Three times Peter denied knowing his mentor.
Hundreds of times Senator Inhofe has denied global warming.
“It’s a hoax,” says he.
Peter feared a fickle population and
the chance of joining Jesus in being tortured to death.
The Oklahoma Senator fears fickle voters and
the loss of campaign cash from the fossil-fuel establishment.
Loving God
means trusting the Final Reality to be doing all things well.
Denying the climate crisis mean denying
the scientific facts
about God’s doings –
denying responsibility for the stronger winds in tornado alley,
for the fiercer droughts and fires in Western places,
for the wilder oceans in New York City subways.
And these clearly undeniable facts
are only the beginning.
As Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets slide into the oceans,
entire Pacific islands disappear beneath the brine,
along with coastlands in Florida and Bangladesh.
Let us also weep for New Orleans.
Yes, even a few Texans know
that it is not wise to mess
with Mother Nature.
The poetry of prophetic ethics for Century 21 includes recognizing that loving God means loving planet Earth and all that takes place on this planet and all the fails to take place. Loving God means loving the plain truth of things, loving that human choices matter – that human choices play a role in historical outcomes. The human actions that have derived from our addiction to the great benefits of the fossil fuel enhancements have played a role in Earth-life consequences. Our future actions as a species can play a role in moderating these consequences, perhaps significantly extending the life of our species and other Earth species.
Too often missing from this ecological conversation is the vision that the familiar symbol “Mother nature” is one of the masks of God, the God of the prophets, the devotion of these ancient Hebrew luminaries, the devotion of Jesus, of Paul, and yes of Mohammed. Loving the Earth is part of loving the Creator of this Earth. Yes, creation is a story, a myth taking place in a fictitious other realm where a humanoid-like Supremacy calls for the coming into being of the coming into being. But this old story, while clearly just a story, is a story about the Mysterious truth of our being here on Earth. This story also claims that our earthly being here is derived from a Final Source that does all things well. “It is good,” God cries out in this story, “it is all very good.” This is still a faith to live by.
Loving this good Earth is part of loving God, the God of biblical lore. If we are not devoted to this planet, we are not devoted to this God. This is a clear axiom for Christian, Jewish, and Muslim ethical thought, as well as for ethical thought everywhere. “Global warming,” “climate crisis” (or by whatever name) is a realistic challenge to the human species by that Final Reality revered as Divine by the true prophets of every age.
And global warming is not the only challenge being faced in this comprehensive love of Earth-and-God. Our reckless species has acquired the power to wreak havoc, and has succumbed to the thoughtless greed of polluting for quick benefits the rivers, the oceans, the air, the soils, the diversity of life of this one inhabitable planet within our reach. This thoughtless addiction to recklessness seems to respect no bounds. This attitude includes hatred of governments that have the power to restrain it. It hates any democratic movement that might issue in a responsible governance of our excesses. It must therefore hate the poor and middle classes for fear that they might awaken to their mistreatments and take charge of governing power. This defensive hatred toward the needed changes has corrupted education into a fight against, instead of for, the truth. It has underfunded education lest too many poorer people become wise about the hateful scam that is taking place. It has over-policed and filled the jails with those who are unlikely to vote for the status quo of unrestrained destruction. However unconsciously these measures are being taken, the root malady is a lack of love for humanity, for Earth, for Reality as a Whole.
The wide-spread rulership of “Satan’s Liars’ Kingdom” was a powerful symbol known to Jesus and his first century listeners. This strange symbol has the power to interpret life in the 21st century as well. This grim vision of the human condition provides us with a foil for understanding Jesus’ announcement of a now arriving and surely coming “Kingdom of God.” We can now view the Kingdom of God (the Reign of Reality) as a rebirth of love for the Earth and for that Mysterious Final Power revered as the Earth’s Creator. This Kingdom of God is not an escape from Earth to some other planet, nor an escape from material existence to some spirit realm of our flawed imagination. Rather, the Kingdom of God comes here on Earth as the Gospels clearly say. This Reign of Final Reality comes here on Earth among the living and dying, flourishing and suffering, human and inhuman communities of consciousness. Our sin, our estrangement from the Real, our despair over our real lives is vast beyond our comprehension. But our deep essence of trust in the Truth, our liberation from ego, and our compassion for all things is even more vast than our depravity.
