THE SHAKING OF THE UNSHAKABLE

 by adam harbinson

I remember when I was a wee boy of about twelve, wandering through Belfast one Saturday afternoon with my dad. We didn’t often go to town; that was for ‘townies,’ we preferred to be in the fields, shooting or fishing, but this Saturday we were in town. He was a good Christian man my dad; most times anyway, and he taught me to look at the world with a questioning eye.

As he and I strolled through the big smoke that Saturday afternoon so long ago, he noticed the sign above a building society office; the ‘Leeds Permanent Building Society.’ A grand building with a grand sounding name I thought, until he said, ‘There’s no such thing as permanent. It will all disappear in smoke one day.’

He probably had the end of the world in mind, but when I think of it now, his words were prophetic, for who could have believed that the events of the last couple of weeks could ever have taken place? Brown and Bush have made close on a trillion pounds available to ailing financial institutions; to put that figure into context, if you spent £25,000 a day it would take you 109,000 years to spend it – and yet the world markets turned round and thumbed their noses. No, there’s not much good news around; the financial guru George Soros, who it is said broke the Bank of England on ‘Black Wednesday’ in 1992, said recently, ‘We’re not heading out of the storm, but into it!’

The origins of the collapse of so many formerly solid institutions, like Northern Rock, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac isn’t the point here, nor is the part that naked greed played in it all. But it has flushed out some home truths; it has shown us where our hearts lie. Hank Poulson, America’s Treasury Secretary publicly got down on bended knee, pleading with the Speaker of the House of Representatives not to ‘wreck the rescue package’ – doesn’t that demonstrate the importance such men place on material wealth?

But is there a lesson for us in the mess? The central requirement for the efficient operation of the global economy can be summed up in a single word; ‘confidence’ – confidence in the banking system, confidence in business, confidence in politicians. For a variety of reasons that confidence has gone; and the system has collapsed.

For me there are at least two lessons. Firstly, my old dad was right, nothing is permanent. Paul the apostle said it another way; ‘… the things you can see are temporary, but the things you can’t see are eternal.’

The second lesson rests on the first. If the things that make up the world in which we live are not permanent, then they don’t deserve our confidence, and therefore it’s the ultimate stupidity to invest in them. But as John O’Donohue writes in his wonderful book, Anam Cara;‘…the eternal and the transient worlds are woven in and through each other.’ The trick is to tell them apart and invest only in the eternal.

My heart goes out to people whose life savings have shrunk in recent weeks, but if we’re honest, maybe this shaking of the unshakable will prompt us to re-examine where our hearts really lie. King David said, ‘Don't put your confidence in powerful people; there’s no help for you there.’

Maybe when things settle down again we’ll remember that, and who knows, pigs might fly.