A meditation after reading the Washington Post’s 2-part series about climate-related flooding on the Northern Gulf, particularly in coastal Mobile County (4/29/24).
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For over a half century in the USA, we've known that--statistically--1 in 4 persons will get cancer. We're smart. We look around at our family of 4 and can do the 'maths.' Yet, we deny our own risk because we feel impotent or unable to grasp just how we'd cope when our world is turned upside down and inside out. Or, hey, maybe soon there'll be a cure. (BTW, technology is not our friend but rather that forked-tongued bad boy your mom told you to steer clear of, but that's another reflection.)
Grasping climate change presents a similar predicament. We know the risk, we can do the math. We devote thoughts and prayers to a "cure." "Let this cup pass from my hands." But, don't ask me to give up my riches, comfort, convenience, security, complacency. I'm pampering myself now in case the tragedy comes tomorrow at 8am. The parable of the rich, young ruler does indeed jump to mind!
And tragedy is coming for all of us. The "new normal," it is named.
Since we feel impotent in the face of the enormity of the challenge, never having lived through tragedy beyond our control, we cannot imagine it happening to us. Maybe the next hurricane will take out my neighbor's house rather than mine? Certainly, I'll take them a green bean casserole and express my sympathies. Maybe that rising water inching up my dock is an aberration that will bring the crabs nearer to catch but then soon recede. "We'll cross that bridge when we get to it."
(Psst...we're there.)
With waning empathy in modernity due to diminished community, we "let the good times roll," denying both our impotence and our failure of imagination. God forbid we should sacrifice the good life for the common good. Not while we're rolling snake eyes with loaded dice.
Maybe it’s true that pilgrims go to Lourdes seeking the Virgin Mary, not so much believing they'll be healed but seeking the strength to endure when no miracle comes?
Even in an egregiously individualistic society where everyone in a rich country inhabits their own climate-controlled, security-enabled bubble, what if that is what resilience means? Shared strength. Perhaps "misery loves company" because that is where hope lives?
If hope is collective, perhaps there's a reactive role for faith communities in climate destabilization. If so, it will be the greatest test of faith Christianity has ever faced.
If you've lived and worked on the frontlines in poor countries that have faced unrelenting, sequential concurrent tragedies, you can imagine both the gory and the glory, the incapacity and the resilience. The former are humbling, the latter ennobling. Scarcity brings out the worst and best in us--sometimes at the same moment. Like when we are called to nurse an enemy with the resources intended for a loved one. The test of hospitality is when there simply is not enough to go around. Amidst abundance, hospitality may be lacking or not, but it is never tested. Abundance evaporates in the blazing direct light of unrelenting, sequentially concurrent existential crises.
Collective hope is sharing. Both the sustenance and the suffering. A distinguishing hallmark of the Primate Order (monkeys, apes and humans)--unique among social mammals, is that it is hard-wired in our nature to share in times of abundance and scarcity.
The eisegesis of Christian theologians seeking scriptural relevance for creation care waxes poetic on the transcendent significance of the incarnation, transfiguration and resurrection. Yet, all the practical theology one needs for creation care is in the Sermon on the Mount. Of course, that depends on how inclusive and expansive your Kingdom of God is.
The climate catastrophe now unfolding, and irreversible, will rekindle community. Bubbles will be burst. We'll survive if we can truly live Micah 6:8 and Matthew 25:35-45. If we can't, we'll face the dilemma of the Medieval scholar who first encountered the Gospels in a Monastery library and mumbled: "Either these are not the Gospels or we are not Christians."
Photo credit: Rob Bearden