Cosmic Reflections

My name has come up, but not my number: I am to check in every day after 4:30 to learn if/when I am to report. So with my life literally ‘on hold,’ a neighbor tries to assure me that once I turn seventy, I will no longer be expected to serve.
If that is true, then that is too bad, for those of us born during WWII have a lifetime of wisdom to bring to the table.
For instance, we have lived long enough to know that not all evil people look like Hitler; that in fact, many, maybe even most, wear the familiar face of someone we trust: an abusive parent, a predatory teacher, a sabotaging spouse. Such evil is all the more treacherous because it messes with our minds when we have no name for it or can’t believe it is happening or accept it as normal or internalize that somehow we caused it.
Evil is when someone or something prevents you from living out your fullest potential within the arc of evolution.
Sin is when you stop yourself from becoming your full Self. This can happen when you succumb to the evil of others.
Our greatest challenge is in how we react, and then act.
Witness the response of the city of Boston (where I was born) to the recent marathon mayhem. Such a clear act of evil brought forth the best of humanity.
But subtle evil is more dangerous because it is insidious. It is the difference between dropping a frog into a pot of boiling water (it will jump out!) and turning up the heat beneath the pot the frog is already in (it will stay put and die slowly).
Thus this was a fitting image for Al Gore to use in his movie An Inconvenient Truth, for we are all of us sitting fat dumb and happy on a planet that is heating even up faster than predicted while we placidly accept that releasing ever more carbon into the atmosphere is somehow normative.
It isn’t. It’s insanity. And those destroying the planet in the name of progress and profit and then lying about it are evil.
So if I don’t get to do Jury Duty this go around, I may never get to because I may have criminal record by the time I turn seventy. For if I haven’t been arrested for protesting the continued exploration and burning of the fossil fuels that are changing the climate and killing the Earth, then shame on me.
As civilly disobedient Thoreau once asked:
“What is the good of having a nice house if you haven’t got a decent planet to put it on?”
Luckily for you, I do not have enough space here to deliver fourteen years worth of sermons that try to answer that. Therefore, in honor of Earth Day, I will simply share some thoughts on this topic from others:
Chief Seattle:
“We did not weave the web of life. We are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.”
Father Thomas Berry:
“Put the Bible on the shelf and study Nature.”
And, finally, of course Emerson, a Unitarian minister who resigned his pulpit to tromp through the fields and woodlands of Concord, finding god in Nature, and writing about it. He said
“If you agree with me, I may yet be wrong; but if the elm tree says the same thing, then I know I am right.”
So be it; blessed Earth Day!