Let a billion lotuses bloom: a contagious mind-virus of decency—Rutger Bregman’s basic message of hope

The lotus, Nelumbo nucifera (Picture source)

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation  
 
(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)

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Given that this morning marks the first day of meteorological spring, it seems important, in these increasingly challenging times, to offer you a modest, hopeful, spring thought for the day. As you can imagine, this is not always easy at the moment, and there is always a temptation to write anodyne, platitudinous lines about the beauty of upspringing snowdrops, aconites, crocuses, and daffodils. Don’t get me wrong: these flowers are beautiful, and their appearance always brings me great pleasure and joy. It is also important to realise, as Jesus realised in his own difficult times, that contemplating the flowers of the field can teach us valuable lessons about how the world is, and about our place within it: lessons about trust rather than anxious control; a re-ordering of our usual priorities; presentness and humility about the future; simplicity and freedom from status competition; receiving life as a shared gift rather than as the opportunity to build an economy of individual accumulation; and so on. But, alas, when it comes to spring flowers, too many Sunday homilies, sermons, and ‘thoughts for the day’ skate superficially over their surface beauty, failing to notice how that beauty is made possible and sustained by something more primordial—something that, when accessed, can truly help us face and deal with the real challenges of daily life.

One “primordial” truth is easy to miss: flowers always emerge into our world clean and luminous from out of darkness. Sometimes this darkness is that of the earth, like the lily of the field; sometimes, like the lotus of Buddhist spirituality, it is the darkness of muddy water. In the case of the lotus, this primordial truth is one reason why the lotus has become for Buddhists a symbol of how a person can bloom in extraordinary and unsullied ways, even though their life is emerging into the light from out of some extremely dark waters. 

 
Figuratively speaking, the “lotus” I wish to speak about this morning is connected to a simple, but vitally important, idea articulated by this year’s Reith Lecturer, the historian Rutger Bregman.

In various talks and interviews (including one I link to here), he notes that when we think about people who appear in our world “lotus-like” and do brave, decent, costly things in dark times, we often imagine they must have been a special kind of person: a moral athlete, a hero by temperament. We assume that they had something the rest of us don’t—extra courage, extra conviction, extra strength, and so on.

But Bregman makes a striking claim based on post-war research into resistance in his home country, the Netherlands, during the Second World War. Researchers interviewed hundreds of people who had hidden Jews, carried messages, forged papers and taken enormous risks. They expected to find a profile—an identifiable “type” of person.

And they didn’t.

Instead, they found something rather more unsettling—and rather more hopeful. The rescuers weren’t a class apart. They looked like everyone else. One historian describes attending ceremonies honouring the “Righteous Among the Nations”, saying it felt like walking into an ordinary underground train: a complete cross-section of humanity.

So what did make the difference?

Well, according to this line of research, one factor predicted moral action with astonishing reliability: someone asked someone else. There were no grand speeches. There was no lifetime of preparation. There were simply direct human requests: “Will you help?” “Will you hide this person?” “Will you carry this letter?” “Will you take this risk with me?”

When people were asked, most said yes.

And this begins to explain something else: why resistance wasn’t evenly spread. It wasn’t simply “more good people here, fewer good people there.” It was social. Local. Contagious. A few people began—then they asked others—who asked others—until courage travelled through a neighbourhood like a kind of moral infection.

Bregman calls it a “mind-virus”—not a virus of fear or hatred, but a virus of decency: the simple, contagious habit of stepping forward when you’re invited to do so.

Now, for us, the point isn’t to romanticise the past and its heroes. Instead, the point is to notice what this all suggests about the present. Most of us care deeply about justice, compassion and the healing of a fractured world, and we go on to talk about big systems—politics, economics, structures—all of which seem to be under pressure and are failing—and, of course, those matter. But Bregman’s idea adds something crucial: systems don’t change unless people change. And people often don’t change until someone asks them to.

So here’s a modest spiritual practice I am going to ask us to begin in this liberal, free-religious community—one that is simple, but not easy:

Let’s not only wish that the world were kinder. Let’s commit regularly to ask someone to do one kind thing with you. Ask a friend to check on a neighbour. Ask a member of the congregation to join you in a visit, a phone call, a meal delivered, a letter written, a donation made, a welcome offered. Ask—not to burden them, not to shame them or make them feel guilty, but to invite them into something good.

I invite you to do this because it seems to me that Bregman is right, and that, to use my enabling image today, if I—if we—wish to see a thousand, a million or a billion lotuses bloom on the surface of our world’s current, very muddy waters, then the “mind-virus” we most need to spread right now is not going to be some brilliant, perfect theological, philosophical or political argument or plan. Instead, it’s going to be found in the simple, humble, but profound courage of an invitation to someone else to do something kind and compassionate with you.