Fr Rob Esdailles' Presentation

1. Introduction:

I first encountered Fairtrade long before the Fairtrade Foundation had sprung into existence, in about 1981.  Fairly-traded coffee could be bought in, I think, the Oxfam shop and there were two sorts vying for my affections.  There was N-Café and there was Campaign Coffee.  The N in N-Café reminded us that we were supporting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua (though it would have been quite reasonable to conclude that the N was a reference to some form of Nuclear Waste) and Campaign Coffee tasted like it had been on one.  Both had a tendency to form an insoluble brown scum on the top of the drink.  Oh, and there was also a type of tea-bag which had such remarkable effects on the waterworks of one of my house-mates that she was about to consult her GP when she realised it was the cup that cheers that was the root of her constant need to go to the loo.  You felt really rather heroic to be drinking that stuff.  It was the virtuous feeling of not enjoying something in the service of the cause.  So Fairtrade was definitely a minority interest, rather like self-flagellation or train-spotting, but arguably less fun.  If woolly hats, beards, muesli and sandals didn’t do it for you, then fairly-traded tea and coffee could reinforce the self-image of all those would-be latter-day John the Baptists, offering a pretty good substitute for locusts and wild honey.  Who would have thought we might one day face the dilemma of whether we could rightly drink fairly-traded Nescafe Partners’ Blend!

But now look at us – the vast mainstream respectability of Fairtrade, with its swish logos.  They’ve even managed a re-branding, a sure sign of maturity – moving from the giant black F to the squirly Technicolor arm-pit.  The growth-rate of the Fairtrade market would be seen as remarkable in any branch of the retail sector.  And both the quality and the range of goods keeps expanding – from tea and coffee to chocolate to sugar to bananas to wine to roses.  I’ve even got some fairly-traded underpants, though I’m not about to prove it.  And most of my Christmas shopping was done on the internet using the web-sites of Traidcraft, the Centre for Alternative Technology and Amnesty International this year – most of the presents fairly-traded and with no shopping trips required:  bliss!  Is all this market-share what Vatican II called a “Sign of the Times”, a fruit of the Holy Spirit at work in the hearts of men and women – or is it just the supermarkets sniffing the air and knowing where the main chance lies?  Does grace build on nature or does nature dump on grace?  You can argue it either way – though I shall return to the question of discerning the “Signs of the Times” later in my presentation.

However, I’ve not been asked to come here today to reminisce about cups of virtuous coffee I have known;  nor simply to entertain;  nor even to congratulate you on the fact that Portsmouth Diocese has attained Fairtrade status – though today should be a day for congratulation and celebration after all the hard work that has brought you this far.  I’ve been asked to speak about the connection between Fairtrade and Faith. 

I presume that most of you accept that there is such a link – or you wouldn’t have given up a Saturday and travelled across one or two counties to get here.  But can we get beyond my caricature of the activist who thinks this has got to be a good thing to do because it is “alternative” and away from the mainstream?  Can we articulate why Fairtrade ought not to be considered as some sort of optional extra for the really committed but should be viewed as an essential part of our witness to the Gospel - not just in the privacy of our own supermarket trolleys and our own homes but also in the public life of Catholic parishes, Catholic schools and Catholic organisations?  I think we can.  In other words, I hope to sketch out a Christian theology of Fairtrade, to relate our consumer spending to the story of salvation.

