I’m not an unconditional fan of much of his theology (and yes I have read his books, listened to him speak live and  his podcasts), but I’m very inspired and challenged by this article on the Sojourners site just posted by Brian McLaren follow link for fuller article).

For many people, economic recovery means “getting back to where we were a few months or years ago.” That means recovering our consumptive, greedy, unrestrained, undisciplined, irresponsible, and ecologically and socially unsustainable way of life.

I’d like to suggest another kind of recovery … drawing from the world of addiction. When an addict gets into recovery, he doesn’t want to go back and recover the “high” he had before, or even to recover the conditions he had before he began using drugs and alcohol. Instead, he wants to move forward to a new way of life — a wiser way of life that takes into account his experience of addiction. He realizes that his addiction to drugs was a symptom of other deeper issues and diseases in his life … unresolved pain or anger, the need to anesthetize painful emotions, lack of creativity in finding ways to feel happy and alive, unaddressed relational and spiritual deficits, lack of self-awareness, and so on.

So … maybe we can sabotage our addictive tendencies by letting the word “recovery” have a meaning that wakes us up rather than drugs us into the comfortable, dreamy, half-awareness in which we have lived for too long.

Great stuff! However the coverage of supposedly repentant bankers being quizzed about their performance, integrity and financial propriety (by – ahem – MPs) makes me seriously wonder how likely such a recovery of priorities in our culture actually is. Click here to see how much these guys earned for doing such a grand job for us all.