Category Archives: Environment

Dreams on Fire: The Burning of Los Angeles

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Promotional illustration (1913).

“Whatever else California was, good or bad, it was charged with human hope. It was linked imaginatively with the most compelling of American myths, the pursuit of happiness.”

— Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream: 1850-1915

“Hell, we threw in the land and sold ‘em the climate.”

— Los Angeles developer, c. 1880

At the end of the nineteenth century, southern California was being sold as an earthly paradise: Mediterranean light, salubrious climate, lush gardens, orange groves beneath snow-capped mountains. An eastern visitor in 1900 wrote home about the idyllic lifestyle of homeowners among the orange groves:

“[T]hey sit on the verandas of their pretty cottages—the refined essences of abstract existences—inhaling the pure air of the equal climate, reading novels or abstruse works of philosophy, according to their mental activity, from day to day, and waiting from year to year for their oranges to grow.” [i]

Promotional illustration (c. 1930).

Who wouldn’t want to live there? My parents left the snows of Minnesota in December, 1937, to pursue their dreams in Los Angeles, landing in an apartment behind Grauman’s Chinese Theater. By the time I was born, they had bought the house I grew up in, on the Valley side of the Hollywood hills, in a new development with more vacant lots than homes. There was an orange tree in the backyard, and a big sycamore to climb in the front. You could enjoy being outside all through the year. Every Fourth of July, six other families who had also moved West from my parents’ home town would come over for the “Red Wing picnic.” No one talked about going back to Minnesota. They were Californians now.

The author in the mountains above Altadena (c. 1979).

Los Angeles was home for my first fifty years. I loved the light, the proximity of mountains and sea, the cultural and artistic energy, the eccentric diversity of architectural styles, and the freedom to explore new ways of being and doing. Where else, with some heroic driving, could you ski, surf, and hear a world-class symphony on the same day?

Orange crate label (1920s).

But the boosters’ dream has been repeatedly contradicted by harsher realities. A sorry legacy of racism, greed, corruption, and violence is also part of the L.A. story. So are the broken dreams of the hopeful seekers who have come from somewhere else to make their mark. And then there are the natural disasters. Those who went there for the climate also got the Santa Ana winds.

Over the past 100 years, at least 150 novels and films have pictured the destruction of Los Angeles by earthquake, fire, flood, tsunami, volcano, nuclear war, and extraterrestrials. In Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction, David Fine explains the phenomenon:

“Disaster fiction … established itself in a city that was positioned literally at the edge of the continent, a place where an unstable physical geography collided with an unstable human geography of displaced migrants and inflated expectation … From the late 1920s to the present the dominant theme in Los Angeles fiction has been the betrayal of hope and the collapse of dreams. Writing against the optimistic booster literature produced just before and after the turn of the century, the city’s novelists constructed a counterfable about loss … the city as the place where dreams founder against the edge of the continent.” [ii]

Los Angeles City Hall basking in California’s problematic mythical past (1931).
The destruction of Los Angeles City Hall in War of the Worlds (1953).

I remember a moment during the Los Angeles Film Exposition in the early seventies, when a trailer for their science fiction movie marathon ended with a famous shot from War of the Worlds (1953): a death ray from a flying saucer decimating the Los Angeles City Hall. Watching one of our city’s most famous landmarks crumble into dust prompted an eruption of cheering and applause. On one level we were enjoying the sheer spectacle of the falling tower, but in retrospect I wonder whether we were also feeling a momentary liberation from our illusions about the permanence of things. Perhaps we were, in that brief moment, able to confront not only the fragility of our city, but our own brevity as well—accepting it, embracing it like the saints who know the art of surrender. The awareness of not being in charge, they tell us, is what makes perfect freedom. Resting in God changes everything.

But homilies and metaphors about letting go and moving on seem premature, even heartless, while so many thousands continue to suffer and grieve the burning of Los Angeles. Roger Magoulas, who lost his own house in the Oakland Hills fire of 1991, has written a helpful article about what he wishes he had known at the time, including how to handle the comments of those who haven’t been through an apocalypse.

“While well-meaning and sincere, those not affected by the fire will often say things that you may perceive as offensive, insensitive, or upsetting (such as, ‘I wish my house had burned down so I could start over’). Figure out how you want to deal with these types of comments, as you can expect them for years. If you can, keep in mind that those not affected often cannot grasp the enormity of your experience, and thank them for trying to help and remind them that fire victims are extra sensitive and have a lot to process.” [iii]

Fire ever doth aspire, And makes all like itself, turns all to fire. — John Donne
‘Tis a silent, skeleton world; Dead, and not yet re-born, Made, unmade, and scarcely as yet in the making; Ruin’d, forlorn, and blank. — B. E. Baughan

As I write this, my beloved native city continues to burn. I have friends and family whose cars are packed and ready for evacuation. Everyone’s breathing polluted air. For many people, daily needs like food, water and medicine are hard to come by. And after the flames die, the challenges of recovery will go on for years. In the Los Angeles Times, Anita Chabria has written about the unequal distribution of returning to normal:  

“The Palisades, clearly, is wealthy. But even within its wealth, there are degrees. There are plenty of folks in the area who don’t have to worry about rebuilding costs, or even losing another home to fire in the future. They can afford it. 

