Now that the revised edition of Love in a Time of Climate Change, has been released by Fortress Press, I am posting excerpts. Today’s excerpt is the second of two parts about awakening to new ways of seeing the world, sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating.
Soon after the first edition of Love in a Time of Climate Change was published, I travelled to Oroville, California, where I sat on the bank of the Feather River a few blocks from my childhood home. I carried with me a tiny urn that held the last few grains of my mother’s ashes, for a private and solitary goodbye. A breeze was blowing, the sun reflected like diamonds on the water, and the salmon were jumping—just like when I was a child. After reflecting on my mother’s life, and all the generations before and those that will come after, I was drawn to focus on the salmon fighting their way upstream, battered and bloodied, to keep the salmon generations alive. It occurred to me that throughout the four-and-a-half-billion-year evolutionary process, there is an inner drive to keep the generations of species going in this marvelous, ongoing, interconnected cycle of life.
I sat with these thoughts for a while. I sprinkled my mother’s ashes and released her into eternity. Then I picked up a rock, which fit perfectly in my hand. I started wondering how long that rock had been there on the riverbank. Maybe from my childhood, or my mother’s childhood, or maybe it had just tumbled down the river that day. That got me thinking about geological time, that fifteen-billion-year process of the evolution of the universe, and about the space between the atoms in the rock that felt so solid, and about the space between the stars and galaxies. What an amazing universe we live in! I was struck by the thought that God, who brought the universe into being and who exists even at the heart of matter, has invested so much love in bringing life here on earth to fruition. Surely God wants this diverse and abundant community of life to continue.
I was filled with awe and gratitude, and then with grief because of the inexorable acceleration of planetary warming. Climate change is having generational impacts, as it casts a shadow of foreboding on the future. It is also having evolutionary impacts. Animals and even plants are struggling to maintain life and reproduce as the seasons shift and their habitats are degraded. Climate change is even having geological impacts, as the oceans warm, sea ice melts, sea levels rise, seasons change, and the jet stream and polar vortex are altered. Changes are even occurring in the axis of the earth.
These reflections filled me with a renewed sense of the profound significance of our time. We are at an in-between time, at this critical juncture in the history of life on earth, a time of danger and a time of choice. Each of us has a choice to make. This is the primary spiritual issue of our time. I continue to experience awe and deep gratitude at this wondrous, amazing, marvelous, universe of which we are a part, as well as grief that climate change and other ecological catastrophes are impacting creation far beyond what many people can imagine.
Greenhouse gas emissions and global temperatures have been rising year after year. Half of the greenhouse gases now in the atmosphere have been released within the past three decades. This means that despite being aware of the risks of continuing to burn fossil fuels, and despite the good intentions of many, our fossil-fuel-based global civilization has doubled emissions in the thirty-plus years since the first climate agreement was signed in in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro.
Scientists warn that we face a perilous moment of choice. The window of time to stabilize the climate still stands open, but if we continue along the current path, it will soon slam shut. The light of Christ still shines, pointing us in the direction of a brighter future that we can live into beginning now. However, as the planet rapidly warms, the challenge of “now” takes on new significance. The importance of acting for climate justice now is stressed throughout this book. “See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!”
This post was a continuation of yesterday’s post: Awakening to New Ways of Seeing the World (Part 1). Both posts are excerpts from Love in a Time of Climate Change, which is now available in Paperback, eBook, or Audiobook format. The Audiobook version is available on Amazon with a trial 3-month subscription to Audible at $.99 per month that you can cancel at any time.
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