Encouraging Words

Kenyan environmentalist and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai shares a parable about a hummingbird as part of today's post on the Speaking of Faith blog.  Anne Breckbill writes this short post about "outrage fatigue", about the feeling that one person's efforts are too insignificant, too little, to make any difference. The hummingbird parable gives us reason to make the effort anyway.

Given the events of this summer -- the oil gushing into the Gulf; the unusual weather, including floods, in many parts of the United States; the terrible floods in Pakistan; the failure of the U.S Senate to pass legislation that would begin to address climate change; the heat, drought, fires, and failure of the wheat crop in Russia among them -- it's good to remind ourselves that there is still reason to try, still reason, as Wangari Matthai says at the end of her story, to do the best we can.

A recent post on the Climate Progress blog summarizes some of the climate data from this summer and talks about the changing attitude toward climate among the leaders in Russia as the reality of climate change unfolds in that country. It's good to look at this post and the news in general as a reality check. Anne Breckbill's Speaking of Faith piece links to a January article from the satirical "news source" The Onion that presents another view of what one person can do: 'How Bad for the Environment Can Throwing Away One Plastic Bottle Be?' 30 Million People Wonder. It's good to look at for some dark humor as well as its own sort of reality check.

We Christians know a lot about hope, about living into something that we cannot yet see or even imagine but that faith tells us is something worth pursuing. Something all of us hummingbirds can do on a daily basis is to share our hope and give one another encouragement in what Fr. Thomas Berry called "The Great Work". I recommend reading the short post on Speaking of Faith today and taking a couple of minutes to listen to Wangari Maathai tell the story of the hummingbird!

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.