“There were also many families living in those glamorous streets who had been in the neighborhood for decades or even generations. Their homes may have been paid off or close to it, their life savings sunk into that plot of ground. And there are many living in Altadena and other affected areas who are just working Angelenos, paying off a mortgage — this was a neighborhood that drew Black and Latino families for its affordability …

“There’s also a trickle-down economic effect, even for those who weren’t displaced. Gone also are thousands of yards that had gardeners. Cleaning ladies, cooks, even nannies are now without work, but still have rent due. How do we include them in recovery?

“And there’s only so long survivors can camp out in hotels and on couches. The housing crunch that is surely coming holds the risk of pushing everyone down a notch, as the most desirable housing is taken up by those with the independent wealth or insurance checks to cover it.” [iv]

Postcard of the Santa Monica Mountains on fire in 1978.

Los Angeles has seen wildfires before. It’s always been part of the life. But climate change—and our culture’s suicidal inability to deal with it—is upping the ante. Atmospheric rivers increase vegetation, then drought turns it into fuel. The whole Los Angeles basin is becoming a fire trap. To make it livable for the long term will require the kind of planning and rebuilding that seems economically and politically daunting, if not impossible.

In his magisterial environmental history of fire in Europe, Stephen J. Pyne notes that civilization may try to tame fire, but can never abolish it:

“Europe sought fire, seized it, remade it, nurtured, feared, distrusted, craved, shackled, and unleashed it. As with the rest of its natural endowment, Europe sought above all to domesticate fire, to subject it to the discipline of the garden, to subordinate it to the order of society. Anthropogenic fire replaced natural fire. Fire became a tool, a tamed beast, a sacred symbol, an obedient servant. It knew its place in the social order and kept to it. In truth, civilization was impossible without fire; and the tended fire became Western civilization’s most elementary image of itself.”

But when the balance is disrupted, by wars, revolution, changing land practices, or climate change, it becomes clear that “fire is a good servant, but a bad master.”

“Then wildfire reappeared like a monstrous birth, and became a feral force that, savage with the memory of its suppression, revolted violently against its warders. Desired fire belonged on hearth and altar; unwanted fire appeared along the rough fringes of an unraveling society, in the cracks of disintegrating cities, amid the rubble of collapsed civilizations. Intellectual Europe saw fire as an atavism, as disorder and destruction, as nature gripped by delirium tremens. But wild or tame, fire persisted. Humans could neither wholly control it nor live without it. Now here, now there, now quiescently, now violently, Europe burned.” [v]

Richard Vogel’s photograph of the smoke in Malibu recalls Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1808-10): One tiny figure is dwarfed by greater powers.
Caspar David Friedrich’s painting conveys the vast and terrible beauty of the sublime.

Writing in the 1960s, California native Joan Didion described the wildfires stoked by Santa Ana winds as a formative part of Los Angeles living.

“The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself … Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.” [vi]

But in a 2005 interview, Didion strikes a typically Californian note of hope: “[M]ixed up with this tolerance for apocalyptic notions in which the world is going to end dramatically is this belief that the world can’t help but get better and better. It’s really hard for me to believe that everything doesn’t improve, because thinking like that was just so much a part of being in California.” [vii]

The remains of Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Altadena.

In the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, where I am canonically (but no longer physically) resident, two parishes have been hit hard by the fires. In the Palisades Fire, 75% of the members of St. Matthew’s have lost their homes. In the Eaton Canyon Fire, the historic church of St. Mark’s, Altadena has been completely destroyed. Although the Body of Christ resides in the people, not the building, every sacred space is soaked with the prayers and praises of generations, and its loss is always deeply felt.

My friend Brad Karelius, a priest in the Diocese of Los Angeles, has written movingly about the ways he was spiritually formed in that vanished place, where so much of its physical structure had been charged with accumulated meaning:  

“[W]hen I would visit St. Mark’s in later years, wherever I looked within the church: the pulpit, the choir stalls, the memorial windows, the Blessed Sacrament, conjured precious memories and deep gratitude for how St. Mark’s drew me into the loving arms of Jesus and sent me forth as a priest into the world.” [viii]

But God’s friends don’t linger long in “bare, ruin’d choirs.” [ix]  There is work to do, people to care for, hope to nurture, hearts to lift, and resurrections to embody. In last Sunday’s Zoom worship with her homeless congregation, St. Mark’s rector, the Rev. Carri Grindon, spoke a word of resurgent life:

 “Whether you’re in hotels or AirBnbs, driving in your car, staying in the homes of family or friends or strangers who aren’t strangers anymore, the bonds among us are bonds that cannot be severed. We are the latest in a long list of God’s people put on the road by disaster and displacement. We are still one in love. We are still one in Christ.” [x]

Sunrise from the burned out site of Mt. Calvary Retreat House, a holy place consumed by the Santa Barbara Tea Fire in 2008. Mzny of us still miss it.

I am grateful to the Rt. Rev. John H. Taylor, Episcopal Bishiop of Los Angeles, for his leadership in this crisis. His daily dispatches have provided some of the links that inform this post.

