Three Ways To Change The World
Three Steps to Change the World: Satish Kumar, in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine suggests the following.
1) Be the change that you wish to see in the world.
2) Communicate the change by learning new skills or using creative avenues open to you.
3) Organise the change through appropriate networks - or develop your own.
A.J. Nickerson in Cambridge Papers Vol 20 No.4 analyses Modern Spirituality in western lands. Millennial and Gen-Z cohorts are most likely to describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated. A 2020 VICE Media Group report concluded that 75% are 'turning towards alternative methods to get in touch with a 'higher power' (mostly occult practices such as crystals, witchcraft, and astrology or pantheism or psychedelics) yet only 11 per cent say their soul feels fulfilled.
This is part of a widespread revolt both against the secular consensus that material life is the only reality, and aganst the claims of religions to have exclusive truth which become a form of abuse when people are required to deny who they are in order to become a believer.
Nickerson thinks we can usefully turn to Christian literary giants such as T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis. For them the ways of Jesus do not close us down but open us up. For Dosteyevsky ways to Divine Illumination embrace truth, beauty and goodness. Such poets mine into the universal longing for 'something beyond', and also mine into stumblings into the Cosmic All-Knowing through particular, concrete encounters with one Person - Jesus. Eliot concluded that the Incarnation was the proper occupation for anyone captivated by the mysteriousness of the world. Through the Particular we are born into the Cosmic.
Although churches may be accused of closing divine possibilities down, in this season of Epiphany or Theophany, when Christians discover fresh divine adventures though all the senses and through the glories of arts and creation, why not open up instead of remining closed?
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