Journal Time

with Ray Waddle

A glance out my window tells the daily story — up and down the street, nobody's outside. No kids play weekend pick-up ball games. Everybody's indoors, warming to the glow of electronic screens, even on nice days.

"I don't like being outside," a student groaned at me once when I assigned the class to walk an outdoor labyrinth and write about the experience.

Alienation from nature gets easier as the gadgetry piles up. People boast at knowing nothing about lawn care or world oil production or where the grocery store's fresh produce comes from. It's easy to act as if it's a "postagricultural" society. But everybody has to eat, and food must come from somewhere, and we still need farmers to grow it, and the right or wrong use of land and air decides our health, whether we city-dwellers give earth any thought or not.

Earth Day is coming — April 24, the 35th annual. It's a Sunday, Environmental Sabbath, and churches will draw momentary attention to the biblical message of caring for God's creation. Sermons will urge recycling, or reducing energy consumption, or beefing up urgency about global warming and other damaging long-term trends.

Then Earth Day will end that night, and the forgetful world will ease back into routines of earthindifference.

Fortunately church-oriented ecology groups will still be in business the day after Earth Day. Presbyterians for Restoring Creation, an independent organization, was featured recently in Orion magazine as a grassroots sign of hope. PRC organizes events like "Bike to Church Sunday" to encourage people to leave the car at home. (At First Presbyterian Church in Boulder, Colo., many biked to church on the designated sabbath; others carpooled, walked or skateboarded.)

PRC Moderator Nancy Corson Carter says a key text is John 3:16-17 — "For God so loved the world that he gave his only son."

She told the magazine: "When I memorized this as a child, I thought that 'the world' meant humans, period. Now I have learned that 'world' in Greek is 'cosmos,' and means all of creation, nonhman as well as human. I have a new way of seeing the world as an interconnection of beings."

PRC supports the mission of the Presbyterian Church (USA)'s Environmental Justice Office, as well as other denominational statements that carry this message: If we believe earth is really created by God, we better act like it, and treat it with respect and justice. One justice issue that worries Christian environmentalists: America has 4 percent of the world's population yet produces 25 percent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

PRC outlines its goals at www.prcweb.org. They include:

— understanding our role in causing the suffering of Creation and repenting of that role.

— trusting that Christ has shown us how to challenge injustice with love and to transform brokenness into wholeness.

— consciously resisting the values and norms of consumerbased economic systems, which emphasize growth at all costs.

Easier said than done, of course. I for instance write these words (indoors) at a computer that depends on electricity and can't be recycled. Soon I'll get into the car and drive three miles just to buy some vegetables for tonight, fresh produce I might have grown myself on a little patch of backyard Tennessee soil and saved the gas and reconnected with the landscape.

But lately I've been reading Kentucky farmer-writer Wendell Berry, and a message comes through: Stop griping about how paralyzing the ecological problems are. Instead, do little things. Grow tomatoes. Support local farmers' markets. Ask questions about where your food comes from, what pesticides were used and how much it cost to transport (needlessly) long distances to get to the local market.

Realize we're all part of the "Great Economy," Berry says — the God-created cosmos where everything is connected and even the fall of a sparrow is noticed. Realize the national economy is not an end in itself but a part, a small part, of the Great Economy. Realize the Great Economy requires humility because it is ultimately a mystery: Humans can never fully know the whole scope of its pattern or power. Yet penalties (ecological catastrophe) await if we violate it or overstep our bounds (examples — nuclear fusion, cloning) and refuse to live in harmony with it. This makes the Great Economy no mere poetic metaphor but a practical reality we must heed. Churches should take note: The Great Economy has another name. It's called the Kingdom of God.

Consider getting in touch with PRC, before Earth Day and especially after.