2. Mindfulness or Exploitation?

Nonetheless, I want to begin neither with a consideration of the ethical problems of world trade at the beginning of the twenty-first century nor with a concept drawn directly from the Christian theological tradition.  I want to begin with a reflection on spirituality, and with that simple, but elusive human experience which we can call “mindfulness”.  Now, although “mindfulness” has particular connotations within Buddhist thought and spirituality, of meditating on impermanence and on our own mortality, I wish to use it in the more general sense of “being aware”, of “seeing things as they are”, or of “living in the present moment”.  Mindfulness isn’t simply a matter of knowing more facts or even a question of having achieved a penetrating insight by our own reflection.  It is, rather, a state of the soul based on the unveiling of reality to us.  It is the fruit of revelation in the truest sense.  What I mean by mindfulness is what the French philosopher, Gabriel Marcel, called “etre présent”, “being present”.  It is a matter of being able to attend fully to another person and to receive them.  It is about having our energies and our attention “gathered” and its opposite is the state of being distracted, with our energies “scattered”.  Such mindfulness is sufficiently rare that we are likely to register it with some surprise in an encounter:  “At last I felt I had really been heard!” (or “really welcomed” or “really understood”).  Jesus was fully present to the woman at the well at Sychar, as she ran to tell her neighbours:  “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done” (Jn 4.29) – although he had done nothing of the sort, merely talked with her in a way she had never met before, with respect and compassion.

Mindfulness is at once a spiritual and a psychological virtue.  St. Irenaeus of Lyons wrote in the Second Century that “the glory of God is a human being fully alive”.  To become more aware of the connectedness of all things and of the consequences of our choices and actions is to become more fully alive and, thereby, more fully to reflect the glory of God.  But it is also a good strategy for attaining or retaining psychological health.  Living well is in large measure a matter of being able to focus our energies in the here-and-now.  By contrast, over-preoccupation with the past leads to neurosis and over-preoccupation with the future leads to phobia.  Nostalgia for an idealised past and dreams of an imagined future of wealth and leisure alike rob us of our freedom to live well in the present.

But why am I telling you this?  What has “mindfulness” to do with Fairtrade?  Just this:  I believe that involvement in promoting Fairtrade is a path to a certain healing of the consciousness for the individual and a healing of the wounds of society, because it is a path towards awareness, presence and compassion.  I believe that our consumer culture is a sick culture because it inculcates in people the opposite of mindfulness and of the spiritual journey which all religious traditions proclaim to be essential to our humanity.  Consumerism offers a culture of distraction.  Yes, it invites us to live in the present moment, but what is on offer is only the artificial, neon-lit eternal present of the shopping mall, where there is indication neither of the rhythm of day and night nor of the seasons of the year.  Consumerism stimulates us to forget our own plans and purposes in the ecstasy of the “impulse buy”: our thoughts and emotions artificially stimulated in the direction of the check-out;  our inner emptiness filled by the bright false promise of momentary satisfaction, before the desire is reborn and we plan our next compensatory purchase. 

We need to recognise the depth of the compulsiveness which is programmed into Western patterns of consumption.  Enough is never enough.  We always want more.  “Need” and “want” are confused.  Indeed, the economy depends on us always wanting more.  It is patriotic to keep spending and to stay in debt.  We are programmed for dissatisfaction and distraction, the opposite of being centred, present, free to respond and to give of ourselves.  Der Mensch ist was er isst, we are what we eat, as Ludwig Feuerbach put it in the 1830s;  in which case we need to ask just what it is we are absorbing, not just into our stomachs but into the core of our being and our self-understanding, when we embrace the unreflective materialism of the contemporary market-place.

A century after Feuerbach wrote, the French philosopher, Gabriel Marcel, noted, in his analysis of Being & Having, that “To possess is almost inevitably to be possessed.  Things possessed get in the way”[1] – get in the way, that is, precisely of charity and of our presence to the other.  What we do when we go in search of the bargain, when we ask the supermarket and the chain-store to make it cheaper, is to shut our eyes and our ears to the reality of our world.  What we ultimately do is to damage our own souls, to deaden our own spirits, and – to use an older language - to imperil our own eternal salvation. 