[i] Claire Perry, Pacific Arcadia: Images of California, 1600-1915 (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93.

[ii] David Fine, Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction, David Fine (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2000), 233, 236-237.

[iii] Roger Magoulas, “What I Wish I Knew After My House Burned Down,” The Bold Italic (Aug. 24, 2020): https://thebolditalic.com/what-i-wish-i-knew-before-my-house-burned-down-c306b1f2382b

[iv] Anita Chabria, “Recovery will be tempered by hard decisions and, if we aren’t careful, inequality,” Los Angeles Times (Jan. 12, 2025): https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-12/column-chabria-palisades-eaton-altadena-fire-rebuild?fbclid=IwY2xjawH0uCdleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHU9v4AMpCoGDOhEEMnXqfMroJ4QD8XM6A2nR-89jYrM9jHXqyCjnR7nc8g_aem_pkaB4VMlgFjaqFrCHCB4ZQ

[v] Stephen J. Pyne, Vestal Fire: An Environmental History, Told through Fire, of Europe and Europe’s Encounter with the World (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 3-4.

[vi] Joan Didion, “Los Angeles Notebook,” excerpt from Slouching Toward Bethlehem, in Didion: The 1960s & 70s (New York: Library of America, 2019), 378.

[vii] Joan Didion, interview with Barbara Isenberg in State of the Arts: California Artists Talk About Their Work (2005).

[viii] Fr. Brad Karelius, “Remembering St. Mark’s Church, Altadena, which burned yesterday in Eaton Canyon Fire,” Desert Spirit Press (Jan. 9, 2025): https://desertspiritpress.net/2025/01/09/remembering-st-marks-church-altadena-california-which-burned-yesterday-in-eaton-canyon-fire/?fbclid=IwY2xjawH0_3JleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHcWYXCWcuRo12uZXw432filoldgeU2o-ipNHX0uxLwqwz3_UZH14bN1VAA_aem_xPMvFG8gKZVTr45n6bNMrA

[ix] William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73.

[x] The Rev. Carri Grindon, homily for the First Sunday after the Epiphany (Jan. 12, 2025). For information about the St. Mark’s Rebuilding Fund: https://www.saintmarksaltadena.org/?fbclid=IwY2xjawH1AlNleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHfsx01P90-PcycJiWfnx6naHclAnQQVdjaD2YNyHjKzN3NVg584NifKk1Q_aem_Rr8cBCVUJ1VTZPf8Ccdg5w

“Water the earth with the tears of your joy”: An Earth Day Reflection

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Marilyn in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, Felton, CA, 2016 (Photo by Jim Friedrich)

That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count.

A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning.

The pine she leans against says: Listen. There’s something you need to hear.

–– Richard Powers, The Overstory

 

Toward the end of the last century, I sat in a circle of religious environmentalists in a California wilderness. Each of us wore a mask we had made to represent a species or element of the nonhuman world: bear, eagle, butterfly, elephant, whale, mountain, river, redwood, maple leaf, wind, ocean, wetland, desert––some part of Creation which had “chosen” us to speak for them in a Council of All Beings.[i]

We began by describing our particular existences, what it was like to be whatever we were.  Then we shared our worries and our sorrows over the harm being inflicted upon us by the human race. At some point, two volunteers removed their masks, resuming their human identity in order to receive the complaints of their fellow creatures––complaints so often unheard or ignored.

Listen. There’s something you need to hear.
If your mind were only a slightly greener thing,
we’d drown you in meaning. [ii]

The Council spoke its anger as well as its hurt. Afterward, participants in the exercise seemed both surprised and shaken by the surges of fierce emotion in such a playful exercise. It was a foretaste of the Last Judgment: humanity has a lot to answer for. But judgment was not the last word. Before the Council adjourned, each of its nonhuman members was asked to give the humans one of its own attributes to assist them in the healing of a wounded Creation. The mountain gave patience. The butterfly, transformation. The bear, strength. The river, ceaseless flow. The leaf: letting go. Renewed by such generous wisdom, we departed in peace.

On the 50th annual celebration of Earth Day, despite decades of progress in both awareness and behavior, the wellbeing of “all creatures great and small” remains under grave threat. Climate change, mass extinctions, degradations of air, water and soil, destruction of habitats, deforestation, deregulation. . . who can count the ways? And the incapacity of our political and economic systems to respond justly, rapidly, or effectively is disheartening at best, fatal at worst.

In the United States, we can certainly point to the unfettered greed, stupidity, and maliciousness in White House and Senate as deplorable accelerants of environmental conflagration, but the problem goes deeper than the heartless actions of particular villains. Our entire culture has an attitude problem. Or rather, we have lost track of the narrative. We have forgotten what kind of story we are in.

The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it,
the world and all who dwell therein. (Psalm 24:1)

Who believes this anymore? Fewer and fewer. And even the faithful among us find ourselves deeply embedded in the systems and premises of secularity, where nature is not divine creation or sacred web, but an exploitable resource, valued primarily for the usefulness it provides or the pleasure it gives. Drained of its inherent sacredness, it no longer commands reverence. Its value is entirely contingent on human needs and desires.

