Streams of Mercy
Today is Earth Day, and I’m spending some time reading materials gathered by Presbyterians for Earth Care. I’ve learned a great deal from John Tallmadge’s article “Toward a Sustainable World.” His words are a challenge to faith communities to strengthen our connections with creation, and to tend to those relationships through our daily choices – in what we consume, how we get from place to place and how we treat the beings around us, along with the water, soil and air.
Tallmadge writes: “In our time, human activity has subjected the social and ecological systems of planet Earth to unprecedented stress. Global climate change, habitat loss, extinctions overpopulation, and pollution degrade the biosphere, while epidemics, poverty, resource depletion, inequality, war and violence degrade the human world. Present habits and trends cannot be sustained without serious and perhaps fatal damage to the Earth and its community of life.
In a sustainable world, humanity and nature would flourish in mutually enhancing ways. Human communities would care for one another, using resources modestly and equitably, without impairing the ability of future generations or other life communities to meet their own needs. How can the world’s churches help us pursue such a worthy, and indeed such a vital goal
It may help to realize that sustainability is not something we achieve and then we’re done; it’s something that has to go on forever, requiring a deliberate transformation of our way of living. It’s not a simple problem like baking a cake, or a complicated problem, like putting a man on the moon; rather it’s a complex problem, like raising a child or making peace in the Middle East. Complex problems have many possible solution, none given or forseen; they can arise only through learning and change from within, on the part of all components within the system. If you are part of the problem, you have to be part of the solution.
Gazing down this strenuous, uncertain path, we can take some light and comfort from our religious life. Faith can provide direction and purpose in the midst of uncertainty. Hope can help us cleave to more promising visions of the good life and human flourishing. Sacrifice can help us embrace the challenge to do more with less for the sake of the greater good and a deeper sense of fulfillment. And community can encourage and support us as we disentangle ourselves from the webs of privilege, entitlement and wasteful consumption spun by industrial capitalism.
Because social change happens one person at a time, we believe that congregations can become seedbeds of transformation. A deliberate program of green faith, green learning, green living and green outreach can foster right thinking and right action in our individual lives as well as our lives in church, neighborhood, city and bioregion. With each other’s help and encouragement, we can become the change we wish to see in the world.”
I give thanks for thoughts shared that help me to see in new ways and challenge me to become a part of the change I wish to see in the world. May we all commit to rise to meet the challenge on this Earth Day 2019.
Elizabeth