On Why The Customer is Not Always Right

Courtesy of deedtheinky.com

Sometime is the late 1870s some chap came up with a one liner that, in my modest opinion, has done more to skew the delicate balance between rights and responsibilities than anything else. Indeed, it is the very statement that has caused me most verbal abuse in my adult life, and has turned ordinarily nice folk into slavering demons. 

Apparently, the customer is always right. 

Pish and pother (if you are in possession of the Cloakean Babel Fish, you will know what I meant to type). 

Yesterday's gospel reading (for those of us who do lectionaries and bibles in church life) was from Mark at the time when two of his followers wanted to be up-close and personal and take up habitation in none less than the armpits of the Lord, one on the right and one on the left. They wanted to be the beloved armpit apostles, closest, snuggly, cherished. Jesus told them to get a life and the other disciples simply sucked air through their first-century dentitions (in a sort of ecclesiastical Ena Sharples sort of way). It was a story about mastership and service, that kind of thing. 

In enlightened 21st century western life, the Almighty Dollar (pound, Euro, frogskin, green, dosh, wonga) seems now to buy you not just products, but rightness. The transaction often falls into the following frame:

drip, drip, drip, oh my word I have a leak, I know nothing about plumbing, let me call a plumber, plumber arrives, oh plumber help me I know not what to do, plumber fixes problem utilising training and experience, you left a mark on my skirting board, I am the customer so I am always right, I will canvass for the plumber to pay me money because I have a smudge on my skirting board, you are wrong and I am right because I paid you thirty quid and made you a mug of sweet tea

You know I speak the truth. You may even have been that limpet who got gusset-rotated about the job you are not gifted in performing, but blessed in the right to judge. Yes, you!

Frankly, the customer is not always right, or indeed often right in my experience (and if they were, the skilled trades would be redundant of course)

The situation is clear to me - that the world seems to pursue its rights at a rate ten to one over its pursuit of its responsibilities. I think this is part of what Jesus was thinking about or alluding to in Mark's Gospel. Day-time telly is awash with voting-age progeny-producing adults who can drive a fast car to work but who feel compelled to take the wrong ladder for a job and render themselves as road-kill on the tarmac below. Then they sue their employers for damages. Or the neatly presented business women teetering on shoes with shiny soles and who power-walks across a marble floor on a wet day and slips over - more dosh please. Your fault. Not my fault. Never my fault. In the blame-claim world, my brain and ability to make my own value-judgement is long gone. Atrophy. 

Jesus broadly says "if you want it, it'll cost you" and then "and I doubt you really know how much". The church is danger of fuelling this too - talk of leadership that isn't mitigated with healthy amounts of talk of followership becomes much the same as the call of the disciples to sit at the head-table. Equally, how often, in an original act of service do church-goers then go one to take that servitude and make it a weapon to exert power over another. 

It seems to me, as I sit here at vicarly computer in my vicarly study, there the world is fast losing its heart for generosity in many ways. The relationships born of transaction and contract are now fairly devoid of a common graciousness beyond the clauses of the agreement. Too little love. Survival of the fittest? Maybe now it is survival of the person most right or the person with the greatest authority and power. Maybe even the survival of the person who paid the money. In end, I wonder if Jesus is trying to tell is that it is survival of the one who loves most and takes least. No, I don't mean that either. I don't think that Jesus ever thought it was about survival. 

The Challenge of Choice

I think it is perhaps fair to say that a great deal of what we choose is done so for selfish reasons. There is no judgement placed in that. That it is so is why acts of specific altruism are so memorable, that good deeds are (for the most part) the choice of exception not the matter of the norm. I include myself in this, of course.

We live in what many term a 'Choice Society'. We can design our lives from the beginning to the end. We can almost design our babies and purge those that don't reach the desired standard. We can choose how many we want, their names and how they live while in our care. We can even choose to make babies to fix existing siblings. We can choose work, or not. We can choose relationships, or not. We can choose faith, or not. We can choose to defy the effects of the passage of time with mechanical and chemical intervention. We can choose to sue those flawed humans that don't get that right for us. We can choose to eat ourselves spherical or to starve ourselves stick-thin. We can choose to abide by promises we make, or not. We can choose to deprive others of their possessions or health. We can choose to consume toxins beyond safe levels. We can choose to live and we can even choose to die. We believe too, that it is our right to make these choices. 

Speaking only for myself, but as a litmus test for many normal humans (quieten down before you even say what has just popped into your mind), I fail to make universally good choices. If I am fortunate, I can live through the effects of a bad choice or decision, and if I am even more fortunate than that, will hope that no-one else was damaged by my flawed choice. It is part of being human, so nothing too surprising in any of that. The fact remains, though, that I cannot guarantee that every choice I make is a good one.

We are now past Christmas as we rest here in the Feast of Candlemas. The story of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple is an anecdote for choice. Mary and Joseph had a choice to take, or not take, their firstborn to an old geezer in a Temple. Imagine expecting new mums to go through a Rite of Purification these days and you will have a mighty cohort from the NCT on your door-step! And then we will reach Lent, a period of de-choosing in many ways. Lent is a time of self-emptying, self-sacrifice, rejecting pleasures, adopting the burden of more prayer and fast. Lent rides against everything that our modern society stands for. 

I should say, too, that I am a believer in human choice. Many is the time when you will hear people of faith saying that 'God told them to N...'. Even Howard Camping, the false-Prophet of the non-starter Rapture blamed God for not stopping him from his foolishness. This line of thinking to me is faith based abdication of our rights under free-will. We choose, not God. God will guide, but rarely will God do the big Lottery Finger in our decisions. I have sat in some Christian circles and felt, quite sincerely, that I am surrounded by God's Own Puppets. I don't believe in a God like that, but rather God who walks alongside us in all our choices, good or bad. In the same way I cannot blame my mother for my poor choices in my younger years, but can be glad she was there to help me mend the damage. 

So, we choose. It is us who choose, not God. We have rights yes, but we are human, mortal, flawed and foolish in our own ways. During the Lent that fast approaches, and on a day when two fearful parents took this strange child to a man they probably didn't know, we have to put down our rights to some extent and remember to replace it with a little humility and know that the choice we make could easily be wrong - and not use God as a celestial crutch or a Omnipotent Scapegoat.