Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

How can one not be moved by what is occurring in Taiwan, parts of mainland China and Japan in the wake of Typhoon Morakot.  Hundreds dead, many still unaccounted for, some buried alive in mudslides, more than a million people with homes and villages destroyed, unimaginable destruction of cities, infrastructure, agriculture land, and more.

If you have not viewed the scene, here is one report from CNN on August 10th:

Or check out this 40-sec video: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/8196560.stm

More than 80 inches of rain.

More than 80 inches of rain. Think about that. Close to seven FEET of rain.

Now the mountainsides and hills give way. Whole villages disappeared. You know the death toll will rise. You know it will.

I don’t know what to say about stories like this. Extreme weather events are becoming commonplace, but I don’t really want to use this latest tragedy as another way to talk about climate change, because who knows what created this event? But I do want to use it to talk about compassion on an increasingly crowded planet in which millions upon millions of people live in very vulnerable places. We remember only too well the tsunami of December 2004.

How to make sense of events like this?  We can’t.  But there is something we must do — reach into a bottomless well of compassion and there find our connections to these human beings.  What survivors of these events have to look forward to are many, many years of misery, suffering, trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, unimaginable grief, and the need for support as they rebuild their lives.

We know how that goes — we know from the poor neighborhoods of New Orleans still in ruins.  We see evidence of the immense generosity of human beings, right along side the immense capacity to pull the blinders in a little closer.

We who have more than we need — even in the midst of deep recession, most of us have more than we need — we must begin to take the spiritual traditions we claim seriously.

The well of compassion must be bottomless.  We must reach deep into the heart of us — past the individualism of the culture, past the lies and deceptions of our politics, past the obsession with our own narrow personal interests and fear — to re-find our connections to all in all.

We are part of a living Earth.  We have truly messed with the planet’s life.  We think ourselves more powerful than it, and then It let’s us know who is in charge.  We share a common fate here with our sisters and brothers all around the world, and the other living species now threatened by our human way of life.  May we be reminded one more time that we are part of a whole — and the whole must be cared for, the whole must have our attention.