Earth Day 2015: The Church and the Writing on the Wall

You have praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which do not see or hear or know; but the God in whose power is your very breath, and to whom belong all your ways, you have not honored. (Daniel 5:23)

Episcopalians read the story of Daniel interpreting the writing on the wall for King Belshazzar in our Daily Office readings for today and tomorrow (Daniel 5:1-12 and Daniel 5:13-30). These readings just happen to fall on Earth Day and the day after this year. For those wanting something chosen intentionally for Earth Day, our calendar provides a collect and lessons remembering John Muir, Naturalist and Writer, and Hudson Stuck, Priest and Environmentalist. But in many ways, I find the readings from Daniel more appropriate for Earth Day 2015.

Daniel names Belshazzar's sin: praising idols instead of the true God “whose power is your very breath”. Daniel notes that Belshazzar should have known better because he had seen his own father, Nebuchadnezzar, suffer the consequences of his pride. The writing on the wall spells out the consequence. God “has numbered the days” of Belshazzar’s kingdom. By the time Belshazzar saw the writing on the wall and understood the message, it was too late.

Our sin this Earth Day is that we have set idols of material and psychological comfort and comparatively short-term economic gain above following God’s commandment to care for God’s creation. Like King Belshazzar, we should know better. We have all of Scripture to tell us stories of people who set selfish goals ahead of obedience to God, and we have science to tell us what to expect to unfold from our failure to care for creation at least as much as we care for our temporary wealth and comfort. Scientists also tell us that this a critical point in our history. We know that we face worsening climate disruption under the best of circumstances, and if we don’t cut our greenhouse gas emissions very significantly and very soon, those disruptions will be more and more catastrophic. Our days may well be numbered.

Creation care is something that the church in the United States tends to tack on to our thinking, our prayers, and our budgets after other items considered more essential to our mission. Environmental stewardship is treated like something new instead of an essential piece of Christian spirituality that we are reclaiming and re-acknowledging. 

Repentance is in order this Earth Day. We repent certainly for the damage we have done to God’s creation and the effects of that damage on our sisters and brothers and other living things around the world, but we also need to repent for the damage we have done to our relationship with God through our failure to care for God’s beloved creation. Like Belshazzar, we have allowed our hubris to get in the way of a wholesome relationship with God. The Catechism teaches (p. 848, The Book of Common Prayer) that sin is “the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people, and with all creation.” Surely that is a sin to confess before God this Earth Day.

The Anglican Communion adopted the Five Marks of Mission several years ago. The Fifth Mark of Mission is “to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth”. A look at budgets at all levels and at where we put our energy, prayers, attention, and our investments show that environmental stewardship, considered essential to the church’s mission, is poorly funded and often neglected. By including creation care in the Marks of Mission, we demonstrate that on some level we know this is essential to the church’s work, but yet we fail to act as if this were an essential piece of the church’s work. 

Please pray with me this Earth Day for us to truly repent and to find the grace, wisdom, and love to heed the writing on the wall before it is too late.

Earth Day / Third Sunday of Easter

“They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their presence.” (Luke 24: 42-43)

Today is Earth Day; Friday was the second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Because the oil “spill” ended up being so much bigger than we realized it would be on Earth Day 2010, Earth Day probably will be shadowed by the anniversaries of the oil spill for many years to come.

Today is also the Third Sunday of Easter, and our Gospel lesson for today (Luke 24: 36-48) is about the resurrected Jesus appearing to the disciples. Jesus asks if they have anything to eat, and they give him a piece of broiled fish, which Jesus eats. Luke’s report of Jesus eating the fish helps us to see that Jesus was truly there, that this wasn’t an apparition. It’s striking to have this reading as we observe Earth Day this year.

Fish was a basic food for the disciples and Jesus, as it was and remains for many people in the world. Fish is a principal source of protein for many people, and fishing – the occupation of several of the disciples – is still the way many people make a living.