Erazim Kohák, Czech philosopher and environmentalist, frames this epistemic crisis in the starkest terms:

“If there is no God, then nature is not a creation, lovingly crafted and evolved with purpose and value by its Creator. It can only be a cosmic accident, dead matter contingently propelled by blind force, ordered by efficient causality. In such a context, a moral subject, living his life in terms of value and purpose, would indeed be an anomaly, precariously rising above it in a moment of Promethean defiance only to sink again into the absurdity from which he rose. If God were dead, so would nature be––and humans could be no more than embattled strangers, doomed to defeat, as we have largely convinced ourselves we in fact are.” [iii]

Fifty years ago, the first Earth Day initiated an impressive legacy of awareness and action on behalf of the earth and all that is in it. And I pray that today will be a time of renewal and rededication to the immense labor of protecting, preserving and nurturing the natural world. But our work must not be limited to the scientific, the political and the economic. It must also, I believe, include the spiritual––the recovery of the Sacred in our collective awareness.

Christian ethicist Richard L. Fern has written, “the experience of living in an ‘enchanted world,’ a place of belonging where personal and communal destinies matter all the way down, depends, not surprisingly, on the adoption of a religious point of view.”[iv] But what would that look like? And how might we get there?

I have no idea. Maybe we begin by entering a forest, or sitting by a lake, becoming still enough to listen, letting our mind become “a slightly greener thing.” Perhaps then the earth may whisper its forgotten secret.

Thrush song, stream song, holy love
That flows through earthly forms and folds,
The song of Heaven’s Sabbath fleshed
In throat and ear, in stream and stone,
A grace living here as we live . . .

–– Wendell Berry, “Sabbaths, 1982––IV”

May each of us, in our own unique way, realize the grace of belonging to the “holy love that flows through earthly forms.” And may our collective awareness likewise awaken to the mystery of the world. And then . . . ?

In The Brothers Karamozov, the young monk Alyosha, suddenly filled with grace after a spiritual crisis, falls prostrate on the bare earth to kiss it, just as the Orthodox do reverence to holy icons. This scene has raised theological eyebrows, but Rowan Williams interprets Alyosha’s dramatic gesture to mean that “the earth is another defaced icon, whose inner and nonnegotiable dignity is secured only when its relation to the creator is acknowledged.”[v] In other words, when the earth is understood as a created reality, a material expression of divine intention and divine love, it becomes, like an icon, a window into the eternal reality in which it lives and moves and has its being. Dostoevky’s description[vi] of Alyosha’s revelation is one of literature’s most ecstatic moments:

The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens, the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars. . . Alyosha stood gazing and suddenly, as if he had been cut down, threw himself to the earth.

He did not know why he was embracing it, he did not try to understand why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss all of it, but he was kissing it, weeping, sobbing, and watering it with his tears, and he vowed ecstatically to love it, to love it unto ages of ages. “Water the earth with the tears of your joy, and love those tears. . . ,” rang in his soul. What was he weeping for? Oh, in his rapture he wept even for the stars that shone on him from the abyss, and “he was not ashamed of this ecstasy.” It was as if threads from all those innumerable worlds of God all came together in his soul, and it was trembling all over, “touching other worlds.” He wanted to forgive everyone and for everything, and to ask forgiveness, oh, not for himself! but for all and for everything. . .

Comet Falls, Mount Rainier National Park, July 2005 (Photo by Jim Friedrich/Karen Haig)

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The divine power that sustains the universe has been described as an immeasurable flow or fountain of energy, and in celebration of Earth Day’s semicentennial, I offer this video pairing of Charles-Marie Widor’s exuberant Toccata for organ, played by Paul Roy, with footage of three western rivers I shot over the last two summers. May it be an icon of the divine energeia, pouring ceaselessly through the life of the world.

 

 

 

[i] The Council of All Beings is a communal ritual developed by Joanna Macy. https://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/Joanna%20Macy.htm

[ii] Richard Powers, The Overstory (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), 4. See epigraph above. Powers’ extraordinary novel takes the reader into a new way of seeing the natural world and one’s own place in it.

[iii] Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature, 1984, p. 5), cited in Richard L. Fern, Nature, God and Humanity: Envisioning an Ethics of Nature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 120. Kohák died at 86 on Feb. 8, 2020.

[iv] Fern, 121.

[v] Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (London: Continuum, 2008), 225.

[vi] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. by Richard Pever & Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1990), 362.

“Save us from the time of trial” –– Climate Change as Apocalypse

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The angel dictates a word of hope and promise to St. John: “Blessed are those who are invited to the feast of the Lamb.” (Rev 19)

 The humanist/scholar became quite emotional in conceiving of the world devoid of human beings, which was a possibility brought on by one disaster or another, due, it must be said, to our own actions. This would be the worst thing he could imagine––worlds devoid of human beings, even if these worlds were populated by other intelligent and enterprising life forms.

–– Joy Williams, Ninety-Nine Stories of God

 What have you got to worry about? We’re only adrift in an open sea with a drunken captain and an engine that’s liable to explode at any moment.