Does that sound over-dramatic?  Well, listen to this – taken from a front page article in The Independent just three weeks ago, with the ironic title, “Shop Until They Drop”:

 Companies are attracted to doing business in the People’s Republic of China because of its low-tax development zones, cut-price abundant workforce and totalitarianism.  Independent trade unions are banned by the Communist Party.  Assembly-line personnel in free-trade zones in south China operate machinery without safety guards and spray paint with inadequate face masks.  They often die in industrial accidents or from gulaosi, the Chinese term for death from over-work.  Workplace death rates in China are at least twelve times those of Britain and thirteen factory workers a day lose a finger or an arm in the boom city of Shenzhen …”[2]

The article goes onto describe “Dickensian” scenes of malnourished and ragged-clothed workers sleeping twelve to a room in dormitories, sharing one cold tap on a veranda, working up to 14 hours a day for wages of $40 a month, and it accuses multinationals of being in a “race to the bottom” in workers’ conditions.  That’s how China can undercut suppliers in developing countries by up to 60%.  That’s why it supplies 90% of the world’s toys and already makes 20% of Europe’s clothes.  And of course we could multiply examples of gross exploitation, drawing in the agricultural sector as well as the industrial, and deriving from many other countries besides the People’s Republic of China.  Take but one example – of flower-growers not bothering to empty their fields of workers before spraying their crops with insecticide.  That’s the reality of Free Trade.  That’s what happens when we, individual consumers in the West, choose not to be mindful, not to ask how it is that a garment can be made so cheaply or who it was that undertook such fiddly – or such tedious or such dangerous -  work or who it was who picked this fruit or grew that plant.

3. A Vision of Connectedness:

But consider this alternative take on reality:

“Did you ever stop to think that you can't leave for your job in the morning without being dependent on most of the world? You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and reach over for the sponge, and that's handed to you by a Pacific islander. You reach for a bar of soap, and that's given to you at the hands of a Frenchman. And then you go into the kitchen to drink your coffee for the morning, and that's poured into your cup by a South American. And maybe you want tea: that's poured into your cup by a Chinese. Or maybe you're desirous of having cocoa for breakfast, and that's poured into your cup by a West African. And then you reach over for your toast, and that's given to you at the hands of an English-speaking farmer, not to mention the baker. And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you've depended on more than half the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren't going to have peace on Earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.”[3]

The passage will be familiar to many of you, for the voice is that of Dr. Martin Luther King, preaching during his last Christmas on this earth.

We cannot unpick the web of relations which binds us to so many people,  and which implicates us in so much injustice simply by dint of the simple act of our going shopping in the high street.  But what we can do is, firstly, to cultivate mindfulness – to stop and think when we see those little packets containing the screws and fixings required when we buy a piece of self-assembly furniture, for instance, and remind ourselves that someone packed it;  to imagine who it was who made our clothes and be grateful for their hard labour;  to remember when we pull our Christmas crackers that they were probably made by someone who’d never heard of Christmas. 

Secondly, we can dare to ask the awkward questions of ourselves – How can I most justly spend my money? – and of the places where we shop:  Who made this and in what conditions?  However limited the range of goods which carry the Fairtrade Mark, to buy those goods is to ask those questions, to enter into the complicated quest for justice, consciously to seek to live a life of solidarity and communion.  Here we can not only conscientise ourselves but also discover our power as consumers.  To buy Fairtrade is to state this:  we do not want to live oppressively!  To buy Fairtrade is to create the political space wherein a demand for fairer trade rules and more respect for workers’ rights can be born.  To buy Fairtrade and to pay the premium to the producers is to state our willingness to limit our consumption for the sake of our planet and all its peoples.

4. Am I My Brother’s Keeper?

So Fairtrade is a psychological issue and a spiritual issue and a justice issue and a political issue and even an ecological issue.  But can we go beyond that to the conclusion that Fairtrade is a theological issue?  I think that we can.