Two years after the Gulf oil spill, fish near the oil spill site are sick. (See Cain Burdeau’s article for the Associated Press.) Evidence connecting the ulcers, black streaks, and damaged fins to the oil spill is circumstantial; what is known is that something isn’t right in that part of the Gulf ecosystem.

According to a report in the May 7, 2012 edition of The Nation entitled “Two Years After: BP’s Toxic Legacy”, people who live along the Gulf Coast are also sick. Along with fighting poor health, people have had to fight to get access to proper medical care. The article gives details of some of the justice and fairness issues involved. Surely Jesus, who healed the sick, would have us be concerned about those suffering from exposure to toxins.

The Gulf of Mexico isn’t the only place where fishing doesn’t provide the sort of healthful protein and steady livelihood it used to. The health of our ocean ecosystems as well as many freshwater ecosystems is suffering from pollution by various toxins, plastic pollution, loss of habitat, ocean acidification caused by global warming, and other changes in ecosystems brought on by warming waters. Something so basic as catching a fish and grilling it, something so basic that Luke uses it to help us see the reality of the risen Christ, is now something we can’t take for granted.

“What would Jesus eat?” may be a more instructive guide to action than “What would Jesus do?”  What basic foods will remain sustainably available to people around the world who have traditionally relied on fish and seafood for daily protein? As Saturday’s forum about the intersection of poverty and the environment   made clear, issues of environmental sustainability, poverty, and human health are interconnected. The church has always served Christ through serving the poor and sick; in today’s world, we must extend that service to the earth’s ecosystems in order to truly serve our neighbors near and far.

Grief

Good Friday / Earth Day

For Christians walking through Holy Week, Good Friday is a day that stirs deep emotions. There is an emptiness in churches where the altars have been stripped. Our Good Friday liturgy begins in silence. We read John’s account of Jesus’ last hours (John 18:1 – 19:37), from the betrayal and arrest of Jesus through his death on the cross and the piercing of his side. The remembrance of Jesus’ pain – physical, emotional, and spiritual -- calls up deep sorrow and grief from us.

This year, Good Friday falls on the same date as Earth Day. Grief for the ways we have harmed the earth provides a common element between the two observances. Just as we go through our Good Friday grief and come out on the other side with Easter joy, the grief we experience when we witness environmental degradation and contemplate the future can show us some direction to find our way out to a place of meaning and Christian hope.

The average amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for March 2011 measured at the Mauna Loa observatory was 392.40 ppm; 350 ppm is generally considered to be the upper limit of the amount of CO2 that is safe for human beings and the other living things that sustain human life. (The last March reading below 350 ppm was in 1987. I recommend a look at the graph on the CO2 Now website) Rising CO2 levels result in ocean warming and acidification which are damaging shellfish and corals, and of course in rising world temperatures which melt ice, make oceans rise, and do much more. As the atmosphere warms, severe weather events become more frequent. Yesterday morning, The Weather Channel posted an update of severe weather in the United States in April. With the month not yet over, TWC says we have set a “tentative” record for the number of tornadoes in April. They also report this:

There have been over 5200 severe weather reports (tornadoes, hail, and high winds/wind damage) so far in April. On average, only about 3300 severe weather reports are tallied in an entire April nationwide.

There is grief in many communities where people have lost loved ones, homes, and businesses to tornadoes and other severe weather this spring.

The environmental damage linked to carbon emissions is only part of the damage that causes us grief this Earth Day. Japan has an ongoing nuclear crisis. Species extinction continues at an accelerated rate. Plastic pollution is everywhere. In a Huffington Post piece called Crucified Creation and the Hope of Eco-nomics Doug Demeo, a friend and GreenFaith Fellow, says that when he looks around the earth today “the weight of creation crucified seems too much to bear”. Doug talks about mountain top removal and hydro-fracking among other “environmental woes”.

Our Good Friday liturgy does something in the midst of our grief. After the story of Jesus’ final hours has been read, and perhaps a homily preached or a hymn sung that provides more reflection on the reading, we pray the Solemn Collects. Rather than staying stuck under the dead weight of grief, we open our hearts to the concerns of the Church and the world. With our hearts already broken open, these tend to be profound prayers.