–– Humphrey Bogart in Beat the Devil

 

The end is near! The world as we know it is on the verge of extinction, according to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.[i]But where is the sense of collective alarm? Where is the will to act? Our house is burning down, but instead of shouting “Fire!” and grabbing some hoses, we carry on as usual, unable to muster a sense of emergency. Perhaps we are just too exhausted by the endless stream of horrors under Republican rule, from children’s prison camps to the spread of American fascism, to have any bandwidth left to address the environmental apocalypse.

As columnist Leonard Pitts suggests,

“So then you read where the planet is melting, dire results expected soon, and you just shrug and file it away with all the other terrible things you’ll worry about when you get a chance. That’s understandable. But it presumes a luxury we don’t have — time. Again, this report says the world has 10 years in which to save itself — and we’ll spend at least two of those under Trump.” [ii]

Don’t ask me to explain why the party in power and its corporate handlers are doing everything they can to make things worse, as if the fate of the planet––and the well-being of their own children’s children––is nothing compared to the allure of short-term power and profit for themselves. Such suicidal selfishness is utterly incomprehensible to me. But we don’t have to approve of it to be caught up in it. We are all participants in an unsustainable culture.

Death rides a pale horse. (Rev 6)

Of course, there are many people, governments and institutions who recognize the climate crisis and are working to address it. Even in the heart of Trumpian coal country, West Virginia’s Charleston Gazette-Mailis sounding the alarm:

“When today’s kindergartners are in their 20s, they may find a devastated world wracked by horrible hurricanes, droughts, floods, wildfires, tornadoes and other tragedies made worse by global warming. Coastal cities may be abandoned, sunken wrecks. Poverty and misery may result.”

The editorial goes on to note that hurricanes Florence and Michael have “inflicted more loss than the entire worth of West Virginia’s coal industry — but conservative politicians still won’t act to reduce the damage.” [iii]

The Second Trumpet: The sea is polluted by fire, blood and death. (Rev 8)

Only ten years left to avert catastrophe! The message is clear: change or die. But given the dysfunctional paralysis of the American government, the iron grip of vulture capitalism, and the enormity of scale required for worldwide transformation, the prospects for success are bleak. The Titanic can’t turn on a dime. And when the captain doesn’t even believe in icebergs, it’s time to strike up “Nearer, my God, to Thee.”

On a recent trip to France, I beheld, for the first time, the extraordinary Tapestry of the Apocalypse in Angers, whose 84 large panels depict scenes from the Revelation of St. John the Divine. This riveting medieval visual sequence­­––the largest wall-hanging ever woven in Europe–– extends in parallel rows for 104 meters down the length of a vast, dimly-lit hall. It’s like a gigantic textile comic strip. Although the 700-year-old dyes have faded over time, these visionary scenes remain compellingly vivid, dense with iconography and narrative.

The Tapestry of the Apocalypse, Angers, France.

Theologian Austin Farrer described their source, the book of Revelation, as a great work of religious imagination.  “It is the one great poem which the first Christian age produced, it is a single and living unity from end to end, and it contains a whole world of spiritual imagery to be entered into and possessed.” [iv] Gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson added his own appreciation. “I still read the Book of Revelation,” he said, “when I need to get cranked up about language.” [v]

The meaning and value of the Bible’s last book have long been debated. Was it a mystical vision, a theo-political critique of the Roman Empire, or a quasi-liturgical dramatization of eschatological themes? The violent imagery of Revelation has been misused by religious cranks and maniacs in notoriously unhealthy ways, but the text has also––more than any other biblical book––given us many sublime prayer and hymn texts. Often neglected in times of contentment or complacency, it speaks loudly in times of crisis. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the book never made much sense to him until the rise of the Nazis.

“Babylon” is Revelation’s code name for the Roman empire, the oppressive and sinful social consensus whose claims of absolute totality were grounded in seduction, deceit and the enforcing threat of violence. And while that particular empire is long gone, Babylon is still around. “Bellicose, selfish, self-deluded, icy, absurdly resolute––behold the Rome of the book of Revelation,” said the Jesuit prophet-poet Daniel Berrigan. And, he added, “Behold also America.” [vi] Forty years after he wrote that, it seems truer than ever.

The Babylons of every age want us to believe that resistance is futile, because “this is the way things are.” We’re all implicated in the system. Even if we don’t like it, we can’t imagine living without it. Try preaching an exit from global capitalism next Sunday and see what happens! We may dream of the “New Jerusalem” of justice, peace and universal blessedness, but it seems impossibly distant. “If the Babylon of our time is already, from God’s perspective, a smoking ruin, how and where do we find the New Jerusalem? Is it really possible to ‘come out’ of empire when it surrounds us so completely?” [vii]

“Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?” The people worship the beast of worldly power as the Dragon (Satan) approves. (Rev 13)

Like all apocalyptic literature, Revelation is pessimistic about the present age and where it is headed. But it is also full of hope about the age to come––the unexpectedly redemptive future emerging from a time of emergency. “The apocalypticist sees meaning where the uninitiated sees only chaos or catastrophe.” [viii]

Revelation insists that Babylon’s “reality” is a lie: there is an alternative to its culture of seduction and death. This alternative, the New Jerusalem, is not to be sought in some unreachable elsewhere. It is here among us, though only visible to the eyes of faith. And in every moment, every time we choose life over death, we begin to make our exodus, however small and tentative, out of Babylon’s prison into the space of divine blessedness.

