HEARING WITH OUR EYES

 

Our cities were built on slavery and they continue to be resourced by it. There are an estimated 46 million slaves globally and it is naïve for us to think we don’t depend on some of them.

 

From the mineral rich mines of the DRC to the garment factories of Bangladesh; from fruit pickers in the home counties to cheap takeaways in the gig economy, our shiny, modern consumer lives are dependent on a trade so dark and iniquitous, it is astonishing we tolerate it so readily.

 

Slaves are forced into agriculture, construction, hospitality, manufacturing, retail, domestic settings, sexual exploitation and menial service on the open seas. They are all around us and yet they are not. Like ghosts, they are not visible to most and not believed in by some either.

 

The prophet Amos tells us the God who stretched out a universe of unfathomable size pays attention to those who abuse the poor. Those who build grand houses won’t live in them, and those who plant gorgeous vineyards won’t drink their wine. Today, however, slavery pays very nicely for those who traffic in it. Humans are a resource that can be used and used again. It is calculated that forced labourers deliver $8000 profit to their abusers every year. Sex traffickers make $36,000 annual profits out of their desperate victims, according to the expert Siddharth Kara. Lives of comfort are lived by those who abuse slaves, mocking the promise of Amos. The mighty are still on their thrones and the humble poor are being ground into dust. It is like a dark Gospel, taunting the coming kingdom.

 

Spiritual redemption has its originating story in the liberation of slaves from oppression. The gift of a day’s rest in seven – the Jewish Sabbath – marks freedom from relentless seven day a week graft, which no human body can stand in the long run. It also prefigures the divine rest we shall inherit at the end of all things. For slaves today, there is no rest. And where there is no rest, there is no hope.

 

There’s an interesting turn of phrase in the letter of James. It says: the wages of the labourers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out. So it’s true: money talks. But all the while we imagine it is conferring access, fame and privilege, it is actually transmitting on a frequency we can’t hear, with a message we can’t ignore.

 

We need to retrain our minds so that we hear with our eyes. Our vision is drawn to things of beauty. There is a palpable bias to what looks nice. The advertising industry is predicated on it, but so is our worship, when we use images of outstanding natural beauty as a backdrop for our engagement with God. What is superficially ugly or repulsive, we keep just out of sight, like the sun we learn not to stare at. In the parable of the sheep and the goats, it’s the hungry and the thirsty, the stranger and the threadbare, the sick and the prisoner whom we look straight through. These are not people at their best, and they do not look their best. And tellingly, neither the sheep not the goats recognise Jesus in the needy.

 

To hear with our eyes we have to pay attention to detail. The first hurdle is disbelief – the struggle to accept slaves are moving around us as surely as shoppers in a mall. We imagine the effects of evil somewhere just beyond the horizon, but they are poisoning the ground we walk on. And it’s precisely in our neighbourhood that we are most likely to spot the patterns of people being dropped off or collected for work, the signs of people broken by coercive control, the fear and defeat in the faces of people swimming in abuse.

 

We can train ourselves for this, and we can be trained by those with the skills. The Clewer Initiative has a safe car wash app and a farm work welfare app that can be downloaded to help us. We do not have to tackle the problem personally. Police forces and related agencies have the skills, the resources and statutory powers to take action. We can report what we suspect on the Modern Slavery Helpline. No-one on the end of that line will be cross if we get it wrong; they will be glad we’re taking it seriously.

 

We each have a modern slavery footprint. There are even ways of showing this to us. So we can take small steps to change our dependency. And there is another one we can make. Prayers of intercession, persistent, focussed, undeterred, have remarkable power that is unrestrained by our personal circumstances. Slavery is the fastest growing international crime. It is the stronghold that keeps adding extensions. But it is not a building that the cruel and merciless will live in. Amos said it. Across the ages, his prophecy is a challenge to our prayers.