Like the First Morning...

 Sometime in July I came across a book called Earth Gospel: A Guide to Prayer for God’s Creation. Sam Hamilton-Poore, the author, has set  it up in such a way that it can be used for daily personal prayer in the morning, midday, and evening in a four-week cycle. I bought a copy and set it aside to use this month, beginning today, with the dual intention of deepening my own prayers for creation and of sharing my experience with this book on this blog after using it for a couple of weeks or so. I still intend to do both things, but the way today’s morning readings and prayers resonated with the Gospel lesson in our Daily Office cycle led me to share something of today’s experience.

Today’s Gospel lesson was John 1:1-18: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Scripture passage for the first day of Earth Gospel is Genesis 1:1-5: “ In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth… ”

Before introducing the Genesis passage, Earth Gospel began with a quotation from Joseph Renville’s hymn “Many and great”  (Hymn 385 in The Hymnal 1982), followed by the hymn “Morning has broken” (Hymn 8)  which suggests that each new morning is “God’s recreation of the new day", of the first morning God created.

Sitting outdoors on a warm but pleasant morning hearing a variety of birdsongs and seeing flowers in bloom and squirrels chasing each other up and down the trees, I thought about “Morning has broken/Like the first morning” and about Genesis 1:5, “And there was evening and there was morning, the first day”.  I tried to think about the first time something we would recognize as a bird sang something we would name as birdsong, the first time something we would name as a flower bloomed, the first time creatures we would call squirrels chased each other up and down something we would recognize as a tree. When did the first bird sing, and what was that like? In some way, surely, that first birdsong changed everything! When did the first flower bloom? When did a human being first stand on a beach and play in the surf? When did we first name the sorts of birds I hear in central Nebraska, and how long did they sing before anyone named them?

It is as difficult for me to imagine the “first morning”, the first of all of these things that feed my soul now, as it is for me to imagine the last of them. Thinking about the last birdsong is especially poignant to me, as their songs have brought joy to me since my earliest memories and since we know the birds are in trouble. Loss of habitat, pollution, and climate all endanger a variety of bird species. (See also the March 17 2010 post State of the Birds.) There may be in my lifetime, as I continue living, a last time I hear certain bird songs in my location.

It’s impossible and yet wonderful to try to think about that beginning John describes with the Word that both was with God and was God. Part of the difficulty of that effort is the abstract nature of the Word before the Word became flesh and lived among us. However, that may be a small part of the difficulty, as it seems equally impossible and yet wonderful to try thinking about the beginning of the things we can see and hear around us.

There is some hope in remembering that thinking about both the first and the last brings a profound sense of wonder, despite the first bringing wonder at unimaginable joy and the last bringing wonder at unimaginable grief.  By bringing us to a place of wonder, both remind us of the profound importance of environmental stewardship. The beginning and the end are beyond our understanding, but not so far beyond our minds as to prevent our growing in wonder and gratitude at God’s creation and at our responsibility to join God in the holy work of sustaining the beauty and goodness of creation.

Extra Bits

This morning I read an interesting short reflection, Earth to Humanity: You Are Really Blowing It, by Lillian Daniel about Hosea, the Gulf oil gusher, and "global weirding".  I'm thinking more and more that while all sorts of people can lead us in the practical steps of environmental stewardship -- lowering our carbon footprints, recycling, using fewer chemicals in cleaning and gardening, and so forth -- and that all of those things are important for us to do, the church, the Body of Christ, has a perhaps unique call to be a witness to what humankind is doing and has done to God's creation.  As Lillian Daniel's reflection suggests, we are called to listen carefully and prayerfully to the cries of the other creatures great and small with whom we share this planet.

Hope

Summer mornings are good for the soul. With an early sunrise – just a little after 6:00 in central Nebraska – and pleasant temperatures at the beginning of most days, it’s easy to find time before the day’s activities to step outside and look and listen. For some of us, sitting on a porch or going for a walk while experiencing the sounds, sights, and smells of a summer morning helps us center down into prayer and be aware of God’s presence much more easily than we do indoors on dark winter mornings.  It’s a lovely and encouraging part of the day.