Let us go back to the beginning of the Bible and the beginning of man’s inhumanity to man, in the story of Cain and Abel.  Cain tries to shrug off God’s question after the murder:

“Where is your brother Abel?”  “I do not know,” he replied.  “Am I my brother’s guardian?”  “What have you done?” Yahweh asked.  “Listen! Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground.” (Gen 4.9f)

“I do not know.”  I choose not to know.  That is the import of Cain’s answer, because after all he had seen what he did.  He hid the body.  But isn’t “I do not know” uncomfortably like the stores’ response when we enquire about labour conditions?  Isn’t it uncomfortably like our own response on those occasions when we decide not to ask, how was this produced and at what cost?

Am I my brother’s keeper?  “No!” cries Cain.  But the whole of the story of God’s People is a resounding “Yes!” to this question.  And that judgement went on to take root in the consciousness particularly of Catholic Christians.  Firstly, the Letter of James specified that it is “the wages of the labourers mowing your fields” and “the cries of the reapers”, rather than just the blood of Abel, which cry out against the rich (Jas 5.4).  Secondly, the authors of the Penny Catechism grouped together the four sins which cry to heaven for vengeance, placing oppression of the poor and defrauding labourers of their wages alongside wilful murder and the sin of Sodom.[4]  The rather odd selection of offences is dictated by four scriptural references to the innocent victim crying out to heaven, but, however odd the choice of sins may seem today, pre-Vatican II Catholics in this country could have no doubt as to the seriousness of matters if they oppressed the poor.

5. Jesus & The Invisibility of the Poor:

Perhaps the Penny Catechism is just a vague memory now, but its moral compass was spot on at this point.  It’s talk of the cry of the poor to God takes us back to the parables of Jesus.  And many of those parables presuppose the harsh economic conditions of first-century Palestine.  Rather than being a country of tidy little small-holdings worked by individual families, gradually the Herodian aristocracy and the Sadducean priestly families that held power in Jerusalem had built up large estates which were worked by landless day-labourers.  Jesus saw such men in the market-place, just as you can apparently still meet them in the market-places of Gaza and the West Bank, hoping to be hired at dawn every day.  His Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard (Mt 20.1-16), rather than being just a paean to the generosity of the anonymous vineyard owner (representing God) and of his steward (representing Jesus), is also an implicit acknowledgement of the need of all householders to bring home a day’s wage.  The story becomes an image of the Kingdom of God for the simple reason that God’s will is that none should be excluded and all should share in the Father’s wealth.  Two millennia later, have we learned the lesson?

Again, Jesus undoubtedly knew the reality of the homeless beggar, summed up in the story of Lazarus in Lk 16.19-31.  The measure of his exclusion and the depth of his misfortune is expressed in the note that “even dogs came and licked his sores” (Lk 16.22), a remembrance that would disgust any Semite even more than it would ourselves in our dog-loving culture, since dogs are regarded as particularly unclean in that part of the world.  But the features of this story which really require our attention are, firstly, the fact that Lazarus has a name, whereas the rich man does not;  secondly, the fact that the rich man does nothing to harm poor Lazarus. 

The naming of Lazarus (and he is the only character named in any of Jesus’ parables) is a potent underlining of the fact that no one is insignificant in the Kingdom of God.  The anonymity of the rich man, who dresses in the purple linen of a Roman aristocrat, on the other hand, is so shocking that older translations habitually give him a name, too, Dives (the Latin for “Rich Man”).  This parable reminds us that the Kingdom of God involves the Great Reversal:  “the last shall be first and the first last” (Mt 20.16).  So do we believe in the Kingdom of God?  Of course we do!  And do we believe in the Great Reversal?  Er, maybe not – but that’s part of the Gospel, too, that the world will be turned upside down, for the good of the poor.  You can’t work for the Kingdom of God and work for the status quo at the same time.  Everything has to be changed (1 Cor 15.50-3).