The fall of Babylon. Only its demons are left to haunt the rubble. (Rev 18)

The Tapestry of the Apocalypse was created by inhabitants of their own medieval Babylon, an exitless world fraught with anxiety and doom. As half of Europe was being struck down by the Black Plague, Revelation’s harrowing images of a death-haunted, perishing world struck home. The obsessive immensity of the tapestry project testifies to a depth of existential engagement with ultimate concerns, as if the artists and weavers were driven to create a comprehensive record of their longing––and their dread––before they themselves ran out of time.

As I processed slowly, contemplatively, through the crepuscular vastness of Angers’ tapestry hall, the strange images flickered before me like an old silent movie, as though their colors and forms were signaling across the centuries with the light of a long-vanished past. Whatever these visions first said to John the Divine in his Patmos cave, whatever they meant to the fourteenth-century French weavers, they were now pleading for my attention.

See! God is making all things new.
Death will be no more,
mourning and sadness and pain will be no more.
The world of the past is gone. [ix]

 

The New Jerusalem comes down from heaven, bringing divine glory into earthly presence. (Rev 21)

Babylon is fallen. The gates to God’s eternal city are open wide. And the urgent question for believers today, in the face of a climate apocalypse, is this:

How do we hold fast to the redemptive vision
of the New Jerusalem
through the long dark night of catastrophe?

 

The Dragon pursues the expectant mother, “robed in the sun,” into the wilderness, trying to prevent the birth of hope. (Rev 12)

In the short term, we can practice both personal and collective environmental ethics, foster alliances with environmental changemakers, and incorporate a deep love and respect for the planet––and all who dwell therein––into our worship and our spiritual formation. And, setting aside for now our differences on a multitude of political and economic questions, we absolutely need to unite in casting our votes for defenders of the earth and against every climate change denier and pollution enabler. When the Beast is on the ballot, vote no!

In the long term, people of faith may face an even more daunting challenge––to cling to hope amid almost unimaginable destruction and loss: the disappearance of coastal cities and large land masses; countless millions of climate refugees; a horrific number of human deaths; mass extinction of species and habitats; economic havoc from fires, storms and floods; an endangered food supply; global conflicts over migration and dwindling resources; and the strain on political systems as they try to cope. How shall we declare God’s blessings then?

If we fail to change and the worst does come, our greatest enemy may be despair. I don’t need to contemplate the whole catalog of loss to feel the weight of immense sadness. Just picturing a single High Sierra meadow choked in smoke, or withered into a lifeless desert, is enough to make me weep.

Save us from the time of trial. That’s what the Lord’s Prayer really means by the more familiar “lead us not into temptation.” But the prayer is not asking to be spared from difficult challenges. That would make it irrelevant in the face of planetary apocalypse. We are all going to be tested by an uncertain future. But if we can beseech God with all our hearts to bring us through the experience of loss, despair and doubt with our faith and hope still intact, then “save us from the time of trial” may prove, in the climate crisis, our most earnest and necessary plea.

Meanwhile, get out of Babylon while you still can.

The Third Trumpet: A burning star falls to earth and pollutes the water supply. (Rev 8)

All photos by Jim Friedrich

 

[i] Summary and links to complete report: http://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/climate-change/

[ii] Leonard Pitts, Jr., “We only have 10 years to save ourselves from climage change,” Miami Herald, Oct. 12, 2018: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article219870680.html

[iii] Editorial, “Like a weather report, with time, climate change projections closer, more ominous,” Charleston Gazette-Mail, October 16, 2018: https://www.wvgazettemail.com/opinion/gazette_opinion/editorial/gazette-editorial-like-a-weather-report-with-time-climate-change/article_26d13b8a-47e3-517a-9882-037b9bff6d70.html

[iv] Austin Farrer, A Rebirth of Images: The Making of St. John’s Apocalypse(1949), q. in Richard K. Emmerson, “The Apocalypse in Medieval Culture,” in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard K. Emmerson & Bernard McGinn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 293.

[v] Hunter Thompson interview in Atlantic Unbound, August 26, 1997, q. in Unveiling Empire: Reading Revelation Then and Now, Wes Howard-Brook & Anthony Gwyther (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), 2 n. 3.

[vi] Daniel Berrigan, S.J., The Nightmare of God (1983), q. in Unveiling Empire, 44.

[vii]Unveiling Empire, 260.

[viii] Bernard McGinn, “John’s Apocalypse and the Apocalyptic Mentality,” in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, 9.

[ix] Revelation 21:4-5.

Fight Like Hell, Love Like Heaven

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Alphonse Mucha, Design for June cover (1899)

Springtime glories round us teeming,
Fill our hearts with joyous cheer,
Sunshine brightly o’er us beaming,
Makes all nature glad appear;
Lovely season bright and vernal.
Ever welcome to our clime,
Emblem of a growth eternal,
And of destinies sublime.

–– Shaker hymn

 

The First of June. This morning’s cloudy sky and cool air cannot refute the calendar. The sun gains strength daily, and the blooming riot of spring yields to a more tranquil verdancy. Summer is i-cumen in.