The recovery of our true being begins today with a recovery of our material nature, our identification with dirt, air, water, fire, our body and blood participation in the horrors and glories of history. This fresh materialism is very different from the mechanistic materialism fostered by the now defunct types of physics, biology, psychology, and sociology. Our fresh materialism sees the enigma of consciousness mysteriously interpenetrating the bodies of living beings and their inescapable relations with the soils, air, waters, flora, fauna, of Earth. This consciousness is boundlessly WILDER than anything capable of old or new mathematical ordering. This consciousness is a capacity to make choices that have no cause except the conscious choice itself. This WILDNESS, so unthinkable in the older sciences, so incomprehensible by any science is very deep. It is so deep that only consciousness itself and look upon consciousness and partly describe its mysterious presence. Like the plain dirt of Earth, consciousness is also part of what we mean by “Earth.” As far as we know, consciousness has appeared no where else. And if it has appeared elsewhere, it is only because consciousness is somehow built into the cosmos as a dynamic we are barely beginning to understand. What we do know if we are willing to look into our own conscious beings is that we are engaged in a powerful sensual relatedness to this planet and to this planet’s Mysterious Creator. This is not a debatable truth held only in somebody’s religious dogma. It is a description of the WAY IT IS, and an affirmation of the WAY IT IS. This understanding of the WAY IT IS reveals how a love of the Earth is part of the love of God and how the love of God includes a love of the Earth.
Loving the Earth
Loving the Earth begins with our sensual awareness of our sights and sounds, tastes and smells, and every feeling of our body – outwardly and inwardly related. This sensual awareness is also an awareness of the sensor, the consciousness that is the aware being having the awareness. Loving the Earth continues with an awareness of our desires, emotions, & thoughts in both their essential and neurotic forms. And all this wondrous psychology of personal awareness reveals only one part of our love of the Earth.
Love of the Earth also includes an awareness and participation in our intimacies – of our consciousness-to-consciousness relations with every living being. We all experience this dynamic, however poorly we understand what consciousness is or what intimacy is.
Still further, love of the Earth includes participation in the essential social processes of human society – those inescapable commonalities of cultural, economic, and political processes. We can be aware of our inability to escape from all these ever-present social processes, while at the same time we can also be aware of the fragmentary, changing, and corrupted qualities of the historical manifestations of each of these essential processes. We can also be aware of our capacities to change these social manifestations.
By “cultural processes” I mean our participation in languages, arts, and religions; our participation in the disciplines of learning, methods of thinking, and fabrics of education; and our participation in the styles of association, moralities, and roles of participation. We are inescapably Earthlings participating in a set of cultural processes. By “economic processes” I mean all the ways we turn Earth gifts into useful goods and services. By “political processes” I mean all the ways we make group decisions about anything and everything. The fact that all these essential social processes have been corrupted in their existing manifestations by our various estrangements from Reality does not undo the fact that these essential processes are an unavoidable gift of our Creator. And this inexhaustible Source is also giving us the wherewithal to improve, repair, and replace the manifest forms of these social commonalities.
Loving the Earth is loving our lives as Earthlings and loving all the other Earthlings who Earth along with us. It is a complex thing to love the Earth, it violates all the rules, it constantly makes better rules, it exceeds infinitely living by the rules. At the same time it has respect for rules, it sees how rules can be collected wisdom for realistic living. Nevertheless, realistic living is too vast to be entirely captured by any set of rules. Loving the Earth is a form of ecstasy, of numinous connection to the Final Mysterious Source of the Earth and its attendant sun, moon, planets, and stars. Loving the Earth is axiom number one of an adequate ethics for realistic living in the Century 21 and beyond.