Boxing Day, as far as I’m aware, is yet another day on which to share the love in a season which is all about sharing the love.
My impression was that, on Boxing Day, people prepared or “boxed up” whatever they could from the feast the night before and saw that it got to people who, otherwise, would have no part in the celebration.
It isn’t a substitute for universal abundance. It didn’t address the situation of the poor in any kind of satisfactory or thoroughgoing manner (we will do that), but it was at least a start and a reminder.
A friend and I were reading a history of Dr. Barnardo over Christmas. Thomas Barnardo was one of the leaders in shining the light of public attention on the conditions of the poor in the East End of London in the second half of the 19th century.
He was one of many in Great Britain and the United States who began to nourish social consciousness and the social conscience during late Victorian times. Others included General William Booth who started the Salvation Army, the founders of the YMCA/YWCA, and the men and women of Settlement Houses like Toynbee Hall in England and Hull House in the U.S.
Writers who breathed life into the social conscience included Charles Dickens in England, who shone the light on the situation of the downtrodden, Benjamin Disraeli in England, whose novel Sybil also revealed the plight of the poor, and Charles Monroe Sheldon in the United States, who wrote In His Steps and gave impetus to a new movement called the Social Gospel. Others like Victor Hugo in France, in Les Miserables, also fought for social justice.
They laid the foundation for a new kind of work. It wasn’t mission work per se, which was a common form of outreach in those days. It was a new form called social work. The urban poor, born of the enclosure movement and the industrial revolution, for the first time, came to be seen as human beings instead of a nuisance and an obstacle to society’s progress.
Dickens’ A Christmas Carol had a lot to do with making Christmas the holiday it is today. I never tire of watching Alistair Sims’ performance as Scrooge. But it also highlighted the plight of the miserable.
But now, this generation, for the first time in history, has the opportunity to globally address the problem of inequity in the world, of poverty in the midst of plenty in a thoroughgoing manner. Soon worldwide prosperity will be here.
I’m led to believe that it will start in a few countries which are well-developed and then be brought by lightworkers from those countries into more and more other countries around the world, until the conditions of poverty and inequity that have existed probably since forever, but perhaps worst in the last five hundred years, are eliminated from the Earth.
Scrooge fell asleep on Christmas Eve and dreamed dreams that shocked him into realization of the misery he was creating around him. He reformed his character to make himself a byword for character reformation.
We don’t have to be visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past to shock us into awareness. The Divine Mother is waking us up mostly gently, sometimes not.
And we get to “dream big,” as Archangel Michael said, and later to have the funds that will allow us to turn our big dreams into reality. We will build a world that works for everyone – for everyone, that is, who wishes to be part of it. Some will choose not to and that is their right.
But for those who want to join us in ridding the planet of violence, inequality, discrimination, slavery, and poverty, we of this generation now will have that chance.
And we are equal to the task. Give us the tools and we will finish the job, I said to Archangel Michael once. And he replied that all it would take was a few more months of making sure that those who stood in our way were gotten out of the way so that our efforts were not undermined.
Well, lately there have been many rumors that the corrupted ones are being escorted off the ranch (1) and we are ready. It’s approaching the time for us to build Nova Earth and anchor in the Christmas vision of peace on Earth and goodwill towards all.
Footnotes
(1) See for instance “Al Hodges Claims Victory in CMKX Suit, Reveals Sting Operation Against the Cabal,” Dec. 26, 2013, at http://goldenageofgaia.com/2013/12/al-hodges-claims-victory-in-cmkx-suit-reveals-sting-operation-against-the-cabal/.