Most mornings this summer I'm sitting outdoors to read the lessons appointed for the Daily Office, spend some time in contemplative prayer, and then pray the Daily Devotions in A New Zealand Prayer Book (He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa).  The peacefulness of this time and the sheer joy of beginning the day with bird song and sunlight, with the greens of the grasses and trees, an often blue sky, and the colors of summer flowers contrasts with the discouragement brought on by the many environmental concerns facing us this summer. The disaster in the Gulf of Mexico as oil continues to spew into the ocean and, closer to home, the concerns about the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline crossing the fragile ecosystem of our Sandhills are in the news almost every day. Our failure to decrease greenhouse gas emissions when such a decrease might have prevented significant climate change is still there in the background (despite ongoing attempts from some quarters to deny the facts); this summer’s violent storms and flooding rains in the United States give us a reminder of what many scientists say will become our new norm as the oceans warm. Legislation that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions in an attempt to rein in the most extreme consequences of climate change continues to stall. And, meanwhile, there is a constant if quiet stream of news about plastic pollution, species extinction, etc.

This contrast between, on the one hand, the summer morning feelings of peace and joy in God’s creation and the hope those bring with them, and, on the other hand, the feelings of helplessness and discouragement about our failure to care for creation and the despair about those bring with them, has been part of my reflections in recent weeks.

This morning’s Epistle lesson from Romans begins with Paul talking about the hope that “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay” and ends with his talking about the nature of hope. We hope, says Paul, not for what we can see happening but for something that we cannot yet see. Along with that reading, the prayers for the Saturday morning Daily Devotions in the New Zealand prayer book include these words (p. 134):

Giver of the present, hope for the future:

save us from the time of trial.

When prophets warn us of doom,

of catastrophe and of suffering beyond belief,

Then, God, free us from our helplessness,

and deliver us from evil.

Save us from our arrogance and folly,

for you are God who created the world.

Hope is not denial of reality. Hope is not pretending that our actions, the way we live our lives today, don’t have very sobering consequences. And hope is not thinking that God will suspend the laws of physics and chemistry and make those bad consequences miraculously disappear.

Hope is trust that God will be with us as we walk into the future we are creating. Hope is confidence that if we turn toward God, abandon our "arrogance and folly", and treat God’s creation with reverence, we have a future; hope says that no matter how difficult the future may be or how different from the present with its many comforts, our lives and our relationships with God, with one another, and with creation will still have meaning.

Gratitude can call us back to hope from despair. A beautiful summer’s morning in Nebraska can open our hearts to that gratitude that leads us to hope.

Sustainability, Sin, and Happiness

Krista Tippett, host of NPR’s Speaking of Faith, had a wonderful post called The Definition of Sustainability Expands with Vocation yesterday on the SOF Observed blog. It was a timely post: this Sunday’s lectionary lessons lend themselves to a discussion of sin and grace and our response to both, and the oil disaster in the Gulf has caused some people to look more seriously at the need to live in more sustainable ways. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Our emerging national conversation about sustainability has a decidedly “eat your spinach” tone. We’re steeling ourselves to enter the realm of sacrifice, and penance. But in all my conversations of recent years, I’ve been struck by the heightened sense of delight and beauty in lives and communities pursuing a new alignment with the natural world.

The assumption that doing the right thing will somehow make us miserable seems deeply rooted in some part of our culture.  If doing the right thing results in immediate deprivation of something we have experienced as pleasurable – think of cardiac patients who must avoid fatty foods – we assume that the misery will continue unabated, never to be overtaken by a greater pleasure. But, of course, people who go on low-fat diets often lose their taste for the foods that clogged up their arteries initially and experience great pleasure as their health and capacity to be more active improve.

More generally, sin, the seeking of our own will that distorts our relationship with God, with other people, and with all creation (Book of Common Prayer Catechism, p. 848), while momentarily pleasurable or convenient or the path of least resistance, is bound to make us miserable because we aren’t in healthy relationship with God, other people, or the world around us. Repenting and turning to doing the right thing is bound to make us happier in the long-term.

Sen. Richard Lugar has introduced a new energy bill (see US senator offers scaled-back climate bill). Sen. Lugar says that it is unrealistic to cut down significantly on carbon emissions in tough economic times. There’s that buried assumption again, that doing the right thing by cutting down on carbon emissions will make us miserable. In this case, the argument is that it would make us so miserable that we cannot possibly find the political will to do the right thing. The bill would cut carbon emissions by 20% by 2030; the Kerry-Lieberman bill would cut emission 17% by 2020 (from 2005 levels). The AFP story about the bill ends with the reminder that “the Kerry bill already falls well below the UN climate change panel's recommendation of cuts of 25 to 40 percent from 1990 levels if the world wants to avoid growing severe weather and the extinction of entire species.”

