BBC Radio 4 2016-03-01

BBC Radio 4 2016-03-01

I guess that a lot of us will at some stage today buy something. We might not visit a shop; it might be an online transaction, or an impulse buy from the phone.

It’s such an everyday part of life for the majority of us that we do it almost without thinking.

And our enjoyment of the convenience of it is being reflected in the decisions taken by superstores such as Morrisons who yesterday announced a deal with Amazon, to bring an even greater variety of products to us on our screens. Our behaviour is being monitored closely by retailers; we apparently are prepared to go “in–store” to take a look at the thing we are thinking of buying – but then we go online, even in the shop standing in front of it and buy it cheaper than going to the till. The Retail Consortium announced this week that they anticipate 900,000 jobs disappearing in their sector, partly due to our choosing to shop online. And despite the irritation of the unexpected item in the bagging area, we are also choosing to use self service supermarket checkouts rather than talk to a human being.

We are, on the whole, smart consumers, with smart phones getting smarter.

But should we congratulate ourselves on this smartness?

Most of us describe ourselves in a whole variety of ways depending on who we’re talking to: we might say we’re, for example, vegetarian, or a grandfather or work in HR. But it’s our identity as consumers – even smart consumers – that can devour all the others if we take notice not of who we say we are, but how we’re actually living.

Because consuming can become the defining way that we interact with the world. Our language is telling; we’ve started to say that we consume not only food, but news, entertainment, even people.

And while our ability to trade is a way of expressing our creativity and cooperation as people, there are mechanisms at work in our own hearts and in the marketplace, that the Christian tradition will want to challenge fundamentally.

Christ taught that life is simply an astonishing gift - without price - unearned and unasked for: a gift of time and people and activity, nurtured by an inner life, full of hopes and regrets we hardly acknowledge. And that life carries within it an innate dignity, interdependent with everything and everyone on the earth.

As a Christian, I find that this way of interpreting how human life is, presents a fundamental challenge to our identity as consumers; because life’s aim becomes not to acquire and use all we can, but to mirror the unimaginable generosity of God, and learn, not so much to sell ourselves, but to give ourselves away.