Today is an utterly gorgeous day, the handful of days each year that are (at least for my taste) a perfect combination of temperature, humidity, air quality, etc. If only it could be bottled, to un-cork on one of those dank, humid days that are no doubt right around the corner.
Nice day here, a long way from the Gulf of Mexico. It might very well be one of those days there, too, although I am told the fumes rising off the surface of the gulf waters are quite unpleasant. It’s easy for me to keep ecological disasters at a distance, as “someone else’s problem,” as something I can forget, not being in my backyard. But what constitutes my backyard, or your backyard, has changed over the years. Something about this disaster feels very close to home.
The anxiety that I feel over this latest crisis is heightened by my particular job, which is to speak of God to “the world.” I’m not sure the language that we customarily speak of God and faith is wide enough to speak to this particular crisis, especially language which (all too often) is about private religion, about “me and God.” What exactly does God–or, indeed, do Christians–have to say about this disaster? Or the larger degradation of our planet? Or our role in it?
When the oil flow was finally (well…partially) capped last week, we all breathed a kind of sigh of relief; the worst seemed to be over, at least the first harrowing episode of “the worst.” But what struck me was that most of the oil was now going into a tanker, its intended target all along. It was now salable. Good thing for BP, absolutely, and a good thing for us, too. It is, after all, our need and our bondage to the stuff that made this whole tragedy possible. And it was our insistence that the dirty work be done far out of view, 60 miles offshore, which contributed to the difficulty in stopping it.
It is sad, indeed,this mess we’ve created. And yet it is a sadness that prevents me from pointing blame and finding easy scapegoats. It is a sadness, acknowledging God creator and acknowledging the failure of human stewardship of that good creation.
Tomorrow morning, bright and early, on perhaps another lovely day, I will get in my car and drive again.
