Meg rants about Competitiveness!

For my younger readers:

Christmas is coming! A good time to give my books as presents to all your friends and relatives! OK, I’m not entirely serious but I have to admit that an awful lot of the presents I’ve bought for other people are books – and, of course, I’ve bought them all at my wonderful, local independent bookshop, Warwick Books, in the Market Place in Warwick – where I run my kids’ book group. If you have a local independent bookshop, do try to support it – or you won’t have it much longer – and you won’t have such an interesting choice of books to nip in and browse through! Waterstones’ books are mostly chosen centrally by a very small group of buyers – which is why you’ll have to order my Lion Hudson books (the ‘My Mum’ and ‘St Jenni’ series and ‘The Ghost in the Gallery’ rather than finding them on the shelves) as they’ve been in print for a long time which means they’re not as appealing to Waterstones’ buyers. I also suspect that because they mention God rather a lot, there’s a bit of suspicion about what I’m trying to do to your young minds! But don’t worry – I’m not trying to indoctrinate you! I am a practising Christian but one who is constantly arguing with or at least questioning God – much like Kate in the ‘My Mum’ books. So if you fancy doing a bit of questioning and thinking yourself over the Christmas period – good time to ponder spiritual matters, I think – then a ‘My Mum’ book might be a good starting point!

For my more wrinkly readers:

Apologies for last week’s effort which was long and rambling and of somewhat limited interest to those not as sold on Youth Theatre as me! More of a self-indulgent musing than a blog perhaps – but useful to me to get it out of my head and heart and on a screen in front of me! Having done it, I felt far more confident about going to what was potentially quite a difficult debriefing meeting after my performance week – which went well, as it turned out. And I stuck to my guns about encouraging absolute commitment to attend workshops in a performance term, which to my surprise I was challenged on. Apparently, one parent had complained! One! I wasn’t impressed – anyway, too much already!

This week, I’m inspired to write/rant by my church house group which I attended last night. We were looking at James Chapter 3 which some of you may know is a particularly challenging chapter for me as it’s headed ‘Taming the Tongue’, something I’m not exactly well-known for either virtually or in reality!

Anyway, we got through that bit without too much argument (mine is a very argumentative house group – suits me perfectly!). It was when we got onto the last 5 verses that things got exciting. Here we are told that ‘…if you harbour bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth. Such ‘wisdom’ does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, of the devil. For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice.’

Well, I have no real quibble with that. But one of our members, a man for whom I have great respect, did. He argued that the trouble with it was that ‘to get on in life’ we need a bit of selfish ambition and envy as a motivator. (Apologies for paraphrasing horribly.) He argued that in education, we do this with kids – we use competitiveness as a means of getting them to excel.

I was, I think pretty well behaved – this sort of argument is, for me, like a red rag to a bull. I am deeply suspicious of competitiveness in any shape or form. Some of my most unpleasant memories are of the bitchiness of girls in the competitive arena of netball or hockey. Before the game even starts, while teams are being picked, it brings out the worst in people. I have never found competition against other people to be a good motivator. I have wanted to do the best that I can do – I have, if you like, competed with myself – but the concept of competing against others, I find repellent. That seems to be about glorifying yourself at the expense of others. It looks like ‘selfish ambition’ to me and I am totally happy that James speaks out against it. For exercise, I’ll stick to swimming, walking, cycling and dancing, thanks very much!

I’m quite intrigued to consider how far this goes back for me. My parents were very much of the ‘You do the best you can and never mind anyone else’ school of thought and I know I have been heavily influenced for as long as I can remember by the Parable of the Talents (You have been given gifts by God and it’s up to you to make the most of them). I was not brought up in a conventional Christian family but somewhere along the way I imbibed the idea that co-operation rather than competition is the Christian way to relate to other people. I was, therefore, quite shocked to come up against a direct challenge in my house group. It’s one of those areas where I’ve assumed a more general agreement than exists.

If I try to be a bit more self-aware for a moment and look back, one of the reasons I chose not to send my children to school and educate them at home was because I couldn’t bear the competitiveness that came with having children. Whose baby would roll first, sit first, crawl first, walk first, speak first, be out of nappies first etc etc? School would mean more and worse – who’s child would read first? And ever on! I could see myself being dragged into a horrible way of being that I absolutely wanted to avoid. With fellow-home-edders, we organised non-competitive sports days and ran co-operative games workshops. When I started teaching drama, I avoided any warm-up games that were competitive and any that involved kids being ‘out’. I still do! And how do I organise my youth theatre companies? Do we audition? No, we don’t! We are as inclusive as we possibly can be. And do children achieve? Yes, of course they do! Not because they are in competition with others but because they are having fun and enjoying the learning for its own sake.

Now is this what my Christian friends do? No, of course not! They send their kids to school and sign them up for the local football club! Doh! So what I do or rather the philosophy that it springs from isn’t accepted mainstream Christianity. I can see why. You can read ‘selfish ambition’ and not read that as ‘competition’. We all know there are inspiring Christian sports men and women. But somehow, I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea. If there are winners, then there are losers – and really I don’t want anybody to experience the pain of losing. That doesn’t seem to be peace-loving, considerate, full of mercy or impartial! I even feel uncomfortable with the fact that some of my books get published when so many other people’s don’t.

In the mix last night we also threw ‘getting on’ in the work-place. How would a Christian who was ‘peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere’ do in business? Another member of our group very perceptively asked ‘Do you think Jesus ran his business along those lines?’ The answer, I think, has to be ‘Yes, he did – and that was one reason he got crucified.’ So how would a Christian contestant do on ‘The Apprentice’? Well, if they’re following James’ words, they’d get crucified too. And that’s the really difficult bit. We have to acknowledge that by accepting this teaching, by spurning a competitive approach and being co-operators, mercy givers and peace-makers, we will not necessarily be winners. We may not ‘get on’ in life to the same extent as those who embrace selfish ambition. We may (and many of us do!), find ourselves working in low-paid ‘caring’ or ‘people’ professions. We may find ourselves the victims of the more ruthless and more worldly.

Once we’re talking winners and losers, we move into another whole arena. What is war but another ghastly form of competition, a complete breakdown of co-operation? I know, of course, that Christians disagree on the validity of making war – but I have never quite been able to see why. Read passages such as James 3 17-18 and it seems to me that war defenders haven’t a leg to stand on. ‘Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness.’ Clear enough?

It seems to me that those who argue that we must embrace the world’s competitiveness alongside our Christianity or we will not ‘get on’, that in certain circumstances we must make war to stop some tyrant or other, continually prevent us from seeing whether the approach advocated by James would really work. Ethical businesses are not (if we use a competitive metaphor!) allowed to play on a level playing field and war defenders rant about innocent victims of tyranny and are remarkably silent about the far greater numbers of innocent victims of war.

By following Jesus we need to accept that in very significant ways we are choosing to be losers – we are signing up for pain – or we are given the way the world works at the moment! We may even be choosing the biggest loss of all. We may be called upon to be martyrs. But perhaps that is a better than end than being a murderer. It’s the one that Jesus chose, after all.

PS. If this doesn’t get you arguing with me, then I despair!!! Come on, all you sports players!