life at the periphery

I was listening to the World Service yesterday and heard about book called  428 AD: An Ordinary Year at the End of the Roman Empire by Giusto Traina. This is a look at the later Roman Empire in a non-landmark year at an outlying territory. It is an interesting premise - to judge the Empire, not by the big splash, but the names and actions at the center, but to look at real life at the periphery.

 I wondered what would happen if we used the same criterion for our own time. Not looking at the wisest people with the biggest back accounts or wisest thoughts but looking at the people who struggle, who are marginalized and who generally, will never even get their fifteen minutes of fame. What does our world look like through their eyes and what do those folks look like through God's eyes.

We know that Jesus often chose the smallest, weakest and most unloveable to love and heal  - at least within his own cultural and historical boundaries. The outside was brought in and the inside, that ring of pharisees and teachers who were the power base, were asked to open up. When they refused they were simply exposed for the empty and, sometimes, corrupt group that they were.

 I am not saying that all virtue resides with the poor and oppressed, merely that looking at our world from the bottom up might be more of the God-view than we would like to think. And on a socialogical level it is worth considering that the health of a whole society is only judged by considering the health of all its constituent parts.


But the good thing is that there is enough for everyone, we still live in a world of bounty. We just have to figure out where we are looking, to the shiny or those who need some assistance in restoring their lustre - or even finding it. We are God's eyes and hands and feet - and God asks us to look differently at things than a world which judges itself by its most outrageous successes rather than by the ordinary and more subtle existances in which most of us are engaged.