Krista Tippet’s post ends with this alternative vision of what happens when we do the right thing:

The writer Frederich Buechner has said that vocation happens “when our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” I’m beginning to see the work of sustainability as an unfolding vocation — not merely a response to problems, but an invitation to possibility and a way to strengthen moral resources such as delight, dignity, elegance, and hope.

Oceans: Oil and Plastic

It’s Day 50 of the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. As days and weeks pass and more and more oil gushes into the water, people are more aware and more concerned about what has happened already and about the long-term effects of this on the gulf ecosystem. Humankind’s failure to care for creation as God intended us to do hits us forcefully as the effects become more obvious. We knew, of course, that if the oil kept gushing it would eventually pollute coastal waters and beaches; we knew that all sorts of wildlife would be endangered. But so often we don’t really believe something like this, aren’t really concerned about it, until we can actually see it unfold.

Images like this AP video of Gulf coast birds in the oil make the situation very real to us. 

As we think about how to respond to these heartbreaking images, it might be helpful to remember that petroleum is the raw material of plastics. As the oil seems to be everywhere in certain areas of the Gulf, plastics are everywhere in our world.  Right now, my hands are touching a plastic keyboard as I sit in a chair that’s upholstered with a synthetic fabric made from petroleum. If part of my response to the disaster in the Gulf is to lessen my demand for petroleum, I’ll need to reduce my use of plastic.

Plastic’s origin in petroleum isn’t its only connection to our most critical present concern, however. The way plastic is polluting the ocean has some parallels to the way the oil from BP’s broken well is polluting the Gulf.

•        What we see of the oil spill on the surface of the water hides what may be the worst of the disaster, as some underwater cameras have shown us.  As marine animals swim through the oil, they ingest the polluted water, bits of tar, and other creatures that have been in contact with the oil. The worst of the plastic is also not readily visible. The big, visible chunks of plastic are both easy and unpleasant to see in the ocean, but the smaller nearly invisible bits permeate sections of the ocean and are ingested by marine animals and birds, thus entering the food chain.
•          The long-term effects of both the oil in the Gulf (and the dispersants that have been thrown into the mix) and of the plastic particles in the ocean are unknown.
•          People seem to find it hard to be very concerned about either offshore drilling or the plastic in the oceans   until images appear of birds dying, until it’s too late in many ways.

Some of the worst plastic for the oceans (because of the way it breaks down) is that found in plastic cutlery, including those white plastic spoons many parishes set out at coffee hour, and the forks and spoons we set out with disposable plates and cups at parish picnics and potlucks. 

One simple, concrete action we can take is to drastically reduce our use of single-use plastic, those things that are made to be used once and thrown away (wherever “away” might be).  For times when someone else has made the decision about utensils and nothing but disposable plastic is offered, some people carry their own utensils along. If it seems a bit much to carry your own knife, fork, and spoon with you, a spork (which combines all three in a single utensil) can be useful. Using something like this can not only avoid the use of a couple of single-use plastic utensils, but when people ask about the spork it’s a good opportunity to talk about our overuse of plastics and of petroleum in general. A simple way to show a congregation’s commitment to creation care is to avoid the use of disposable cups, plates, and utensils at parish functions.

Two events in recent days – one in my own backyard and one in Antarctica -- have reminded me of the importance of addressing our use of plastics as part of being intentional about environmental stewardship.  Recently I bought four bags of garden soil to help fill in some raised vegetable beds. (They will be filled further later in the summer with my own compost.) As I spread the soil over the beds, I started to see a familiar blue color in the soil – plastic bits! I picked up some of the bigger pieces for a photo:

Meanwhile, I saw this article about plastics – including fishing buoys and a plastic cup -- found in the seas around Antarctica.  The photo with the article shows a familiar sight, those same little bits of plastic that we see along the edges of lakes in Nebraska, on ocean beaches, or in garden soil from the nursery. Is this what God intended us to do with the gift of this beautiful planet?

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For more information about plastics in the ocean and ways we can take better care of the ocean and its creatures, search the web. Two places to begin are the Plastic Pollution Coalition website and the 5Gyres website.

Perspectives addendum

Here's an addition to today's earlier post, another perspective on the Gulf oil disaster.

In Perspective: Visualizing the BP Oil Spill Disaster  superimposes the area covered by oil in the Gulf on a map of someplace close to home, giving us a better perspective of the size of the area. Centered on Lincoln, the northern part of the oil blob lies a little southeast of Wayne, the eastern part somewhere east of Council Bluffs, the southern tip just south of Beatrice. The western reach of the blob is all the way out in Kearney. In other words, if the area of the spill were along I-80 in our part of the world, it would extend from where I-80 and I-680 split in Iowa to Kearney. It's a big area.
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Thanks to Elizabeth Kaeton for sharing this link on Facebook.

