Guest post: Lowell Bliss of Eden Vigil

“Wangari Maathai–Nobel laureate, founder of the Green Belt Movement, and sister-in-Christ Jesus–passed away on Sunday, Sept. 25, at the age of 71.  We at Eden Vigil wish her the joy of her resurrection.”

Ed has asked that I post this latest issue of the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest, something I’m happy to do.  But first let me forward a story from Ed himself.  On Sept. 28, Ed wrote:

Wangari was a good friend of Care of Creation Kenya. . . . She did attend a 2006 God and Creation conference – funny story there:  She had been invited and finally showed up on the last day of the conference.  They had to give her platform time which turned out to be right before my presentation, which was to be the closing talk of the conference.  Well, she took the entire slot (45 minutes) which meant that by the time I got up to talk, it was already past lunchtime…  wouldn’t have worked in the US, but these were Africans – so I just pretended there was no clock in the room and took my entire time as well (and then some, as I recall!).  I had the honor of a future-Nobelist telling me after that she ‘enjoyed my talk very much.’ Of course, at that time we had no idea that she would be winning the Nobel.

 Environmental Missions Prayer Digest, October 2011

Often in this opening paragraph, we offer a Scripture passage or a quotation.  This month, in tribute to Professor Maathai, we refer you to a song, Peter Mayer’s “Holy Now.”  (You can find a nice version of it at YouTube here.)  The songwriter arrives at the conclusion:

So, the challenging thing becomes

Not to look for miracles

But finding where there isn’t one.

Often what we come away with from a song, like how we interpret Wangari Maathai’s Catholic faith or her activist life, is determined by what we listeners and observers bring to it in the first place.  For what do we have eyes to see, or ears to hear?

Wangari Maathai proposes an Easter Monday celebration

Professor Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977.  Its mission, as described, was “to plant trees across Kenya to fight erosion and to create firewood for fuel and jobs for women.”  In 2004, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first African woman and the first environmentalist to win the prize.

While Green Belt’s “Billion Trees Campaign” may be calculated in the number of seedlings planted, Professor Maathai’s legacy may be best understood in her statement: “The planting of trees is the planting of ideas.  By starting with the simple act of planting a tree, we give hope to ourselves and to future generations.”

In 2005, Professor Maathai gave an interview to Mia MacDonald of Beliefnet which was entitled “Heaven Is Green.”  When asked how she had sought to engage religious leaders in environmental activism, she replied:

For the last few years, I have been trying to communicate with leaders of various Christian churches to urge them to bring protection and conservation of the environment into the mainstream of their faith and their teachings. I have been suggesting that Easter Monday could be a very good day for the entire Christendom to plant trees. If we could make that Monday a day of regeneration, … it would be a great celebration of Christ’s resurrection. After all, Christ was crucified on the cross. In a light touch, I always say, somebody had to go into the forest, cut a tree, and chop it up for Jesus to be crucified. What a great celebration of his conquering [death] it would be if we were to plant trees on Easter Monday in thanksgiving. 

Please join us in prayer:

•  For comfort to the family and friends of Professor Maathai who are mourning her death.
•  For the continued success of the Green Belt Movement, now that its founder has passed away.
• For the re-forestation of Kenya.   The country’s forests have dropped below 2% of total area, and as such are exacerbating drought, erosion, and climate change.
• For the Ogiek, the ancestral forest dwellers of the decimated Mau Forest. They live in constant tension
  

  Ogiek men examine a 3D map that they helped create from tribal memories, detailing the landscape of the Mau Forest prior to its decimation.

  with the government and have often been displaced.  Less than 5% of the Ogiek are Christian.  Literacy rates are low, so the Gospel must come in oral forms.

Link: Heaven is Green: An Interview with Wangari Mathaai

Photo of Maathai: Martin Rowe

Photo of Ogiek: Giacomo Rimbald

courtesy Thomas Schneider

This is the message we have just sent from Care of Creation to our friends and partners around the world. It’s topic is appropriate to Our Father’s World friends and readers, I think. May you have a truly blessed and deeply meaningful Holy Weekend whereever you are!

“Easter People in a Good Friday world.”

This phrase grabbed the attention of a few people earlier this week – in part, I suppose, because it was heard on NPR. Host Michele Norris was interviewing writer Ann Lamott about Easter. Citing the tension she feels between the world as it should be and the world as it is, Lamott quoted another author, Barbara Johnson: “We are Easter people living in a Good Friday world.”

Of course, most of the people around us are actually Good Friday people living in a Good Friday world.

