‘Hope is not a wishful, wistful sigh that things will get better.’ Photo: Alto Crew / Unsplash.
‘We too groan in ourselves, eagerly waiting to live fully as daughters and sons of God.’
On the precipice of an environmental tipping point, what is hope? Frank Regan takes inspiration from Easter
Tipping points are by their very nature difficult to feel and to perceive. We approach slowly, almost stealthily, until we feel something move beneath us. We advance gradually, passing the point until at last we see the new phenomenon or situation towards which we have been progressing.
Only recently the secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, has pointed out that we and our planet are fast approaching a tipping point. Beyond that, as Greta Thunberg, the young prophetess of Gaia, emphasises, life as we know it, life for future generations, may no longer be viable in vast swathes of our planet.
The planet, of course, has its own story, with its constant struggle to maintain and take care of itself, very often in conflict with humankind. That conflict became more intense with the industrial revolution and the demands of a growing population. Still the planet’s own dynamics and energies carry on. Climate change is a natural phenomenon, as are shifting tectonic plates, volcanic activity, the changes of seasons, seasonal flooding and drought – all are manifestations of a planet with its own life rhythms, and of a planet that has accustomed itself to accommodating millions of species throughout the four billion years of its existence.
We are at a historical juncture, a moment when the human species has to make some radical decisions regarding how we are to live into the future. Concentrations of anthropogenic carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases have grown steadily more noxious. This is mostly due to processes that have enabled our civilisation to grow and prosper, but which also devour our planet’s natural wealth and impact our climate.
Like Herman Melville’s crazed Captain Ahab we have thrust the harpoon of our materialist and devouring political economy deep into the bodily life of the earth. Moby Dick, the great white whale, Gaia’s fictional symbol, is significantly wounded. The wound is deep and turning gangrenous. So deep and gangrenous is it that it will be almost impossible to stop or reverse biosystem collapse as it appears in the melting icecaps and glaciers, the escape of methane from the Siberian arctic tundra, the accelerating loss of Greenland ice with its resulting rising sea-levels.
Soon, Christian-minded Friends will be celebrating Easter and Passover. Both speak to us of living this life in the love of God – not the next life, this life. The Jewish Jesus never spoke of eternal life. He spoke of his coming that we might live life to the full. He never spoke of the salvation of souls. He spoke of the resurrection of the body, destined, as he showed us in his own body, for transfiguration.
The planet, God’s body, is in agony, crying out in the eruptions, the tsunamis, droughts and famines. Recently we are witnesses of the mega-blazes devouring southern Australia. They are a foretaste of the ecological inferno we are fuelling in our unconscious wasting of the preciousness of our beautiful planet. We have crucified the body of God made visible in the crucified body of Christ. The nails are driven. The spear is thrust.
Chapter eight of Paul’s letter to the Romans is one of the Bible’s most beautiful chapters. Paul tells us we are called to live life in God’s Spirit, which has freed us from the law of sin and death. Each time we recognise God as abba, the Spirit of God joins with our spirit and ‘bears witness… that we are children of God’ in whom God takes delight.
We are in a planetary time of suffering, of agony, of struggle. Creation itself longs for freedom – freedom to be the life-giving source God created it to be. At present it is mauled and manacled by human greed. The planet, with all of creation, agonises in groans and pangs of birth labour. We too groan in ourselves, eagerly waiting to live fully as daughters and sons of God. The Spirit groans within us, constantly, in incessant prayer, for we are temples of the Spirit where prayer and worship are ceaselessly offered, often with words we do not understand.
That is why some of us gather for Passover and Holy Week – to try to understand. We are brought back through our faith-memory to the Passover meal shared the evening of Jesus’ death. Little did those who gathered that night suspect the meaning that meal would accumulate down the centuries. At first the words sounded strange and ominous. Body handed over. Blood shed. For all of us.
Thanks to St Paul we now realise that ‘all’ includes all of creation, still groaning, wanting to give birth to a new humanity and a new creation. The water that flowed from Christ’s pierced side was for the flourishing and growth of new life. The blood shed trickled through the earth, the clay of which we are made. Now that blood courses through our veins. Our memory is of Christ the Risen Lord, transfigured into Son of God, transformed into a ‘Christified’ creation. Memory is the gateway into the life and death of Jesus as he walked the roads of Galilee, constantly struggling to restore life and healing. By memory we remember a future in which to grow into the new human being God invites us to be, energised by a vision of God’s reign built on peace, justice and ‘wholiness’. By memory we celebrate the hope that grounds our attempts to create a planetary way of living that benefits all of us.
Hope is not a wishful, wistful sigh that things will get better. They won’t. There are biosystemic situations, created in part by us, that we cannot now or in the medium term future stop: the escape of methane into the atmosphere, the melting of the glaciers and icecaps, the rising sea levels, and the warming of the oceans. Humankind will have to imagine ways to cope with new situations.
There is a growing grief for the planet. Millions of children have been sensitised and made aware of the preciousness and precariousness of our planetary life. The pain and suffering felt by Gaia is infecting the health, physical and spiritual, of humankind.
We have been warned of the tipping point. It seems impossible to change direction. The liberal capitalist economic model still prevails. Greed and avarice, the demand for growth and profit constitute its soul – our soul. Depredation, plunder, exploitation and extinction are its principal energies.
The poet Emily Dickinson called hope ‘the thing with feathers / that perches in the soul / and sings the tune without the words’. Our hope is about the totally unexpected, the surprise, and the grace of something entirely new. We hope for something perching within, unimaginable, ineffable, knitting itself in the secret depths of our wounded soul. We know the tune but we do not have the words.
WB Yeats wrote in ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ that ‘We must laugh and we must sing / We are blest by everything, / Everything we look upon is blest’. We must acquire a vision of reality that sees our planet as sacramental of God, as a life which is intimately bound up with ours, as a gift we must not squander.