It can be difficult to know where to begin doing something with our grief for the earth. With no significant national or international effort to address climate change or prevent future oil spills or stop covering the planet with plastic, we know our efforts are valiant but probably not enough. Yet just as our hearts are touched by Good Friday, our hearts are broken open by this grief, too. Prayers for the earth and her people are a good place to begin. We might pray for the Church and all people, praying that we continue to find meaning and hope in our lives even as the chances of sustaining life as we have known it on our planet get increasingly smaller. We might pray for open eyes, ears, minds, and hearts, for the ability to understand what we are facing and the will to do something about it.

The third of the Solemn Collects asks for the cry of those in misery and need to come to God; it also prays for God to “give us…the strength to serve them for the sake of him who suffered for us.” Gathering our strength and doing whatever we can to prevent and alleviate the human misery that results from environmental degradation is the only choice we have as followers of Christ. Environmentalist Bill McKibben said it in a different way in his speech at the Power Shift gathering in Washington, D.C. last weekend: “The only thing that a morally awake person can do when the worst thing that’s ever happened is happening is try to change those odds.”

When we choose to acknowledge the problems we face and to work to address them with so little evidence that we can succeed is when we draw on our faith and our hope; when we make that choice, we get out from under our grief and, drawing on our faith for strength, gather energy for the work ahead.

One Year After

It’s been a year since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Over this year, reports about the severity of the resulting oil spill and its effects have varied widely, and there remain conflicting reports about the long-term effects of this disaster. What do we know? What have we learned?

One thing on which the majority of people looking at its effects can agree is that we don’t know enough at this point to know what to expect in the future for the gulf and its coastal communities.

Immediately after the explosion last year, this blog had two posts that talked about it. One of them, The Day After, was written on April 23, the day after Earth Day. It talked about the discouragement of having something like this happen around the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day, especially given that an oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara in 1969 is said to have inspired Sen. Gaylord Nelson’s proposal to have such a day. But then the post added this: “The good news the day after Earth Day is that there doesn’t seem to be a major oil spill, though there is an oil slick that at last report…measured ten miles by ten miles.” The days immediately after the explosion were like that – conflicting information, an effort to minimize worries about the disaster, and a public eager to believe the more positive reports.

On April 24 I posted Two Days After. The main point of the piece was that environmental problems were most probably not going to be solved by either the political establishment or industry. The Kerry-Graham-Lieberman climate bill had been put on hold. As for the oil rig explosion, there was this:

The Coast Guard discovered today that, contrary to earlier reports, the well that fed the oil rig that exploded and burned last week, collapsing into the Gulf of Mexico on Earth Day, is leaking oil. This evening’s story from the AP about the situation reports that the oil slick has grown to a twenty by twenty mile square.

Things suddenly looked very different! As information continued to change over weeks and months, it was often hard to tell the size and scope of the disaster.

An Associated Press article from this week, Scientists: Gulf health nearly at pre-spill level, surveys some of the scientific opinions about where we stand a year later. While there is some disagreement, the overall consensus is that the health of the Gulf waters is close to where it was before the oil spill. That rating is not particularly high. The article explains:

If that pre-spill grade isn't impressive, it's because the Gulf has long been an environmental victim_ oil from drilling and natural seepage, overfishing, hurricanes and a huge oxygen-depleted dead zone caused by absorbing 40 percent of America's farm and urban runoff from the Mississippi River.

A close reading of the article reveals that while this standard sort of overall rating is back to where it was, many of the scientists expressed concerns in interviews about what we might see down the road that either hasn’t shown up yet or isn’t the sort of thing taken into account in grading the overall health of the gulf. There is simply a lack of data in some areas. Of particular concern are observations of effects on certain animals: dolphins, sea turtles, crabs. Effects on cetaceans (dolphins and whales), for example, can be found here where the NOAA Fisheries unit posts information about the “cetacean unusual mortality event” in the northern Gulf of Mexico.

