There is also considerable evidence of radical discontent 
among the economically contented, especially in the area 
of human relationships. We seem less able to settle for 
what is merely good or endurable, rather than for the best; 
and there may even be something admirable in this refusal to 
settle for less.

But the price we pay is a drifting search for an elusive 
contentment we rarely find, because there is always the 
promise of something more complete, someone or something 
more comprehensively satisfying.

I am desperate to avoid a tone of condemnation here, mainly 
because I do not believe people are entirely responsible for 
the predicaments they get into, but there is as much to regret 
as to celebrate in the human condition of our time.

The same was true before our time, of course; much to regret, 
much to celebrate. The enduring of abusive relationships long 
after people should have quit them is something to regret, 
though the endurance itself was admirable. There is something 
wistful about our longing for perfect lives today, and something 
in me wants people not to settle for less than the best; but the 
enduring element in all these dramas of discontent is the self, 
ourself, so there is a strong likelihood that what we are bringing 
to these experiences of failure is as important a factor as the 
external reality we encounter.

The wisdom of the ancient narrative of the Fall would suggest 
that whatever it is that gets in the way of our happiness is most 
likely to be discovered in our own failings, though we are strongly 
programmed to identify scapegoats to account for our own failings 
and the tragedies they create: "The woman gave me and I did 
eat", said Adam to God; so it would appear that finding 
scapegoats for human unhappiness is one of the oldest routines 
in the book.

The Fall narrative can be used as an instrument of Socratic 
therapy. If we use it to interrogate the nature of our own 
discontents, it will help us to identify the mechanisms of blame 
was have constructed to shield ourselves from our own 
responsibility for the way things are with us.

The complement to the theme of Fall in the Hebrew scriptures 
is the theme of captivity or bondage in Egypt. Of course, I am 
not suggesting that the texts leap from the Fall to the Captivity, 
but there is a sort of narrative logic to the scheme that reflects 
human experience.

Our discontents lead us into experiences that begin by exhilarating 
us, gradually turn into habits that bore us, and can end by trapping 
us in relationships or routines that imprison us. And there is nothing 
that cannot be the vehicle of this process: natural substances, sex, 
emotional entanglements, greed for status and the toys it buys, work, 
spirituality, religion. Any of these, or any combination of these can 
be the force that arrests and imprisons us. Breaking out and making 
it to freedom is tough.

So far I have implied that these dramas of Fall and Captivity 
happen particularly to individuals, and it is certainly true that most 
of my emphasis will be on the personal use of the great narratives 
in the struggles of our private lives, but a more profound example 
of this theme is provided by whole communities.

Whole peoples and races can be led into captivity by the 
compulsions of oppressing power and the same psychological 
mechanisms apply, the same creation of scapegoats, the same 
dynamic of final self-imprisonment. Any community that creates 
slaves or serfs ends up imprisoned by the very system that is meant 
to amplify its freedom.

So it should not surprise us that the most dramatic and effective use 
of the great biblical narratives of captivity and the struggle to be free 
has been made by enslaved peoples, by Afro-Americans, by the 
oppressed people in South and Central America and Africa, by 
those anywhere who have found themselves in bondage and heard 
the great stories of Israel's escape from Egypt into the wilderness 
and the long trek into the promised land.

This rhetoric of exodus and wilderness marks the speeches of 
Martin Luther King and the Black Theology movement in North 
America. It also marks the Liberation Theology of Central and 
South America.

I visited a base community in El Salvador during the civil war in 
1990, weeks after the massacre of the Jesuits at the university, 
and heard an exposition of scripture that burned with passion from 
a man who lived in a plywood shack in a shanty town. He was 
interpreting the passage in Luke Chapter 4 where Jesus reads from 
a verse in Isaiah that proclaims good news to the poor, release for 
the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind, and letting broken 
victims go free.

There was no application from a distance, no spiritualising or 
metaphorising of the text to make it fit a very different context: 
the fit was perfect, it was about their situation, it described their 
experience, it was about their struggle for liberation, it was living 
scripture, their scripture, their narrative.

This active, political use of the narratives is still the most 
appropriate and it is why the oppressed groups anywhere are 
easily able to find themselves in these ancient texts and use them 
in a living way. In addition to providing oppressed groups with 
theological ammunition and stunning metaphors, they have also 
produced the best songs, none better than the great spirituals 
sung by the slaves in the United States during their long trek to 
freedom.

But let me turn back to the less exciting theme of personal 
captivity and the struggle for wholeness and freedom that is 
likely to be the most immediate use we will make of these texts. 
These narratives are remorseless in their announcement to us 
that here are no easy routes to personal wholeness and human 
freedom.

