Activity - Sundays with John Ball

There is nothing more natural than activity. It is what we do when we are awake. To be active is to be human.
Activity is work and work is creation and creation is an attribute of God. By working we are divine.
Activity is a form of giving. The Powerful have always made a virtue of their inactivity, their taking, their use of servants, but they are not the crown of creation, as they like to think. On the contrary the Powerful are the lowest in creation. To be forever avoiding activity, to be ever looking to avoid work, as you do in your consumer society is to seek death.
Contemplation, too, is creative. When Mother Julian prayed and contemplated the Divine, she too was active, she too was working.
But you don’t contemplate, you don’t pray, you don’t even think. You blot out your minds. Even in your minds, especially in your minds, you are passive, lazy consumers. 
It is better to give than to receive. Free people wish to donate their activity to others, to the people in their families, to the people in their village, to their neighbours.
Free people wish to offer their work to God, in whose image they are made.
Work is a gift.
Work is the gift of our power.
Work is service.
Work is a service that is donated, not expropriated.
An economy of service, a gift economy, an economy of work donated from our strength and our love, is the basis of  the free society.
But the armed gang enslaves. With threats of extreme violence people are forced to perform expropriated work, begrudging, unwilling conscripted drudgery.
In its most basic form expropriated work is slavery.
When this exploitation is systemized and bureaucratised, forced labour is transformed into debt slavery. It is called taxation.
Money tokens are introduced by Authority, with Caesar’s head on the coin, so we know to whom we owe our labour.
Each activity is given a number relating to the amount of coins it is worth, and the coins are interchangeable. In this way each activity is numbered and taxed.
In this way Authority owns our activity. Authority enslaves our power. Its followers steal our God given power of creation, they subvert it and pervert it into an enslaved service to their own glory.
These perverts cannot give, they can only take, they live not in faith but in fear. For them God given activity is a burden and these, the undead, long for the grave. They number our power, they take our power, but however much they have they must have more, never satisfied, reaching into every corner, numbering, taking, eating up everything like locusts, this cancer of joylessness, of unfaithfulness, of  hopelessness, of selfishness, these cancerous idolaters of the self.