spirit level
Cedric Mayson
What do religious people have to celebrate? Jews have just had their high season. Hindus are praying and feasting for Diwali. Bahais are commemorating the birthday of Bahula. Muslims are about to begin Ramadan. And Christmas is about to leap over the horizon with a shower of stars and angels, cribs and credit cards. What is it all about?
These celebrations all testify to a spiritual component in human experience that picks us up when everything seems to be collapsing, and stands Life back on its feet.
History is a record of the advancement of ordinary people and the collapse of the rich and powerful. We have been taught the other way round, from the conqueror’s viewpoint, which sees a social Darwinism endorsing the survival of the fittest, as one oppressor after another scrawls their name on the pages of the past in political, economic or ecclesiastical ink. It is testimony to the wishful thinking of our teachers.
History needs rewriting from the victims’ point of view. The scenario of political and economic conquerors defeating one another is a side issue. Although the poor, weak and oppressed seem as helpless as children it is these victims, moving like tectonic plates beneath the surface, who have determined the contours of history.
The princes of military, political, economic or ecclesiastical might have strutted their stuff, but have constantly been pulled from their thrones. The proud of heart have been routed; the rich have been sent away empty and the hungry filled with good things including health, education, housing, holidays, liberation, security and justice.
Thebes, Athens and Rome are stuffed with crumbling memorials to those who thought they were gods, but whose destiny was dust. The empires of Europe have crumbled, and these countries have seen those they conquered becoming leaders in the world. In the past two centuries, the poor in Western society have turned their countries upside down.
People today are indoctrinated to believe that the dictators of capitalism, military might, nationalist oppression and religious domination command the Earth. But the truly formative forces are elsewhere.
While the rulers of the United States and Britain are starving or
pulverising the people of Iran or Afghanistan, economic rulers are manipulating globalised poverty, and some religious rulers are piously calling the faithful to peace while aggressively asserting their own empires. The world as a whole is being swept by unprecedented alternative agendas.
But there is also a self-less commitment to promote development, emancipate women, protect children, eliminate poverty, remove racism, heal disease and discover a common ground of being that will undermine the oppressors as it has throughout history. The Durban Conference against Racism abounded with powerless people from around the world who believed the power structures were changing.
The good news at the heart of all faith is about a vital liberating force within the human community. It bursts out of oppressive social or individualistic structures with a rollicking expectancy that defies defeat and death. It is the vision that inspires prophetic reformers and a conviction deep in the hearts of ordinary people.
We know it. The apartheid regime, backed by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, was toppled because the faith of the ordinary people rooted our struggle in the triumphant forces of good. We backed the right horse.
The apparent noisy success of those advertising themselves on the screen of wealth, military supremacy or fundamentalist religion is not a sign of God’s blessing but of the imminent bursting of the balloon. The air pops out, the hocus pocus is revealed as a hollow pretence, and underneath them new initiatives have been growing all the time.
History shows cycles of belief and behaviour, turning the pages like chapters in a book, and many suspect we are living through one of those chapter changes now. Evil systems are being rejected, collapsing from the inside. People who used to be obsessed with life after death are now more concerned to find love and justice in life before death.
The ability to unleash war upon one another is one that most ordinary people of the world have ruled out. They abhor those who hit the World Trade Centre, but also refuse to toast George W Bush and Tony Blair. The real power at the heart of humanity is not the ability to kill, claw for power or denigrate others. It is hope.
Spiritual festivals are always a mixture of laughter and tears, of celebration and repentance. Confession stimulates the mind to rethink our relationship to the powers for good that operate within the human community. Are we energising the forces of good to transform society, or wallowing in the pessimism of evil? It is the challenge to all of us, archbishops and atheists, presidents and potentates, editors and columnists. Are we celebrating Life as it really is, or letting demoralising oppressors trip us up to rob and rape us?
People come together at religious festivals to celebrate the hope that is within them. We are going to find the answer to cancer and to Aids. We are going to defeat poverty and fear, crime and corruption. We shall have leaders of peace, not leaders of terrorism. We shall transform our country together. We shall have a new Africa. Get a keen eye for history and celebrate hope.