Of course, it is not just Lazarus who is invisible in his misfortune.  It is Christ.  The famous Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Mt 25.31-46) is centred on this truth, that neither the good nor the wicked, neither the sheep destined for salvation nor the goats destined for damnation, recognises Christ.  Don’t think that the struggle for justice is full of immensely rewarding epiphanies of the Risen Lord smiling benignly on us as we go about doing good.  Don’t expect the poor to be grateful because we try to help.  “When did we see you hungry or thirsty, a stranger or lacking clothes, sick or in prison …?”  The world is full of awkward cusses like ourselves, who don’t necessarily look terribly Christ-like and who may not show any gratitude for our ministrations, however well-intentioned.  It’s the quality of our care, not the depth of our faith or the completeness of our theology, which is put under the spotlight, and that’s something to make theologians feel as uncomfortable as hell!  And yet, amidst all that mess, “Where two or three meet in my name, I am there among them” (Mt 18.20)

6. Doing Evil By Doing Nothing:

But turning back to the story of Lazarus, this is the other shocking thing in Luke’s parable:  that, so far as we know, the rich man doesn’t do anything to hurt Lazarus.  He does not kick him gratuitously as he leaves his house.  He does not set his own guard-dogs on the poor man or get his steward to turn the fire-hose on him to get him to move on (though that used to happen in the city of London 25 years ago when I was working in a night-shelter in the capital, so the street-sleepers would be gone before the city gents arrived).  Neither does he get court injunctions to exclude Lazarus from his front door-step. 

Dives does something far more damning than any random acts of cruelty:  he fails to notice Lazarus;  his plight does not impinge on his consciousness  at all.  That’s what sends the rich man to hell.  But isn’t that the problem in our own trading:  not malevolence, not capricious cruelty, but the sheer invisibility of the poor producers to those who run the world’s trading systems, systems which grind mechanically on, blind to the fact that they are crushing the poor in their cogs?  Pope John Paul II named this type of amorality of human institutions as “structures of sin”, although he insisted that the roots of this type of systemic blindness lie in the wrong-doing of individuals and, especially, in “the all-consuming desire for profit and … the thirst for power.”[5]

And, conversely, isn’t that what Fairtrade is about?  Isn’t that why Traidcraft and Cafod and the Fairtrade Foundation and all the other agencies involved like to tell stories – to make the poor visible, to take away their anonymity, to make them truly “partners” in the exchange, people with personalities and gifts and histories that are worthy of respect?

In Jesus’ ethical teaching there is a sort of law of the excluded middle:  doing nothing is not an option.  To fail to do good is to do evil.  That is the reason for Jesus’ expostulation in the Synagogue at Capernaum, when he is criticised for healing on the Sabbath (Mk 3.1-6): “Is it permitted on the Sabbath day to do good, or to do evil;  to save life, or to kill?” (Mk 3.4)  There is no third way.  Not to act is to perpetuate and to perpetrate the wrong.  So the followers of Jesus have to denounce the sinfulness inherent in world trade and have to witness to an alternative way of living, more in tune with the demands of the Kingdom.  That process we enter into when we commit ourselves to Fairtrade and take that commitment into our synagogue, our Sabbath Assembly, as Christian community.

7. Pieces of A Mosaic:

There is much else that I could say to you.  These few thoughts are just a few pieces of the mosaic that ought to make up a Catholic theology of Fairtrade.  Let me at least name some of the other elements, though I haven’t got time to develop them at length here. 

Firstly, recall the process that perhaps brought many of you onto the streets of Edinburgh this year, or that took some of us to Westminster on November 3^rd to lobby on behalf of the “Make Poverty History” campaign or that kept us wearing white rubber bands all through 2005.  It began in 1994, when Pope John Paul II published a letter, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, “On Preparation For The Jubilee of the Year 2000”, even though most of us didn’t notice the publication at the time, even though the concept of Jubilee 2000 then took on a life of its own outside and beyond the Churches.  When historians look back on John Paul’s reign that will be one of the most remarkable elements that they will note, his conviction that he was destined to lead the Church, and society in general, to prepare for a new beginning in the Third Millennium.  Jubilee, a Jewish and then a Christian concept, was what was to underpin the renewing of all things in Christ;  Jubilee, the very idea that animated Jesus of Nazareth and led him to choose Isa 61.1f as the beginning of his sermon in the Synagogue of his home town: 

