Dear Church Family,
Once again I’m writing to you from the past. At press time I’m at the first of 2 family reunions (to be followed by a family wedding – what a whirlwind trip!) so I’m writing this before departure.
I thought I’d share some wrap-up thoughts from our two youth mission trips — the ecological mission trip to Monterey, and the huge youth convention known as Triennium.
On the Monterey trip I had been worried about the emotional toll that can be taken by ecological work. I was afraid the sea creatures would break my heart open. And they did, but as often happens with love, there was a strengthening effect as well.
I fell in love with the sea otters. I didn’t want to, because they’re too impossibly adorable. They’re basically stuffed animals that are alive, right? They look like pets. They even play with toys. I felt like they emotionally manipulated me with their ridiculously cute faces. But, at the same time as my heart reluctantly opened to them, I learned about their triumph. I learned about how they had been hunted down to extinction, and how less than 50 animals survived; but people rallied to protect them and protect their habitat, and lo! They lived and thrived. And my heart is strengthened by their vigorous will to live.
Today’s ecological work is different from the time when the otters were rescued from extinction. But it stands in the same lineage. Today’s ecological crisis is all-encompassing in a terrifying way; we need to reduce carbon across industries, across nations, and across cultures and ideologies, not to mention cleaning up plastic pollution and meanwhile moderating our emotions so we don’t fly into a terrible distracting rage about plastic vs. non-plastic straws. This is hard work. But it stands in the same line as the beach cleanups begun so many years ago. It’s not just a matter of picking up trash; it’s also standing firm against the loud voices of power and money. Some actions are easy to take (cleaning up a beach with your friends) and some are harder (passing the Marine Mammal Protection Act), but all take a stand for what is right.
I think of the story of Exodus, the Hebrew people leaving Egypt. God intervened on their behalf to help them go out of Egypt, flanked on either side by the awesome and untameable power of nature, but they also took subtle strikes on their own behalf. When Pharoah ordered all their male babies to be murdered, the midwives cleverly subverted his orders. Shiprah and Puah, the resistance leaders, ought to be remembered as heroines of the Exodus, no less than Moses and Aaron the prophets.
These stories aren’t as disconnected as they may seem. I learned on the mission trip to Monterey that the ecological crisis in the Monterey Bay was brought about overfishing sardines — yes, we knew that — but also that the demand for sardines went off the charts when cans of sardines were needed to feed American troops in World War One. Fishing industries in the Monterey Bay were more or less sustainable, until the Armed Forces came into the picture. What I mean by this is that the machines of ecological destruction are feeding the engines of domination and war. The sardine factories are the slave ships of the Atlantic and the chariots of Pharoah.
Poet Jericho Brown spoke of these kinds of intersections in his interview with Krista Tippett, saying “show me someone who doesn’t mind degrading the environment, and I’ll bet you found someone who’s happy to go to war.”
The reverse is true too. The fight for freedom, of enslaved people and their allies, is in some way also the fight for conservation that saved the otters and their ecological niche, and it is the movement for demilitarization; it’s the people of God before Pharoah demanding their freedom while the forces of nature rage. Love stands before Power and uses every trick in the book. We opt out, we protest, we disobey orders, we analyze the economy, we pass laws if we can, and we make stuffed animals to endear the otters to a future generation. We use everything we are given; we use our whole lives. We are called to this holy task with everything we’ve got.
At Triennium several of us attended a session run by the Presbyterian Hunger Program about climate change. Eighty or so youth and their associated adults sat in a room talking about everything we are using to fight climate change. I was encouraged by the tale of a young pastor (OK, she’s only 3 years younger than I, but I was her camp counselor 16 years ago so I still get to call seniority) ministering in coal country in Kentucky, and how their church put up solar panels. Their parishioners’ paychecks may still come from the coal companies, but their electric bills no longer feed back to the same company. And we hippie vegetarians & vegans were surprised and encouraged by the suggestion of a Montana kid who said locally hunted venison has a lower carbon footprint than farmed beef. We use every trick in the book in service to God’s creation, our home, and God calls us all in different ways. May you hear your particular call today.
God’s Blessings,
Talitha