So, what do we do about the Club? We own up. We say, ‘I am in the Club.’ Only from that owning can we start to change it. It’s just like the Twelve Steps of an addiction programme.
We realise that we are addicted. The Club needs our addiction. We are addicted to the news, to soap operas, to living in comfort, to box sets, to takeaways, to our foreign holidays, to our meat-eating or vegan lifestyles (yes, vegans, sorry but you’re supporting Monsanto, a key member of the Club) unless you are 100% organic and, if you live somewhere like the UK, currently you are very unlikely to be living a sustainable lifestyle – but I honour you for trying all the same.
Then we do everything we can to step away from the Club. We stop using it as much as we can; we stop buying into the idea that violence can ever be the answer, even (or especially) in our entertainment – and we bless it. Even if we move to our own plot of land and live self-sustainably without electricity or oil, we still need that final, magic, formula of blessing. But don’t despair. Blessing is not the soft option. It’s not just available to people with faith either. A blessing is a call for Grace and Grace is like Hope; a thing with feathers, a magical transformative energy. Grace brings miracles to faith-filled and secular. We are going to need a miracle. The planet Earth needs a miracle.
Let us ask for that miracle by blessing, by blessing our planet every day, by blessing each other, by blessing our politicians, by blessing those who despise us and use us and persecute us (while simultaneously and clearly calling them out, for sure!).
Violence begets violence. Fights beget fights. As Einstein said, you can’t solve a problem with the same energy that created it. To end the Club we have to love each other, and to own up that the only way the Club can survive is if we love its benefits more than we love our neighbours and the whole of Creation.
And perhaps – just perhaps – we do follow those Twelve Steps.
We admit that we are powerless over the Club – that our lives have become unmanageable.We come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.We make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him/Her/It.We make a searching and fearless moral inventory of our own membership of the Club.We admit to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our addiction to the Club.We become entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.We humbly ask Him/Her/It to remove our shortcomings.We make a list of all beings (not just people but animals and plants) we have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all.We make direct amends to such beings wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.We continue to take personal inventory and when we use the Club for our benefit, promptly admit it.We seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him/Her/It, praying only for knowledge of Their will for us and the power to carry that out.Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we dry to carry this message to Club members and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
‘That’s unrealistic,’ you say.
‘That’s impossible,’ you say.
Is it?