A Little People’s Revolution – Saint Hilda’s Tide
The ‘Establishments’ – Democratic and Republican, Conservative and Liberal, religious and secular - have often failed to understand the sea change in popular voting and membership habits among ordinary people. Hilary Clinton attributes her election loss to a late intervention about her emails - she has failed to see the underlying sea change in attitudes. UK’s PM Theresa May perhaps sees it. She says ‘change is in the air’. She identifies that millions of people across the world who are squeezed between the economic top and bottom feel left behind by globalisation – they feel they have lost job opportunities, they have lost identity of place and community as mass migrations take place. So some of them turn not only on the establishments who rule from within their comfortable bubble, but also on incomers. Racist minorities now feel they have permission to make scapegoats of other races as Hitler made a scapegoat of Jews. Yes, The Little People are rising up. They don’t care if generations of self-sacrificing work and knowledge of how to sustain civilisation is thrown out along with the selfishness of the elites. At least they can hit out and have their brief day. But the inevitable price is the break-up of good social order within and between nations. A century after ‘the war to end wars’, the likelihood of wars even among democracies increases, and even of a new Dark Age..
What is the answer to these waves of selfishness versus selfishness? The answer is a wave of unselfishness. Some call this a new monasticism. It is a grassroots movement of people who love God and neighbour. On Saint Hilda’s Day, November 17 those in the Community of Aidan and Hilda who commit to this way renew their vows. Someone makes their first vows with us who are gathered at St. Oswald’s Pastoral Centre, near Whitby for a retreat. Another makes hers in Australia. An Australian member told me via Skype that he has learned more about the ways of Jesus from Aboriginal people who humbly allow themselves to be nourished by the earth and their kith and kin than from Christians whose creeds remain only in their heads. Graham Booth tells us at our retreat about Night Services in Danish churches where young people come out of night clubs, sit on bean bags before a huge cross made up of broken glass and thousands of candles that speak about light through vulnerability. It is the way of Jesus. It is the only hope as darkness gathers on our world.
