Revisiting the Habakkuk Response

Though the fig tree does not blossom,
   and no fruit is on the vines;
though the produce of the olive fails
   and the fields yield no food;
though the flock is cut off from the fold
   and there is no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
   I will exult in the God of my salvation.

Habakkuk 3:17-18

When I read today’s Daily Office lessons, the lesson from Habakkuk (Habakkuk 3:1-18) helped me get farther into the spiritual re-centering that we experience during Lent.

While it’s easy to despair when we get past our tendency to denial and allow ourselves to really see what is happening to the earth – or more particularly, to our biosphere – as global temperatures rise, dwelling in despair is not a Christian response. It may be hard for others who hear about climate change only in passing to understand, but those of us with a special interest in environmental issues have an awareness that we are in a very grave situation. Past posts have pointed to several specific concerns. Two pieces of information, though, may be enough to explain why despair might be a temptation:

1) The Keeling Curve graphs concentrations of carbon dioxide, a major heat-trapping greenhouse gas, in our atmosphere. We know that a little wine is pleasant and may even have some health benefits, but excessive amounts can make us sick and even produce death from alcohol poisoning. In the same way, carbon dioxide is necessary to plant growth, but excessive amounts result in warming that harms the entire biosphere. In 800,000 years of geological records, the earth did not exceed 350 ppm of carbon dioxide until the 1980’s. Last year we exceeded 400 ppm for the first time ever. These graphs make clear the degree of the excess of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

2) In our current national and global political climate, the only proposals to limit carbon pollution are too little and too late. We simply do not have the political will to make big changes soon enough to make a significant difference. Anything we can do is good, of course, as decreases in carbon pollution can mitigate global warming and perhaps buy us some more time, but since we are negotiating not with a human enemy but with the laws of physics and chemistry, token efforts or halfway measures aren’t very effective. We have already set off feedback loops like the melting of the Arctic sea ice so that warming will continue even if we were to immediately make impossibly deep cuts in our emissions of greenhouse gases.

These two things together are enough to bring great discouragement if not despair.

But as I read Habakkuk this morning, I remembered writing an earlier post, The Habakkuk Response, in June of 2011. That piece started off talking about a report about the rate at which marine ecosystems are deteriorating, a report that talked about a very real possibility of entering a phase of mass extinction of marine life.

That piece ended, though, with some encouraging words. They are encouraging not because they say we can make the laws of physics and chemistry disappear or suddenly jolt the world’s leaders into a radical shift in perspective and values that would allow them to get to work on solving the greatest challenge we have ever faced. They are encouraging because of the reminder of who we are and whose we are. Here is the ending to that post:

I read something else this week, an interview from Christianity Today called The Joyful Environmentalists: Eugene Peterson and Peter Harris. In it, Peter Harris talks about the difference between their work – work done “in response to who God is” -- and the work of secular environmentalists. Noting that environmentalists who believe they’ll be able to save the planet may easily get “exhausted and disillusioned and depressed”, Harris goes on to say:

If, on the other hand, you do what you do because you believe it pleases the living God, who is the Creator and whose handiwork this is, your perspective is very different. I don't think there is any guarantee we will save the planet. I don't think the Bible gives us much reassurance about that. But I do believe it gives God tremendous pleasure when [God’s] people do what they were created to do, which is care for what [God] made. 

The idea of doing what we can to care for the earth out of a joyful response to the Creator resonates with the verses near the end of Habakkuk. Though the crops have failed and the livestock is gone, says Habakkuk, “yet I will rejoice in Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation.” The Habakkuk response suggests a spiritual path to help us avoid despair and do the work of creation care as well as we possibly can in the difficult years ahead.

Thanksgiving: Gratitude with Eyes Open

Thanksgiving Day in and of itself is a celebration of a spiritual response to everything in God’s creation that gives us life and joy. Despite the considerable cultural and commercial baggage it has picked up over the years, at its heart an annual day set aside for an entire nation to express gratitude is a great spiritual gift. Whether by design or by accident, this national holiday calls us to an essential spiritual practice. Some years our hearts are full of joy on the fourth Thursday of November and the gratitude comes easily; other years it falls at a less joyful point of our lives and we have to be very intentional to discover what can move us to gratitude even when we are caught up in grief or troubles. Giving thanks when things are going well and life is a delight is important, but developing the habit of giving thanks in more difficult times is a great spiritual gift to ourselves and those around us.

While an annual call to give thanks is good, a daily practice of gratitude can transform our lives. The simple daily habit of naming five or ten things for which we are grateful changes us over time. The practice of gratitude requires us to notice bits of goodness, joy, or hope even in times when we might overlook those little bits. That noticing makes the dark times less dark and lets in a little light just when we need it most.

