The New Story Journey embodies a vision not only of the kind of world we want to see, but how we might get there. Our June conversation touches on the question of how to imagine a fairer world and overcome injustice without repeating it.
That must happen at all levels of society, from the grassroots to the ivory towers. For most of us, most of the time, it will happen in local community more than anywhere else. And because the future is a conversation across the entire world, and wisdom arises from connection - not separation, those local communities will be resourced by the ideas, experience, and faith of people from many places.
In this week’s blog post, we're grateful to share the wisdom of our friend Boyd Wilson, who writes from Aotearoa, New Zealand:
This abandoned cottage speaks to me of the enormous post-Covid challenges ahead, and some of the social heritage in our recovery toolbox.
I suggest that the long-term issues need to be addressed now, not later, in conversations beginning in and fermenting from local (neighborhood, rural district) folk who each bring not an agenda but a listening heart. Such a conversation may begin casually between two, growing to no more than say nine individuals, each bringing concern for the future within and beyond the next generation or two, priority for the most vulnerable, questions rather than rehearsed answers.
Diversity – of gender, age, race and ethnicity, faith tradition or none, degree of poverty whether material, of education, of hope – will be vital but with no place for fixed belief in an exclusivist elite. The shape and direction of the local process must not be imposed or mentored “from above.” Nor should it adopt a defined goal. Participants should seek to share deeper understandings of local context – the story of the natural environment, of how the human presence changed through the generations and what it looks like now, of the good news and the bad in the addressing of justice. Actions – small, each perhaps unimpressive alone, even ridiculed – will ensue as the process ferments. Local conversations may connect with others but each should retain its own integrity. Wider resources to be referenced should include excellence in objective journalism (too often, it seems, subsumed by shallow froth and slanted op-ed pieces), the arts, faith narratives without pat institutional dogma, books (Paolo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed was a very long time ago inspiration as I sought the meaning of being community in full context).
All this will be recognized as idealistic. Grassroots reality is always messy. Some local processes will simply peter out. Others may be absorbed into institutions (political, religious) that may seem to at least acquiesce to power sources feeding the underlying, threatening issues. Real-life is surely not meant to be tidy! But shared, grassroots passion for deep hope is much more powerful than the powers-that-be can grasp. It’s about gentle subversion, the practice of living generously, vulnerably, in simple dignity in the face of the forces of me-first individualism, dependency on faith that the establishment mysteriously knows best.
I’m far too old to offer a credible prescription even if I had one but will offer a few more (admittedly gratuitous, even trite) principles:
Let’s rebuild foundations of local community where every person, nice or not, rich or poor, is recognized, gifts valued, needs acknowledged. Let’s remember that the Latin roots of the word “community” mean a process not of abstraction but of actual sharing. So local means small. If wider society is to be leavened with hope and justice the process must be from the grassroots up, beginning with partnership, family, closest neighbours. Be sensitive to neighbours who appear to be invisible to, ignored by, the dominant community process.
Let’s acknowledge that the future belongs to the most gifted young generations in all of history.
Let’s know in our bones that a just future requires simpler lifestyles.
Let’s not be miserable; rather, let’s always gratefully celebrate what’s good, beautiful, hopeful, naming the values immeasurable in mere monetary digits.
Let’s balance the wonderful toolbox of digital technology with deep wisdom, a realistic mandate of hope extending at least two generations. We must be informed by science rather than gossip. Yet we must trust in the inherent goodness of people and in true (thus open, searching, deeply centered, earthed) faith.
We inheritors of the game-changing industrial-technological revolution, the taking into elite ownership of what had been common resources and the Enlightenment in Europe, need to listen to the wisdom of more mythic, more grounded, cultures. In Aotearoa New Zealand that obviously begins with Tikanga (the cultural way of) Maori and Pasifika but the listening needs to be global.
Let’s re-think what we mean by money. That doesn’t necessarily mean a lurch away from historic capitalism but away from the “economic growth” mantra of the neoliberalism that fails to value whatever is not measured in, for example, the Gross Domestic Product. Whatever the merits claimed for faith in unfettered, un-earthed, market forces, we must accept that the so-called “trickle-down” effect has resulted in greater inequality not only of material measures but also of hope. Ultimately, this trend can surely end only in disaster for most.
Let’s acknowledge that humankind belongs within the ecology of all life on Earth, but with the special gifts of information, imagination, power, and spiritual mandate to care for the whole planet. We must re-learn the deep meaning of land.
In both social justice and ecological healing, priority must be given to the most damaged and marginalized, often the hardest-to-love. (Yes, that may sometimes be via empowering for the greater good people and resources that may not at first be deemed among the poorest of the poor.)
Let’s be patient. Whatever the developments in the last two generations for which we’ve cause to be grateful, the trends now proving non-sustainable are likely to take at least another two generations to correct.
Words by Boyd Wilson. Boyd Wilson is a former agricultural journalist who turned to church ministry in a full rural context. He lives in detached, somewhat contemplative retirement in Auckland, New Zealand.