What do we know? We know that environmental disasters affect all living things, including human beings. We know that ecosystems are complex and there are things we simply don’t know, such as the long-term effects of the dispersants that were used. It’s very difficult to predict the effects of this sort of disaster.

What have we learned? Apart from what scientists and the oil industry might have learned, those of us who aren’t directly involved in it have observed a couple of things. One is that collectively we have short attention spans. Once the aerial shots of the huge oil slick and the close-ups of pelicans covered in oil were gone, we moved on to other things. Little has been done to prevent another such disaster from happening partly because there is not a strong and sustained outcry from the public for policies to change. Things look pretty normal now, and we move on.

Related to this is something else we have learned yet again: we see things as isolated that are really connected. The concerns about the proposed oil pipeline through Nebraska are connected to the Gulf oil disaster; in both cases, local ecosystems are put at risk because of our addiction to oil. The situation in the Gulf is connected to the way we devalue poor people, people of color, and nonhuman creatures. It has to do with an inability to see the connection between our own consumer habits and the suffering of other people. It’s connected very much to the Gospel, to the command to love our neighbors, and to the teaching that the way we treat the most powerless people is the way we treat Christ (Matthew 25).

An assessment not of the science but of some of these other concerns comes from Patty Whitney, a Louisiana coastal communities advocate. Her piece, For Gulf Coast Residents, the Oil Spill Nightmare Continues appeared in Jim Wallis’s God’s Politics blog yesterday. She describes the ongoing social and economic effects of the oil spill on Gulf Coast communities, ending her post with these words:

The cameras and attention needed to bring light upon the injustices that continue are darkened and silent. The plight of the voiceless has been minimized and shrugged off in the name of scoring points for one political party or another in a unique game of one-upmanship. The fact that God’s creations are priceless makes them value-less in our society, which only measures value by the dollar.

So, where are we one year later? Still suffering the impacts of human-made and natural disasters. Still fearing that the other shoe is yet to drop. Still fighting for justice. Still tired. Still aware that God is the Master and the final judge, and that God doesn’t value things by the dollar. We’re counting on that.

**

(Photo courtesy of U.S. Coast Guard)

What Earth Week can learn from Holy Week

...(and conversely)
“Be truthful and get to work.” (David Orr)

Our Holy Week has begun. From the Hosannas of the Palm Sunday liturgy through the remembrance of Christ’s crucifixion on Good Friday, we recall the crucifixion and the events leading up to it. As much as we are able from a distance of some two thousand years, we will look at these things, difficult though it may be to see them and think about them, because the events of Holy Week are a necessary part of the truth of the Easter story.

The point of all of this isn’t to wallow in guilt and suffering, but to deepen and widen our joy at Easter; the point is always the wonder of the Easter message. While we can have a happy Easter morning without observing Holy Week, we appreciate the wonder of the resurrection much more after we have looked at the reality of Christ’s death on the cross. Some folks seem to get stuck in Holy Week and miss the point of it all; others, believers in some variation of positive thinking, avoid Holy Week with its disturbing images of Jesus’ humiliation, its reminders of varying degrees of betrayal by the disciples, and its description of the crucifixion itself. But if we leave out either Holy Week or Easter, we miss the truth of the whole story.

Because Earth Day is April 22, Earth Week and Holy Week coincide this year. Earth Day and Earth Week are meant to focus our attention on our care of the environment, but ways to do that vary widely. Many Earth Week events will simply celebrate being outdoors in the springtime – a fine enough thing in and of itself – without talking about the realities of climate change and pollution and their very real impacts on our lives.

One thing people celebrating Earth Week could learn from the Church is the importance of allowing ourselves to look at and talk about things that are difficult to ponder. Often when I talk about climate change or plastic pollution and share my concerns with people, they know that what I am saying is true, but they tell me that they can’t let themselves “think about that”. This sort of reaction has caused some environmentalists to quit talking about those realities and focus instead on clean energy or green jobs as ends-in-themselves.

