I suppose there has always been a great deal wrong in human society. We can be compassionate and imaginative and heroic, but also cruel and greedy and violent beyond belief.
If you read about the way King Leopold of Belgium treated the African slaves in the rubber plantations, or the tortures inflicted to extract religious confessions in the Middle Ages, or simply enquire into the treatment of pigs in meat plants and slaughterhouses, and the preparation of bulls for bullfights, I’ll hazard a guess the horror will never entirely leave you; it will be stamped on your soul like a brand burnt into slaves and domestic cattle.
We can look back on plagues and tortures, on slave ships and footage of shell-shocked soldiers, and be abjectly grateful for our boringly comfortable lives.
And yet we know, the stakes are even higher today. The greed and consumerism of the human race is in process of destroying our actual entire world. And in their hubris and cunning stupidity, governments and corporations seem to imagine greenwash is all that’s required.
And of course the miseries of the vivisection laboratory and the factory farm, the slave labour and the sweatshop, the predatory sexuality that snuffs out the happiness of childhood, the gross inequalities that require masses to live with despair so that the privileged few can wallow in obscene levels of wealth, the corrupt politics obtaining power through oppression and deception — not to mention the wife-beating and the gay-bashing and now the new feminist sport of persecuting trans women — these never end.
We are in a peculiar time of intensification, because the old order is dying — but tightening its grip because it is against its nature to let go. We are in a time of heightening authoritarianism challenged by grassroots rebellion, all around the world. The edifices of power are crumbling, and life in the rubble is uncomfortable. The opposite poles of government and governed are increasing characterised not by support and respect, producing harmony and peace, but jealousy and opportunism and antagonism. We are at war with ourselves.
Our proposed solutions to all that ails us are also polarised. In his budget this week, the UK chancellor announced with satisfaction that growth and employment is increasing while debt is shrinking: “Let there be no doubt, our plan is working,” he said.
Looking at the people living in vans outside the row houses of our urban streets, the people begging on doorsteps in every town, the increasing number dependent on food banks, the gradual starvation of our education system, our utilities, our transport infrastructure, our police, the discharge of raw sewage into the sea all around the coastline of our island nation, the disruption to food supplies and the the collapse of so many businesses under Brexit, I had to wonder what planet he is on.
But it intrigues me that the Brexit vote, and the vote between the political left and right, display — again — polarity. An almost even split.
So we are living in days of unrest when there is much to concern us, when a response seems to be required of us, when people are marching in the streets and crying out for support — and yet the clamour is not unified but polarised. The placards and flags of one challenge those of the opposing side. Where there is no vision the people perish, but where the vision is present but intensely antagonist, there is ugliness, war, and dissension. Together, we stand. Divided, we fall. But we cannot unite when we see things so differently. And all the while, behind the scenes, opportunists turn circumstances of chaos and disaster to personal gain. But with climate change upon us, they have nothing to crow about. They too sail on this ship that is sinking.
What to do?
I put it to you that never was there a time when personal holiness was so absolutely required of us — to live with transparent authenticity and integrity the Gospel of Christ. By this, he said, will people know that you are my disciples; that you love one another. If you aren’t a hundred per cent sure what love is (there are, after all, many definitions of it) I suggest that it is effectually indistinguishable from kindness.
The Gospel of Christ, therefore, by his own definition, is not about being right but being kind. Christ calls us to love one another, and it’s an odd thing, but true, that we love most not those who have been kind to us, but those to whom we have been kind. That’s right. Being kind fosters love. Even if you don’t love someone much in the first place, you will love them more if you are kind to them, and less if you are not. It always works that way.
The way of the Spirit is not a matter of moral or theological rectitude — correctness — it’s about the authenticity and integrity that allows the mystery of the great I Am to shine through; being who you really are, living with such transparency, such simplicity that the light of your being — the flame of the Spirit in the sanctum of your heart — can be seen.
This is a time when we are required to hold our light steady, to keep our footing, to resist the whirl and spin, the cross-currents created by polar opposites.
Now is a time when we do well to live so humbly and quietly, to become so lowly and so small, that we walk beneath the thunderclaps and clashes of the Titans, and make with our own feet a network of tracks of peace at the grassroots level. This is a time to live below the radar, to stay centred and keep radiating peace. Neither the practice nor the vocabulary of war is helpful in these days. Stay back from antagonism, from demonising others and calling them evil. Refuse to be drawn.
But that doesn’t mean doing nothing. Part of the strength of humilis, the lowly, unseen, simple life, is that it gives back to you the time and space to observe and notice and think and wisely choose.
If you live small and quiet and slow, if you hold fast to humility and peace, if you choose gentleness and kindness, if you stop to listen and have time to see, then you will be part of the generation of the new dawn that is surely coming. Your choice will, in and of itself, determine the world in which you live.
And if we all do it, it’ll be a movement, and that is the way we change the world.
Anxiety, pressure, and hurry, are behind many of the poor choices we make. Ill-considered decisions made while we had too much going on to think straight — too many demands and commitments; fear of what others might think of us or do to us; self-imposed deadlines and targets.
In these days when the polarities are churning up the ground, make of it a ploughed field where you sow the seeds of peace.
It doesn’t have to be anything important or big, it can just be about feeding the wild birds, or walking slowly enough for the little legs of the child whose hand you are holding, or choosing to buy milk from the farm where the cows are allowed to keep their calves, or sharing a cup of tea and cheerful conversation with someone whose political views are the opposite of your own, or putting a tin of baked beans in the food bank basket at the supermarket, or planting a tree, or giving your sleeping bag to Care4Calais, or buying your bread and vegetables loose instead of wrapped up in plastic, or washing your fleece in a special bag to keep the microfibres out of the ocean, or smiling to your neighbour and stopping to say hello. One foot in front of the other, one deliberate decision at a time. This is how we build the kingdom, this is the only way we have to change the world.
When I was a young woman, we had a rusty old van that had to be nurtured along. In the winter, it wouldn’t start, but under the bonnet was fixed a crank handle. You could take it out and fit it to a hole low down at the front, and use it to turn the engine manually. It was the only way to get it going in the cold.
Our small acts of faithfulness, practised every day in a lowly and authentic life, are our crank handle to restart the engine of this rusty old world and make it go a little further down the road.
And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God? [Micah 6.8]
