If we are people of faith, we might ask whether the God we serve has planned things to be like this? I suggest that the God or Being/s who created the universe would be likely to have set all things in place for justice and equality. On the other hand, God/s set us free to make our own decisions about what we do with life and resources and the way we treat others, otherwise our relationships with the Divine would be almost meaningless and we would never “grow up”.
Obviously, if it is true that any injustices are the consequences of human decisions, then each generation faces choices about how we deal with the current situation. It also means that life is, of its very essence, corporate. While we make our individual choices about the way we live, major inequities and struggles for peace and survival can really only be solved by the way we live together.
This joint responsibility also means that we face dealing with the consequences of our histories. For example, much poverty and oppression in the world is related to past colonial history, especially actions taken by European powers of in earlier centuries. These nations assumed that they had the right to take over African, Asian and Latin American people, to use people as slaves and steal the resources from the land in which they lived. In Africa, it is often said that the colonisers “brought the Bible in one hand and took the land with the other”.
In response to leadership, together we abolished slavery. We no longer “own” other people in the direct sense. However, it is hard not to see many, many struggling people around the world as being part of other forms of slavery – working for more powerful people and being given barely enough to eat, slaving away for long hours to profit the owners of their industries or land.
Then there is all the violence and terrorism, often in the name of competing religions, and wars still fought around different nationalities, political or religious groups. So many millions of desperate people are pushed away from their homelands into refugee camps, fleeing their countries across borders or onto boats.
If we were to transform the world, or even our own country, into a place of compassion and justice, where would we start? How could we, together, gather the strength of power for good so that we restore the dreams of our Creator and move towards a new life for us all? There is no easy way to do this, but together we might make beginnings in the communities around us and support agencies that make moves for good in faraway places.
Because it is only together that we can really make a difference, we could also begin by relating in friendship across religions, cultures, genders, races and social groups. When we look each other in the face and see that we are all human, maybe we could move across some of the historic and current divisions that have caused so much pain and injustice.
We could openly and honestly own our history. For example, we are not, and never have been, “the land of the fair go” and most of us simply took this land from its Indigenous people. What do we owe those who have suffered through our forebears and through us? What would your priority be if you could be part of the changing of the world?