David Orr, author of several books including Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse, recently shared the preface to the coming paperback edition of Down to the Wire with the Climate Progress blog. (See David Orr on confronting climate collapse)

David Orr says “Because the issue is unlike any we have ever faced before, it would be difficult enough to handle without deliberate distortion and outright lies. The consequences are global and, beyond some threshold, they will be irreversible and catastrophic.… Yet we continue to talk about climate destabilization as if it were an ordinary issue requiring no great vision, no unshakable resolve, no fear of the abyss.”

He continues:

"Instead, many continue to believe that our failure to respond adequately is the result of our failure to present a positive image. We have, they assert, marinated too long in “doom and gloom.” Their advice, instead, is to be cheery, upbeat, and talk of happy things like green jobs and more economic growth, but whisper not a word about the prospects ahead or the suffering and death already happening. Perhaps that is a good strategy and there is room for honest disagreement. But “happy talk” was not the approach taken by Lincoln confronting slavery, or by Franklin Roosevelt facing the grim realities after Pearl Harbor. Nor was it Winston Churchill’s message to the British people at the height of the London blitz. Instead, in these and similar cases transformative leaders told the truth honestly, with conviction and eloquence."

The point, he goes on to say, “is not to be gloomy or cheery, but to be truthful and get to work.”

In our Holy Week liturgies, we show how to look at the whole truth without getting mired down in “doom and gloom”. Being truthful about why humankind needs the hope of the resurrection in the first place is one piece of what we do; and that truth is incomplete unless we look beyond it to the promise of Easter. As St. Paul knew, there’s no hope without a need for hope. Earth Week could learn from Holy Week the necessity of telling the whole story, the whole truth, both the difficult truths we would rather avoid and the hope we can find beyond that.

Conversely, the Church might consider the words “be truthful and get to work”. If we hear the whole story this week without then going out to serve in Christ’s name, if we celebrate the resurrection of the body without then getting to work as the Body of Christ in the world, we will have avoided once again the truth of the Gospel message. If we truly celebrate Easter, we will have the strength and hope to look at all the difficult things in the world and to bring Christ’s healing love to a world in very great need.

Burning Water

This morning's news includes a report that the Coast Guard is considering burning the oil slick on the Gulf of Mexico. Choosing the controlled burn seems to be the sort of option I often discuss with my students in ethics class: what do we do when faced with two or more options, none of which are desirable? In this case, if the oil slick isn’t burned, forecasters think it will be reaching the Gulf shore, covering birds and beaches with oil and creating a disaster for both wildlife and for people whose incomes depend on tourism along the shore.

The irony of learning that what was left of the oil rig fell into the Gulf of Mexico on Earth Day is compounded by this latest development. Seth Borenstein’s Earth Day article that ran in many newspapers and that I mentioned in my post The Day After looked back at the sorts of environmental issues that were the impetus for the first Earth Day, including the infamous flammability of the Cuyahoga River. So we have come full circle in these forty years. There’s still concern in the United States about offshore oil spills, and there’s still talk of water burning. This time, though, instead of river pollution accidentally catching fire, we are talking about a controlled burn in the Gulf of Mexico as a possible best option.

For Christians, water is a symbol of cleansing, of new life in baptism. Last Wednesday at Hastings College we held an outdoor chapel service designed by students. We started with a water liturgy, pouring water into a container while talking about its meaning for us throughout Scripture and especially in our baptisms. Dr. Dan Deffenbaugh preached about the river of the water of life, using Revelation 22 as the text and reminding us of the wonder and sacredness of the great Ogallala aquifer beneath our feet. At the end of the service, we used smaller containers to take water from our “font” to the trees and flowers around us.

Coming soon after our celebration of the Great Vigil of Easter, when we talk about water in the story of creation, in the Exodus from Egypt through the Red Sea, and in our baptisms, this Earth Day service reinforced for me the sense of the holy meaning of water for Christians.