Half a century ago, Hal Borland reported the news from the natural world for the New York Times. His descriptions were local to the northeastern United States, but not so singular as to prevent translation into our own habitats. His June dispatches are a canticle of praises sung at summer’s dawn:

June is really a time of relative quiet, serenity after the rush of sprouting and leafing and before the fierce heat that drives toward maturity and seed. June’s very air can be as sweet as the wild strawberries that grace its middle weeks, sweet as clover, sweet as honeysuckle.

The rasping that is July, the scraping of cicadas and all their kin, is yet in abeyance. June doesn’t assault your ears. It flatters them, then softens the sound of frog and whippoorwill, and is a joy.

These things we know each June. We learn them all over again in the first week, and we wonder how we ever could have forgotten them. For June is peonies as well as roses. June is the first kitchen-garden produce as well as flower beds. June is a happy memory rediscovered and lived again.

June is cornflower blue and day-lily gold and white lace of daisies in the field. June is bridal wreath and mock orange and the scent of sweet peas on the garden fence.

June is strawberries, red and juiceful and tantalizing …. June is peas in the garden, late June, for the favored gardener. June is first lettuce and baby beets, and string beans in blossom and susceptible to both beetle and blight. June is corn, both sweet and field varieties, pushing green bayonets toward the sun. June is scallions.

 Now come some of the pleasantest nights of our year, nights when you can almost hear the grass growing and the rosebuds straining at their seams…The world has a green, growing fragrance, a hundred odors mingled into one. A late Spring rushes into full leaf and opening bud, and June comes over the hills in the moonlight.[i]

Our hawthorn tree – one of my friends to love and protect.

This is the news we absolutely need to hear. This is the day which the Lord has made. Let’s go outside and see what’s happening in the garderns, fields and woods of our own neighborhoods. It’s time to pay more attention.

In Borland’s entry for June 1st, he delivers a homily on the meaning of the season:

June and Summer bring the undeniable truth of growth and continuity. Each Summer since time first achieved a green leaf has been another link in the chain of verity that is there for understanding. Every field, every meadow, every roadside is not rich with the proof of sustaining abundance, evidence that the earth is essentially a hospitable place no matter what follies [humanity] may commit. June invites [us] to know these things, to know sun and rain and grass and trees and growing fields. It is a season for repairing the perspective, for admitting, however privately, that there are forces and rhythms that transcend man’s particular and transient plans.[ii]

I want to believe that. I really do. But we live in the shadow of apocalypse. Does nature still have the capacity to transcend human folly? Will the earth remain a hospitable place?

After writing that last sentence, I checked HuffPost to see whether the White House had issued its expected decision on the Paris Climate Agreement. This is what I saw:

HuffPost headline (June 1, 2017)

 

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain in the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.––Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning . . .[iii]

Is Eden doomed, soured by sin? Must we begin to lament its inevitable destruction?

Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement makes little economic or political sense. The rest of the world understands the stakes, and a clear majority of American voters know we need to get serious about climate change. Even oil companies are against abandoning the agreement. So why does Trump refuse to give in to the growing consensus––and life or death urgency––on this planetary crisis? Is it simply his inability to admit any error? That is no doubt part of it. But the scale of his suicidal ignorance is so vast that I have to wonder: are we witnessing a performance of pure, unadulterated evil?

In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan is enraged to find that he is not the One to whom every knee on heaven and earth should bow. Rather than live in a created order where he is not the center of attention and worship, he chooses to be the lord of hell and chaos––no mere servant in heaven–– and dedicates himself to “study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield” (1.7-8).

If Satan can’t rule creation, he will destroy it to satisfy his infantile rage against everything good, true and beautiful. If he can’t have victory, he’ll settle for revenge.

And now
Through all restraint broke loose he wings his way….
Directly toward the new created World,
And Man there plac’t, with purpose to assay
If him by force he can destroy or worse,
By some false guild pervert; and ashall pervert
For man will hark’n to his glozing lyes [flattering lies]. (3.86-93)

Sour with sinning, indeed. Let every American feel the shame and horror of what the Faither of Lies has done this day. Let us weep and wail as we must. Let our anger and disbelief erupt in fierce and unrelenting action.

But do not forget the other news––the news right outside your door. Do not forget to cherish the beauty of this day, this June, this “wild and precious life.” Always remember why this God-given world matters so much. Whatever responses and actions we commit ourselves to on this Day of Infamy, let them come not from hate or fear, but from love.

Obsessing over evil will only suck us into the dark vacancy of its chaos. Everything we do to protect and preserve Creation must be grounded in the divine Love without which nothing at all would exist. Fight like hell, but love like heaven.

 

 

 

[i] Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons: A Selection of Outdoor Editorials from the New York Times (Philadelphia & New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1964), 78-83.

[ii] Ibid., 78.

[iii] Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring”

 

Dies Irae

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Biblical prophet at Moissac Abbey on Le Chemin de St. Jacques

Biblical prophet at Moissac Abbey on Le Chemin de St. Jacques

Mr. McCleery, my seventh grade Latin teacher, had us memorize verses of the Dies Irae, a medieval chant describing the Last Judgment in strikingly lurid language. Most boys in junior high do not walk around chanting Latin poetry about the end of the world, but I rather enjoyed it. The tune was catchy, and those terse rhyming triplets beat time like the sensuous energy of a drum circle.