The long process of liberation may begin in exciting euphoria, 
in a midnight flight from Egypt, in an act of stunning resolution, 
but it is always followed by the long trek through the wilderness. 
This long trudge of discipline is true in all our human predicaments, 
but it is agonisingly true of the compulsions that afflict us and 
from which we long to grow and move away.

There may be support systems, maintenance programmes, 
therapy and counseling, prayer and reassurance, but there is no 
shortcut through the dry lands of effort. Growth is a cumulative 
process.

Of course, it wont start at all without the strength that comes 
from the longing for freedom and the loving challenge our friends 
place before us, but once we are on the road we have to walk it.

As far as our compulsions are concerned, it is a bit like slowly 
rewinding the tape of our days. The habits that imprison us were 
gradually wound round our lives by the slow accumulations of 
imprisoning habit, and they can only be unwound by the same 
process, slowly reversed. No violence or suddenness will work; 
the human psyche is not equipped with a fast rewind button.

Of course, tips and techniques can help us along bits of the way. 
Nietszsche knew a lot about this. He said that there were only 
six ways of combating the vehemence of a drive. First, there is 
the avoidance of the opportunities for the gratification of the drive, 
so that it will become progressively weakened until it withers way. 
Or we can impose a pattern of strict regularity in the gratification 
of a drive, so that we gain intervals of peace during which we are 
not troubled, and maybe go on from there to the first method.

Thirdly, we can deliberately give ourselves over to the wild 
and unrestrained gratification of the drive in order to generate 
disgust with it and use disgust to get power over the drive. 
There is what he calls the intellectual artifice of associating 
gratification of the drive with painful thoughts, so that the 
gratification itself becomes painful.

Number five tells us to bring about a dislocation of the amount 
of strength we have by taking up particularly difficult and 
strenuous labours, or by deliberately subjecting ourselves to 
a new stimulus and pleasure that redirects our thought and 
urges it into other channels. In this regard, Bishop Gore 
spoke of "the compulsive power of a new affection", and 
certainly nothing better at casting out the bitterness and sorrow 
of an old love affair than entering into a new one.

Finally, and rather despairingly, Nietzsche suggests that for 
those of us who can endure it, we should weaken and depress 
our whole bodily organisation by ascetic practices, so that in 
the overall weakening that occurs the particular drive that is 
disturbing us will be weakened as well.

Nietzsche was a profound psychologist and I have quoted that 
guidance because it shows what tough territory we are in 
when we start working on ourselves. The forty years wandering 
in the wilderness, with all its temptations and complaints, is 
an apt symbol of the human struggle for peace and wholeness. 
And no one gets it easy, or no one of any complexity.

What happens when we finally make it to the promised land of 
sobriety or relational stability or the mastery of some discipline 
or career. From a distance, the promised estate flowed with milk 
and honey and, from the heat and deprivation of the desert, that 
looked exactly like what we wanted.

But who could or would want to live on milk and honey for 
the rest of their lives?

It might be a good way to start the day, but as an invariable 
diet? Let's face it, it cloys, it soon has us longing for something 
more exciting, even for the diet of the wilderness, the manna and 
the quails, those moments of self-mastery and the mysterious 
contentment that the struggle itself brought us.

What happens in the promised land, you see, is exactly what 
started the whole thing going in the first place, in that place 
called Eden we fell from. What gets going again is what never 
really stopped, though it was maybe too exhausted or depressed 
to be really obnoxious for a while - and that is ourself.

We come into the promised land along with all our ideals and 
longings, and pretty soon we are up to our old tricks. When 
I was in South Africa a couple of weeks ago, on the day the 
Truth Commission produced its report, I witnessed this 
depressingly ancient human reality. Of all the groups in South 
Africa that took part in the long struggle in the wilderness years 
of apartheid, who would have expected the ANC to try to 
block the publication of the report of those terrible years? 
But they did, along with Mr de Klerk.

And Desmond Tutu, that true prophet, true in the wilderness, 
still true in the promised land, pointed out that he had not 
struggled to liberate the oppressed in order for them to 
become oppressors.

That is always the struggle, the eternal struggle of the human 
heart. It is what turns God's ancient persecuted people the 
Jews into persecutors of the Palestinians in their own land. 
It is what makes the man forgiven a mountain of debt in the 
parable of Jesus into the persecutor of the poor man who 
owed him a handful. It is the failure to connect, the failure of 
identification, the failure of the imagination of the heart.

That is why the struggle is never over, the promised land never 
delivers the promise, unless we remember the most important 
of the lessons that good religion teaches us: we ourselves are 
never cured of ourselves; we are always, in New Testament 
language, sinners in need of forgiveness and grace.

That is why Jesus said the harlots and the tax collectors go into 
the kingdom first, because they had no delusions about themselves. 
But that'll have to wait until the next lecture.