Anyhow, that's also what I have for you tonight -- mostly unmasticated regurgitation, with a healthy dose of idealism thrown in for good measure. I had hoped to have more blog entries digging in and writing through issues, to offer up some food for thought and to give myself a reason to process. But right now the sheer volume of information my brain is taking in means that trying to put a coherent thought or argument together feels like trying to build a spaceship at a garbage dump (except for the fact that the information I'm learning is actually fabulous, and nothing like garbage... that's where the analogy breaks down). Can it be done? Maybe. Do I have the energy for it on this particular night after 11 hours of class? Hell no. What I can do, instead, is rummage through the heap and hold up a few shiny objects.
Warning: begin soapbox.
The latest issue of the Semi (Fuller campus weekly paper) was on the topic of the environment, and why it is both the responsibility of individuals, and of the church itself, to take up the cause. Slightly, oh so slightly, close to my heart, especially after working as a backpacking guide for Sierra Treks for several seasons, where I was consistently awed by the creativity exhibited in wilderness, and the ways we have desperately mistaken the priviledge of dominion over the earth with domination of it.
Anyhow, I had hoped to write an article for this issue of the Semi, but that was before I came down with Death for a week before Christmas. So I was quite pleased to see the lead article, by a Fuller professor who talks of her unlikely conversion to environmentalism, addressing the issues I would have written about, and much more articulately than I could have mustered. Three things struck me, both for how she presented them in the context of environmentalism, and also in the context of what it really means to care about all the other things God cares about -- which is pretty much what Jesus meant when he said, "Follow me."
She writes of how it is hard to love what we don't often see. This applies to spectacular places like Rainbow Canyon in NE Yosemite - where there are no roads and no trails and the only way to find them is to learn to read a topographic map - as well as to kinds of people that we don't spend time with on a regular basis. Maybe our roads don't naturally "go" to those people and we have to pull out a map, or enlist a guide, to get to them. She writes of how, while it's important to have ideals and opinions, it's a problem when we're not ready to be personally uncomfortable. Maybe this means taking the bus, maybe it means learning how to love people when it's inconvenient - which, if we're talking about the kind of love God asks us to have for each other, might be more often than, say, every third Tuesday. And she writes of how this is a justice issue, because the comfortable will not change until we feel a pinch, and because we are the comfortable we are the last to feel the pinch, and by then it may be too late.
But I won't convince anyone of anything, and neither will she, as we sit and write from our comfy Ikea chairs. And she knew it too. So now I will move from regurgitation to full-on plagiarism:
"Only changed hearts will willingly bear real costs, and hearts are rarely changed by arguments, whether from the pulpit or elsewhere. Thus, I suspect that what the church can do to carry out its responsibility to the environment depends less on what policies might be advocated Sunday morning in the sanctuary, or on what sort of coffee is served in what sort of cups on the patio, than on what God's people are taught to love. Oh yes, by all means show the moral costs of policies; by all means choose coffee that does not destroy lives and rain forests; but even more, be as creative and concrete as you can to help people to love God's world and God's creatures, human and nonhuman - the world God himself, who made it, loves. Then they will steadfastly support the policies and pay more to buy the less destructive coffee."May my heart be changed, that I might remember the world doesn't revolve around me, and that I may learn to bear real costs with grace and humility.
End soapbox.
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