbole. Such absence, too, could be accounted a famine. How many people are desperate to know, hungry for knowledge, and yet bombarded by the equivalent of food so riddled with harmful additives, even stuff that is not food at all, that it leads to illness and dysfunction?

Do I have answers for all this? No, not totally, but might not a reflective faith and life spur me, spur us, to look afresh, beyond the obvious and literal, and ask, “in the face of this lack, what do I have to offer that makes a difference?” Joseph was possessed of divine favour and wisdom. Faith in Christ holds promise of a not dissimilar level of access, as in the New Testament reading today (Galatians 3: 23 – 4:7) where the Apostle Paul points to the hope of Christians in terms of a relationship with the divine, that allows them to call God no less then “Abba” , that is “Father”, and all that flows from such.

Where there is lack and want, what am I called, what am I expected, to do? Do I recognise such famine for what it is? Such is also, surely, part of what Lent, what self-examination, demands?