For people who pay attention to climate change and pollution and their effects on living things, there is plenty to tempt us to despair. Yet those who grieve the passing of species and ecosystems most deeply are those who have loved these most deeply. Even as we grieve and wonder how best to live in this changing world, we continue to notice and treasure the gifts of God’s creation: the sky, the earth itself, the seas and lakes and rivers, and all the animals and plants that fill them. The living things whose increasing fragility we grieve the most are the very things that allow a glimpse of goodness, joy, or hope that can save us from our own despair. A daily practice of gratitude opens our hearts in a way that inoculates us against paralyzing despair.

Both the cultivation of grateful hearts and the cultivation of awareness of our environmental problems are key practices for Christians at this point in history. Seeing and naming the world’s brokenness in terms of injustice, poverty, and hatred has always been an essential part of living the Christian life with integrity, and these aspects of the world’s brokenness in this century are intertwined with environmental degradation and the impacts of climate change. Accordingly, looking as fully as possible at the reality of our warming planet, a reality that can be difficult to acknowledge and perhaps impossible for us to fully comprehend, is an essential task for Christians today. But the practice of gratitude, the practice of intentionally looking for and recognizing the things both great and small that continue to bring us life and joy, is equally essential to the Christian life. Gratitude keeps us from being consumed with despair, but at the same time it keeps us from denying the value of what is being lost. We continue to love creation even as we grieve the loss of so much of what we loved; we continue to grieve loss after loss even as we continue to be grateful for all that we have loved. 

The Joy of Composting Redux

…and Double Digging, Too!

November petunia

“No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds, November!” ends a poem by Thomas Hood. I remember reading this to my children on some gray November days that must have been much like the days that inspired Hood to write those words. That’s not an accurate description of our part of Nebraska this year, though, and especially not on a warm, sunny day like today. There is still fruit; today before pulling the mostly frozen tomato plants from my garden, I picked a handful of ripe cherry tomatoes. There are flowers, not only the unexceptional chrysanthemums and marigolds in sheltered places, but a few of the more tender annuals, like petunias, continue to bloom here and there. The trees have remarkably more leaves than usual in November, and birds are out and about.

My very small garden beds yielded a constant supply of tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers through October. Despite generally warmer than normal temperatures, though, a freeze last week nipped enough plants to make this a good day to clean up the vegetable patches. After pulling the plants, my husband and I dug compost into the soil. The space this freed up in the compost bin was soon filled with layers of dry leaves and the plants we had pulled. The remains of this summer’s tomatoes and peppers and leaves will renew the soil and nourish next summer’s garden.

A post last April about composting said:

Composting is a literally down-to-earth project, something that helps us connect to the Earth and to the basic functions and patterns of living things. The reminder of this connection several times a day as I set aside scraps and garden clippings for the compost pile ends up being a sort of prayer woven through the day, a sense of connectedness to God’s creation, a reminder of our role in caring for creation.  Through these things, it’s a reminder of humility in its true sense: who we are and whose we are.

Compost ready to use

Seven months later, those scraps and clippings and spent flowers have been transformed into a constant source of nourishment for other plants. If setting these things aside was a sort of prayer, the resulting compost is an allegory of how God receives our humble daily prayers and transforms them into something greater that becomes a constant source of nourishment for us and those for whom we pray.

This week brought more reports of record warm temperatures this year and of a pattern of new record highs outpacing record lows by a significant ratio. The preliminary data for October from the Mauna Loa observatory  shows 387.18 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (with 350 ppm being considered the upper safe limit).

A deep connection to the Earth, a love of creation, makes us grieve when we become aware of what is happening, but the joy in this same connection can serve as an antidote to despair. Both our spiritual practices, like prayer for humankind and our planet, and our practices of stewardship, like composting, give us a way of coping spiritually and emotionally with climate change while doing what we can to improve the situation.

**

Last month, while most of the garden was still producing fruit, I used a couple of empty rows of one bed to try double digging. This is an old garden practice that I had never tried, but which had intrigued me ever since I saw a Victory Garden podcast about it four years ago. (You can see it here.) It’s a great way of amending soil. I used regular compost instead of composted manure. Double digging involves turning the topsoil along with loosening the subsoil and adding compost down deep. For me, double digging was very satisfying. With several small, orderly steps, a fairly large area of soil gets altered in a way that makes it more productive for several years. Now that other areas of the garden are bare and the ground hasn’t frozen, I plan to do more of this.