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, for he has anointed me to bring the good news to the afflicted.  He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives, sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim a year of favour from the Lord.” (Lk 4.18f)

Jubilee, the bringing in of the excluded, the forgiveness of the wrong-doer, the healing of the leper, the cleansing of the unclean, that all might enter God’s Kingdom;  that was Jesus’ vision. 

And another word for that vision, another term beloved of Pope John Paul, is solidarity.  No man is an island, as John Donne noted.  All are connected.  I am my brother’s keeper.  My Samaritan enemy proves himself my neighbour.  Love knows no borders.  All are called into one communion.  That is the dynamism in our eucharist because it is the dynamism at the heart of Jesus’ entire being.  As the beautiful prayer in that early Church Order, the Didache, expresses it so well: 

“As this broken bread, once dispersed over the hills, was brought together and became one loaf, so may thy Church be brought together from the ends of the earth into thy kingdom”.  (Ch.9)

That is what we celebrate each Sunday.  That is what we proclaim when we break bread together.  To say, “Amen”, to the Body and Blood of the Lord, to receive him as our food, is also to receive our commissioning, our calling to go out to be bread for the world.  When the disciples ask Jesus to dismiss the crowds, his response is this:  “Give them something to eat yourselves” (Mk 6.37).  We say, “Amen”, to that dangerous memory as we say, “Amen”, to the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  And Fairtrade, combined with the campaign for Trade Justice, is one of the best ways we have of feeding the poor.

I mentioned the concept of “The Signs of the Times” at the beginning of this talk.  It is a term that is developed in the Vatican II Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, but it effectively derives from Pope John XXIII’s encyclical on human rights and duties, Pacem In Terris.  Good Pope John was not simply an optimist, but rather he was a man of faith, convinced that the Spirit is abroad in the world.  Indeed, at the opening of the Second Vatican Council he playfully rebuked the “prophets of gloom” that surrounded him:

“In the daily exercise of our pastoral office, we sometimes have to listen, much to our regret, to voices of persons who, though burning with zeal are not endowed with too much sense of discretion or measure.  In these modern times they can see nothing but prevarication and ruin.  They say that our era in comparison with past eras, is getting worse and they behave as though they had learned nothing from history, which is, none the less, the teacher of life … We feel we must disagree with those prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world was at hand.”

In contrast, John XXIII asked himself about where the Holy Spirit could be seen to be working in human aspirations.  It is interesting to note the currents of thought which he identified:  the gradual improvement in the social and economic condition of the working classes;  the participation of women in public life;  the end of colonialism;  attention to human rights;  the founding of the United Nations;  the search for nuclear disarmament and the growth of international Aid.  Surely, we can add the Fairtrade movement and the campaign for Trade Justice to the list of Signs of the Times in our generation.  The Spirit is still at work, changing hearts, changing lives, changing economics.

Let me close with a warning, however.  We English Catholics find ourselves in uncertain times.  The hold of faith on our society has been weakened almost to the point of disappearing from public discourse.  How tempting it would be to immerse ourselves in the struggle for justice because here at least we can find something tangible, terra firma in a wobbly Church in a wobbly world.  But I hope that I have shown that working for Fairtrade is a fruit of our faith and not a substitute for it.  It is a rooting of that faith in our contemporary world, certainly, but it is also the voicing of a conviction at the heart of our faith:  that all are one in Christ Jesus;  that all are our brothers and sisters;  and that all are invited to the banquet of the Kingdom.  And our own salvation, our own inner peace and the peace of society and the world, all depend on our living more justly, more mindfully and with greater solidarity.