In the Northern hemisphere, we are in the season of Fall and harvest. It is also the time when a number of cultures and traditions encourage communion with our benevolent ancestors, saints, and spiritual teachers.
My thesis is simply this: A comet actually is heading our way. We ourselves set it in motion millennia ago. But only recently have scientists, echoing longstanding indigenous warnings, charted its course and voiced the alarm. Its name is Anthropocentrism and these are the End Times because human-centeredness will prove to be nearly as devastating as the comet in the movie.
The most ancient path I know is the ecological one. Creation is an intricate living system that honors life, death and rebirth within Earth’s natural cycles; where reciprocity is honorable, and all life is sacred. We humans, who happen to be mammals (but also a bit of a virus), have trouble remembering the path of Creation.
Our planet is not well. That’s an understatement. The Earth is in a state of crisis. Human aggravated global warming/Climate Change is a real and present danger.
We could describe the pain we’re in right now as the colonial anesthesia wearing off. In epic fashion, events of the past many months have connected all the threads of the story: white supremacy and racism, detention centers and prisons, militarism and policing, the wealth of a few at the expense of essential workers, broken healthcare, hurricanes, derechos, and wildfires, and certainly others.
I’m thinking a lot about this moment. Under 70 days until the most important Presidential Election arguably of all time, close to six months into an unprecedented global pandemic, increasing racial uprisings, increasing inequalities, anxieties, looming questions, delayed and potent grief.
The world has shifted on its axis since my last article appeared in Progressing Spirit. As I write, the number of COVID-19 deaths has passed 400,000, a number that shrinks from the reality experienced around the globe. As countries attempt to reopen their economies, anti-racism protests are sweeping the globe. Immune to neither challenge, we in Canada are little more than a quiet simmer when compared to the legitimate rage being expressed across America and around the world.
One of the “ultimate questions” humans like to pose is this: Why are we here?
This might seem to be a particularly appropriate question to ask in a time of the coronavirus plague when so much is becoming uprooted, when so many are afraid and suffering and dying.
It is a sad thing to close the doors of a church. Hard as it is for the congregation’s members, however, the event has a far deeper, though often unseen and uncalculated, impact on the health of the community in which that congregation was practicing its increasingly irrelevant faith. As churches age and weaken, their focus necessarily turns toward survival and away from the world outside their doors.
“What are a Bible Story or Stories that are especially pressing for today’s world?” Clearly there are many but I have chosen one from the Hebrew Bible and one from the Christian Bible.