Perspectives

You give us mastery over the works of your hands; you put all things under our feet:

All sheep and oxen, even the wild beasts of the field,

The birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and whatsoever walks in the paths of the sea.

(Psalm 8: 7-9, St. Helena Psalter)

What we know about the amount of oil gushing into the Gulf, its effects on the entire ecosystem, and the possibilities (or impossibilities) of stopping the flow of oil into the ocean and of dealing with the effects of the oil and the chemicals used to disperse it has been in constant flux. This changing stream of information along with the volume of words that have been written and spoken about it in recent days make it difficult to stay with any one picture of the disaster long enough to really process it and see what sort of sense can be made of it. The finger-pointing and blaming that has threatened at times to take our focus away from the search for a solution and from consideration of ways we might help to ameliorate it effects is perhaps an attempt to catch hold of some pieces of information and make some sense, make a story, out of it. Something I’ve found helpful is to take note of articles, videos, and photographs that strike me as especially meaningful and then look at them again awhile later, allowing time for some deeper reflection to displace some of the string of immediate reactions that allow information to reach my brain without allowing for any deeper understanding.

Psalm 8 on Trinity Sunday brought some of these pieces from the past week together. The thought of God giving humankind mastery over creation, and especially the thought of God putting us in charge of caring for the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and “whatsoever walks in the paths of the sea”, shed some light on the larger meaning of this disaster. We’ve seen pictures of oily birds – some alive, some dead – and we are beginning to see the results on fish and turtles and other sea creatures. Something has gone terribly wrong; our demand for lots of oil at a fairly cheap price has come at a high cost for everything in the path of the Gulf waters.

Last Monday, the New York Times ran an article Oil Hits Home, Spreading Arc of Frustration  that talked about the changes in perception of the crisis as the oil washed ashore and became more visible in bays along the coast. The story begins with this sentence: “For weeks, it was a disaster in abstraction, a threat floating somewhere out there.”  Everyone knew there was oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, and scientists had been telling us what to expect as the oil kept on gushing, but the severity of any environmental crisis is easy to deny if we can’t see the damage. When the oil starts significantly affecting coastal areas, it’s harder to deny its impact.

On Tuesday (“Oil Spill Day 36” as they called it), ABC News ran a story that showed what Phillippe Cousteau, Jr., and Sam Champion saw when they put on hazmat suits and dived into the Gulf. This was a chance to see what lay between the place on the sea floor where the oil gushed continually and the surface, and it was a sobering perspective:

Then, on Wednesday, the Huffington Post carried A Lesson from the Gulf Oil Spill: We Are All Connected    by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori. Bishop Jefferts Schori wrote about the truth of humankind’s interconnectedness with the rest of the creation, a truth she said is known by the original peoples of North America, by scientists, and by the Abrahamic faiths. She wrote:

 Another way of saying this is that we are all connected and there is no escape; our common future depends on how we care for the rest of the natural world, not just the square feet of soil we may call "our own." We breathe the same air, our food comes from the same ground and seas, and the water we have to share cycles through the same airshed, watershed, and terra firma.

The contrast she made between “our own” square feet of soil and the entire natural world, along with the reminder that God has charged us with caring for all of creation, not just our own private piece of it, opened another perspective on the oil disaster.

In shrinking ourselves to fit only our own personal space and our private concerns, we make ourselves less than what God created us to be. This is not humility; true humility would be seeing ourselves as we are. Instead, this is denial of who we are, which brings with it a denial of who God the Creator is. The denial is tempting because if it were true that we have no effect on the rest of the world, then our responsibilities would be small. If my own greed and lack of care for the effects of my choices on creation are insignificant, then I can blame either BP or the government for the disaster while pumping gas or waiting for a plane or packing my groceries into a plastic bag.

When we diminish ourselves to take away our sense of responsibility, though, we diminish God.  If we are good at convincing ourselves of our insignificance and smallness, then we also become convinced that a small god can meet our spiritual needs. A small god can tend to our immediate concerns and give us some comfort; such a god would not be concerned with the bigger picture, with people we don’t know and with other living things, and certainly not with the entirety of creation. But such a god would not be our God, the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe, the Alpha and Omega. In times of disaster, it's especially important to keep everything in proper perspective.