We create what destroys
Bind ourselves to betray
The beautiful creatures are going away.
So laments singer-song writer Bruce Cockburn on his 2006 album Life Short Call Now.
What can I say after such a summer, when the season is not yet over, and the burning started before summer had officially begun? What can I say about the carnage of more than one billion creatures with some species most likely made extinct? When millions of hectares of our precious, already decimated forests have been burnt - even rain forests that we thought were fireproof - when the carbon emissions from this vast hellfire will increase a hundredfold the problems we have ignored for so long?
What can I say, at the end of three whole weeks of a lovely, normal, old-fashioned beach holiday in a place that has been burnt in the past but, so far, this time around, has escaped the fury? Three weeks in which I have verandah sat, read novels both low- and highbrow, swum in an ocean clear of ash and walked on smoke-free beaches. How can I not feel survivor’s guilt, and anger and despair?
I look at the world as it is, particularly in the light of the catastrophic climate change we have brought upon ourselves and I want to say to the Creator, ‘okay, time to wind this glorious but utterly failed experiment up’. We human beings have ruined everything, and we continue to do so, unashamed, when the results of our rapaciousness and greed are staring us in the face and the voices of the Cassandras can no longer be ignored.
Like so many people, I am afraid and angry and embarrassed by the antics of so many of our leaders at this eleventh hour. I am also painfully aware that I am complicit in the state in which we find ourselves and our planet. I’ve lived very comfortably in this hedonistic and consumerist society. I have been profligate with water, bought clothes I do not need, thrown away plastic, flown on planes, eaten way too much meat.
Last year I read a biography of Thomas Merton and was struck by the urgency he and others experienced in the the nuclear disarmament movement of the 60s and 70s. Like us, they feared they were at the point of no return. I take my inspiration from these faithful warriors of old.
Perhaps the outcome from this conflagration for which we can act and pray is for a new awareness of what is at stake to be born in many, along with a new energy to act.
I want to use this blessed holiday I have had to return reenergised to the fray. Confessing and amending my ways, protesting and writing letters to policy-makers and praying for courage and energy and the discernment to see where I can be used in this great battle of our times – the battle to save what we can of the Creator’s inestimable creation. Before all the beautiful creatures go away for ever.
This was published in the February edition of The Melbourne Anglican