Close-up of the book cover. Photo: Penguin Books.
‘No one is too Small to Make a Difference’, by Greta Thunberg
Review by Frank Regan
The upcoming Christmas story takes place in obscurity. Bethlehem is the least, the smallest, of villages. Mary and Joseph are among the least of society. The baby is born into physical smallness and social insignificance. I am struck in these times by smallness. This small book (eighty pages) is by small Greta Thunberg: sixteen years old, with Aspergers, from Sweden. It has become my lectio divina.
Last year Greta went on a solo strike from school. A year later millions of ‘smalls’, children and others, went on strike to defend mother earth or Gaia, the goddess we might call Wisdom. I believe Greta is Gaia’s prophet – she has suffered years of anxiety and mental stress before receiving her prophetic vocation. (The book does not mention God. Nowadays, God is missing, but not missed. Greta calls on science to tell us the day of wrath is coming.)
Our biblical tradition tells us that when human beings became corrupt and inflicted violence upon the earth, God sent a deluge. Greta, with her steely prophetic perspicacity, is alerting us to the signs of the times. She may sound like a prophet of doom – like John the Baptist before her – as she enumerates the symptoms of illness which could become terminal. The axe is laid to the root and we need a root-deep, radical vision of where human activity must direct itself. Her hope is in science. Will it be sufficient?
We are awakening to earth’s dignity as the body of God. Fourteen billion years ago there was a small compact mass of matter. One small teaspoon of it would weigh ten billion tonnes. It exploded with a force and energy still felt today.
We share with the earth a common history of life in abundance, in danger of extinction. Our faith tradition tells us that God is intimately, intricately involved in our life and history. God sent his son to announce a new way of living in the peace of God’s blessed abundance, in the justice of right relationship and in the wholeness of being God’s children. Jesus spoke of a new humanity transfigured and of a new creation transformed.
Between the fraught present and hopeful future the mystery of the incarnation is revealing itself. The loci of revelation are you and I, Greta, Mary and Joseph, Jesus and all 7.7 billion of us, mostly small, whose souls hunger and thirst for something greater, new and fulfilling.
We shall gather again, as we always do, around the Christmas scene. The child in us will vibrate to old memories that awaken in us the happiness and innocence of yesteryear. But now we are adults with adult responsibilities. We wish each other the joy of the season and we remember that, just as the child in the crib, we are sent for the life of the world.