Dies irae, dies illa, 
Solvet saeclum in favilla,
Teste David cum Sibylla.

Day of wrath, O day of mourning,
See fulfilled the prophet’s warning,
Heav’n and earth in ashes burning.

The text of Dies Irae is inspired by the first chapter of Zephaniah, which was one of the eucharistic readings last Sunday. I sometimes wonder what churchgoers think about when asked to consider “a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom.” In Syria or Ukraine, it’s just the latest news. But for those of us not living in one of history’s infernos, Zephaniah might be dismissed as a colorful crank carried away by the thrill of his own hyperbole.

The effect of the Bible’s more fiery rhetoric is often muted by the flat, inexpressive way it is usually read – or worse, mumbled – in the typical liturgy, as though no one really means it. Readers of prophetic texts should be given bullhorns. They should walk among the people as they shout, looking them in the eye.

I will bring such distress upon people
that they shall walk like the blind;
because they have sinned against the LORD,
their blood shall be poured out like dust,
and their flesh like dung.[i]

The church growth people might have something to say about that sort of messaging, but there is no denying that the prophets are working hard to get our attention. And in these last weeks of the Christian year, both the Sunday lectionary and the daily liturgical readings resound with the trumpet blasts of biblical warnings. People get ready. History’s chickens are coming home to roost.

Those prophetic rants have sometimes been read as endorsements of sacred violence – angry outbursts of a moody and unpredictable god – but God’s best friends have long rejected that crude picture as a tragic misreading of the divine. Nevertheless, there is no denying the violent imagery woven into some biblical texts, and we must find a way to make sense of it.

Walter Brueggemann explains that the prophets “speak in images and metaphors that aim to disrupt, destabilize, and invite to alternative perceptions of reality … [They] speak in outrageous and extreme figures because they intend to disrupt the ‘safe’ construals of reality, which are sponsored and advocated by the dominant opinion makers.”[ii] In other words, prophets blow up the old paradigms in order to make room for the new. They take seriously the power of language both to enslave and to liberate.

Zephaniah targets those “who rest complacently on their dregs,” who are blinded by their illusions, who assume divine indifference to the damage they do to the poor, the vulnerable, and the whole interdependent system of life on earth. We can find similar voices in our own time.

German writer W. G. Sebald’s apocalyptic poem, After Nature, is as harrowing as anything in the Bible. As he contemplates the dark and barren landscape of Matthias Grünewald’s Crucifixion, painted in 1505, Sebald finds a predictive warning of the planet’s own death unless we change our ways.

Here in an evil state of erosion
and desolation the heritage of the ruining
of life that in the end will consume
even the very stones has been depicted.[iii]

Today the United States Senate came just one vote shy of approving the Keystone XL pipeline, a massive fossil fuels project to enrich a few people at the expense of the whole earth. The effects of exploiting the Canadian tar sands, according to climate scientist James Hansen, could well be of biblical proportions.

Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.[iv]

Hansen concludes that Keystone and its aftermath “will be game over for the climate.” The apocalypse was defeated today in the Senate, but there will be another vote early next year, when many of the “no” votes will be out of office. Alarmingly, the next head of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works will be a climate change denier who believes in a god who would never allow earth’s climate to be affected by the actions of mortals. If the senior senator from Oklahoma were to study his Bible, he might find that God takes human freedom far more seriously than he does. We do have the power to destroy God’s creations and disrupt the fragile balances of life.

The prophets are trying to make us renounce that power before it is too late. When Zephaniah warns of “a terrible end” he isn’t simply condemning us; he’s trying to save us. The “day of wrath” will not be an arbitrary vengeance from the sky, but the sum of innumerable bad choices here on earth. Zephaniah and his fellow prophets hold before us a chillingly graphic picture of where those choices are headed. What has been called the wrath of God is really something bearing our own signature.

Will God ride to the rescue? In a poem called “Emmanuel’s Nightmare,” African-American poet Gwendolyn Brooks wonders what it might be like if we were simply left to our own devices. She imagines the Second Coming of a Christ who would “clean the earth / of the dirtiness of war.” But the Savior finds himself thwarted. Humans love war too much. It is “what they lived for.” So God’s Son gives up and goes home. Mission not accomplished. “He had not the heart / To take away their chief sweet delectation.”[v] 346

The prospect of being abandoned to our own suicidal impulses is not a happy one, but – thankfully – it is not in fact the story we tell. God has destined us not for wrath but for salvation.[vi] The means of that better destiny will turn out to be quite surprising, not at all like the terrible clamor of the Dies Irae. But that is a tale for another day.

[i] Zephaniah 1:17

[ii] Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 625

[iii] W.G. Sebald, After Nature, q. in Colin Riordan, “Ecocentrism in Sebald’s After Nature,” in W.G. Sebald – A Critical Companion, eds. J.J. Long & Anne Whitehead (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 51

[iv] New York Times, May 9, 2012

[v] Robert Atwan, George Dardess, Peggy Rosenthal, eds., Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 346

[vi] I Thessalonians 5:9