I wonder today, then, what meaning we give to burning water. What might it say to us on a deeper level if later today we do see images of the huge oil slick burning in the Gulf? What does it mean to have burning water become a recurring image in the United States? What does it mean when setting the water on fire -- and adding to the pollution of our air -- looks like our best option? And I wonder how we can make a connection with the reality of burning water in our liturgy, how we can acknowledge and find hope and redemption in the image of the water that cleanses us and gives us life being so contaminated that it burns.

Two Days After...

An Earth Day Addendum

This evening as we prepare for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, the John 5:1-9 Gospel lesson that is an option for us in two weeks comes to mind. When Jesus notices the man lying by the pool of Beth-zatha, Jesus asks him “Do you want to be made well?”  Two days after Earth Day, after a week in which many people have expressed the desire for a cleaner, more sustainable environment, I’m wondering what we really want. Do we want to be made well?  (See the January 24 post about this passage.) 

The Coast Guard discovered today that, contrary to earlier reports, the well that fed the oil rig that exploded and burned last week, collapsing into the Gulf of Mexico on Earth Day, is leaking oil. This evening’s story from the AP about the situation reports that the oil slick has grown to a twenty by twenty mile square. 

This evening we have also learned that the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman climate bill that was supposed to be unveiled on Monday is now on hold. While many environmentalists considered the bill’s reported goals for carbon dioxide emissions to be too low to be very effective, the bill was a step in the right direction, and evidently the most robust bill that could be thought to have a chance to get passed in today’s partisan political climate. According to Matthew Daly’s article in the Huffington Post, Senator Kerry is talking about this as a short delay. However, the work on immigration reform will not be easy, and the political timing may mean that any climate bill has little chance of getting through the Senate.

Where do we put our trust? The man at the pool was empowered when he trusted Jesus and got up and walked. Trusting in Christ, we may be empowered to get up and galvanize the many grassroots efforts to change our own habits and to advocate for a sustainable environment. We would expect industry and political institutions to solve this problem, but God sometimes does the unexpected and surprises us with the people and circumstances God uses to do God’s work.

Industry and government could -- and probably should -- be leading the way in addressing climate change in a significant way that does justice to the almost incomprehensible importance of the issue. However, industry looks first at profit, and many holding political office today seem to look first at gaining and holding onto power. People of faith, following the Great Commandment of Jesus, have a primary allegiance to God and to loving our neighbors. We are in a position to put the integrity of God’s creation and the needs of our neighbors near and far ahead of profit and power; the voices consistently calling us to the work that needs to be done on behalf of the generations of humankind that follow us may need to come primarily from the church.

The Day After

The 40^th Earth Day is now over, though events centered around it continue. Here in Nebraska, an event called Earth Day Omaha  was held last Saturday, while Earth Day Lincoln  is scheduled for tomorrow at Antelope Park. In between, there have been events large and small around the state, along with lots of television specials, news stories, and commercial events aimed at the day. At its best, Earth Day reminds us to care for our environment and to think about stewardship; at its worst, Earth Day allows us to put a band-aid on environmental problems, encouraging us to continue in our collective denial of the actual state of our environment.

An oil spill off of the coast of Santa Barbara in 1969 is said to have inspired Sen. Gaylord Nelson to propose the first observance of Earth Day.  Forty years later, one of yesterday’s headlines was about an oil rig that had been burning sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. Today we have been learning about the size and nature of the resulting oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico and what effects it may have on living things in the Gulf and along the coast.  The good news the day after Earth Day is that there doesn’t seem to be a major oil spill, though there is an oil slick that at the last report I heard measured ten miles by ten miles.

The lack of progress in some areas can be discouraging. However, an article by Seth Borenstein for the Associated Press that was carried in several newspapers on Earth Day noted areas of progress as well. Entitled Earth Day: No more burning rivers, but new threats, the article begins with the good news that the Cuyahoga River no longer is flammable and smog levels are down significantly in several cities.  

The question now is whether we can continue to make progress and make it rapidly enough to limit the effects of climate change and pollution to levels that prevent significant loss of individual human lives and whole species of plants and animals. Any resolve any of us felt on Earth Day to be better stewards and do more to improve the environment needs to be put into action. If progress is not being made quickly enough, then we will have to act with even more energy to make up what we can for the time that has been lost.

