Matthew Henry John Bartlett

That we now find ourselves required to discuss and investigate care specifically, and can no longer get by simply speaking of the more general prophetic call, can only mean that care (And thus also Christianity) has already become something other than what it should be. This is why we should try very hard not to talk of care, or at least not care in and of itself.
   Whew! Let me try to unpack all this a little better with an example. A friend of imine who is Maori recently noted that many pakeha Christians now seem constantly to talk about community, whereas Maori rarely do. Without wanting to take this too far, it would seem that for many Maori community is pretty much self-evident, or presumed, and thus doesn’t require much discussion. In contrast, for most pakeha Christians community is talked about constantly, but is rarely actually apparent. This act of speaking about community, then, this invocation of the latent promise within language, is an attempt to speak into being something that is absent. Language here becomes an attempt to come to terms with something that remains elusive, remain difficult even to conceptualise and formulate. Given all this it might be useful to consider the amount we must speak as a measure of how we we are actually doing, or, more precisely, the extent to which we have actually internalised the spoken, whether it be community or care. When we need to discuss something specificaly, in order to try and bring it into being, then there is an acknowledgment of its absence. Moreover, the act of speaking of something also puts it forward as only an option. So long as we speak specifically about community or care, soa s to bring them into being, we also acknowledge the absence, and therefore their contingent or optional character …

[from Mike Mawson’s article “Why I try not to care (and I don’t want to talk about it)” in the August 2003 edition of Stimulus]