Changing the World by Ray Simpson

The world has changed. Today, the 1 percent who own global businesses pursue endless increase in products and profits and ride roughshod over the Earth, local communities, and workplaces. They reduce human beings to mere consumers. 

In 2016, voters in the UK, USA, and other lands claimed that they wanted to kick out the ruling elites who colluded with this. What they accomplished instead may have been something even worse. As a friend from Germany emailed, "I am going into this new year with a strange feeling that the bow wave of something big is coming our way. The old people in rural East Germany say it feels like it did before Hitler came to power."  

An analysis of the UK Brexit vote by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation confirms that many voters felt cut adrift from the mainstream. People with few educational qualifications and in deprived areas felt powerless, poor, and excluded. In the USA, many white males who had lost their jobs and familiar frameworks were also swayed by slogans that knocked the old mainstream ideas. So the electors "kicked the system," or so they believed.

What can we do about all this? Is there are a part we can all play to bring change to the world, a change that does not lead to tyranny?

Ray Simpson is the author of the Celtic Book of Days: Ancient Wisdom for Each Day of the Year from the Celtic Followers of Christ, available through Amazon.com. 

The "my lot first" philosophy will make the fragmentation of the UK, Europe, USA, and the world more likely. Within the Community of Aidan & Hilda, however, our Way of Life commits us to renounce the spirit of self-sufficient autonomy and to cultivate solidarity with all people. Our mission includes speaking out for the poor, the powerless, and those unjustly treated in our society, and to minister to and with them as God directs. We believe God wants all of us to be a loving, creative stewards of the Earth, of the places where we each live, and of human community as a whole. 

It may seem a hopeless task. But we believe that with God ordinary people can do extra-ordinary things. Elizabeth, Queen of UK and Commonwealth countries, quoted this saying of the newly sainted Teresa of Calcutta in her Christmas Day TV broadcast: "Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love."

Author Charles Eisenstein wrote: "Every act of compassion strengthens the global field of compassion. Every choice of conscience strengthens the global field of conscience." 

Ours is a revolution of the little people who support one another as we transform the world from the bottom up.

Ray Simpson is the author of several books on Celtic spirituality, including Celtic Christianity: Deep Roots for a Modern Faith and The Celtic Book of Days: Ancient Wisdom for Each Day of the Year from the Celtic Followers of Christ, and services as the Founding Guardian of the international Community of Aidan and Hilda, www.aidanandhilda.org.