Earth Day is not part of our liturgical calendar; we in the church are still in Easter. The Sixth Sunday of Easter is Rogation Sunday, another good time to think about our stewardship of the Earth’s resources and to pray for God’s blessings on our efforts to use them well. Throughout the Easter season, though, we might contemplate the miracle of the resurrection and God’s assurance that out of death can come abundant life. The day after Earth Day may be clouded by discouraging circumstances, but we are people who always live in hope. Seeing for one day yesterday that many people were willing to participate in some sort of Earth Day activity or discover some small changes they might make that will make a big difference in the long run indicates that people do care about the environment; the work to be done is to increase the level of that care and public understanding about the work ahead of us.

Recovering Greenness

Today’s reading (April 27) from Forward Day by Day ended with these lines from George Herbert’s poem “The Flower”: “Who would have thought my shriveled heart / Could have recovered greenness?”

The past couple of weeks have brought much to feed our souls: a couple of lovely April days, flowering trees, and Earth Day’s reminders both of the wonder of God’s creation and of the heartening increase in environmental consciousness. Just this evening, news is being posted about today’s meeting in Washington to lay the groundwork for a United Nations agreement among the top greenhouse gas polluters to work on slowing or reversing climate change – a step forward.

On the other hand, the past couple of weeks have also brought news of the spread of a new kind of flu, continuing concern about the economy, and Earth Day’s reminders of the severity of the climate crisis and of the effects of pollution on humans and other living things. The less pleasant news seems like enough to shrivel our hearts, while the beauty and wonder of creation and the way our bonds with the Earth pull us toward better stewardship pull us in other direction, to what this 17th century Anglican clergyman and poet called “greenness”.

Late Sunday afternoon I did a little puttering in my garden despite the cool weather. The point wasn’t really the transplanting I was doing, but spending some time outdoors close to the dirt where I could hear the birds singing and see and smell some spring flowers. I had been paying attention all day to the news about the flu virus, and had read Andrew Revkin’s post “Contagion on a Small Planet” on Dot Earth. This post, referencing a Food and Agriculture Organization paper, mentions “the ongoing disruption of ecosystems” as a factor in the creation of “a global commons of disease risk”. The environment, the economy, and this latest health concern are, of course, interconnected, as all things are. As I dug a hole for some creeping phlox, I reflected on how “the environment” both weighed heavily on my mind and provided just the remedy to keep this weight from becoming so heavy as to keep me from acting.

Our Catechism teaches that sin is seeking our own will instead of God’s will, “thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people, and with all creation.” (BCP, p. 848). A return to wholeness requires the restoration of health to this entire network of relationships. When we are in right relationship with God, other people, and all creation, we have the heart and energy to do God’s work with grateful hearts no matter how difficult and heavy the burdens might be. We recover our “greenness” by tending to these relationships and restoring them.

I had experienced this dynamic of burden and restoration during the week as I read about climate change and pollution and prepared an Earth Day sermon for the Wednesday morning chapel service at Hastings College. In the sermon, I told about the tour of the toxic sites of Newark, New Jersey, that was part of the GreenFaith Fellowship training program, so I spent some time reflecting on what I saw then and how it had affected me – more heart-shriveling stuff. But a lot of my reading and writing this time of year is done outside on my kitchen porch. My small yard, the neighboring trees, and the sky provided plenty of wonders to help me recover greenness: bright yellow goldfinches flying in their up-and-down pattern to come get some seeds at the feeder, a pair of golden eagles making an occasional appearance in the sky and a nearby tall tree, baby squirrels learning how to get around in the tree where they were born, a flock of gulls passing over.
And, of course, there were spring flowers, which George Herbert took as a sign of the return of greenness to our hearts and souls as well as to the earth. “The Flower” begins with these lines:

How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring;
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.

Who would have thought my shriveled heart
Could have recovered greenness?