I had a taste what that’s like Thursday morning this week. The setting was perfect – a cafeteria looking out over Lake Mendota at the University of Wisconsin. The sun was shining for the first time in days, the water perfectly calm with a couple of racing sculls from the University practicing. It would have been a great time to talk about the hope of Easter. But the conversation was dismal – much more fitting for Good Friday, I’m afraid. These are folks who know the environmental situation well. One has been teaching environmental classes – ethics and theology, in fact – since I was a freshman in college. I’ve had many conversations with him over the years, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him quite this discouraged. He just doesn’t see any hope in the direction things are going today. The other partner in the conversation has read the writing on the wall as she understands it, and has a basement filled with canned food, stocking up for the crash that might be coming, that she thinks is just around the corner.

A bit pessimistic? Yes, but… Make no mistake – the world these folks are living in is real. The threats they were talking about are genuine. Fresh water, climate change, food price crises, peak oil or nuclear disasters – any one of these is sufficient to keep you up at night. As one of my friends said this morning, if you are caught in a food price riot in Egypt, or one of our farmer friends in Kenya suffering the effects of climate change on his tiny farm, for you the crash has already come.

So what does it mean to be an Easter person in this kind of world? Well, the difference is not in the world. We see the same suffering, the same violence, the same disasters. No, the difference is in us: We’ve tasted resurrection power in our lives. The message of the gospel of Jesus has brought us to relationship with God our creator. We were dead in our sins, now we are alive in Jesus and in ways we’ve never experienced before. Caught before in the loneliness of despair, we have now found ourselves members of a new fellowship. Life isn’t all good because of Easter, but it’s different now – we have hope within us, even when navigating a world of despair.

So how do we live? We live on Friday as if it were Easter already. That is what Easter means. Jesus’ resurrection is new life and power and hope breaking in to our present reality. And how exactly do we bring Easter back to Friday?

By living in hope.

‘Faith is confidence in what we hope for’ (Hebrews 11:1).

We do not deny the realities of the world we live in. The problems are real. And humanly speaking, pretty hopeless. But we bring to them the hope that comes from confidence that God is working in the world and in us to bring Easter realities to Good Friday problems.

By living in power. Not the power of the world that always corrupts, but the power of the resurrection, that paradoxically, only comes to those who are willing to die:

“I want to know Christ-yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.” (Philippians 3:10-11)

And by living in love. If there is one thing the Good Friday world is lacking, it is love. It should not be surprising that one of the last things Jesus said to his disciples was this:

9 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.” (John 15:9-12)

Which reminds me of an amazing line from Wendell Berry:

I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.

Perhaps you think of Care of Creation as an environmental organization. In some sense, yes – we care about and promote restoration and healing of God’s creation and that earns the label ‘environmental’. But we’re about so much more than that. Our goal is that comprehensive, complete “wholeness” Berry speaks of that can only come through “reconciliation and atonement with God.” We’re Easter people – like you, perhaps – trying to bring Easter back into the middle of Good Friday, to do what we can to touch the lives of people and the soil under their feet with both the love of Jesus and the power of his resurrection.

Springtime flowers (Flickr - Creative Commons License)

These thoughts were originally written for a church devotional for Park Street Church in Boston, and comprised the main text of my newsletter to Care of Creation ministry partners last week.  They seemed worth preserving here as well.

“I am making everything new!” Rev. 21:5

It is not a coincidence that Easter occurs in the springtime.

Spring is exciting, especially for those of us who live in the frozen north, as we do in Wisconsin. Returning to our house recently, my wife and I pause and glance over our flower beds as we do often at this time of year. This time she gives a little cry of joy: Hidden beneath dead leaves and other leftovers from winter isa spot of green. As we bend to look, we see another and then another: the first signs of resurrection. Frozen in below-zero soil just a few weeks ago, the flowers are coming back to life.

As we look around what is still a pretty dismal landscape, we realize that these tiny dabs of green are not the only sign of hope. We look carefully at the branches of the lilac bush in the corner. Sure enough – it has buds. We realize that the strange sound we hear is birds chirping in bare branches, as if like Aslan they can sing the leaves back onto the trees. The miracle of springtime is unfolding all around us. No matter how cold and endless the winter has seemed, and no matter how weak our faith, spring always comes. It comes with an explosion of new life, with fresh light, with vibrant new colors, with sounds of birds and water and melting snow. It is the sights and sounds of life overwhelming death. The outcome may have seemed in doubt a short time ago, but today the end is clear: Winter’s defeat is inevitable. Spring is going to win.

After a long Wisconsin winter, that fact by itself would be enough for me. But there is more. I remember the words of St. Paul in Colossians 1: “All things were made by Him, and for Him…and in Him all things hold together,” When I look at a new leaf unfolding from a bud, or watch a bird scratching for food I realize that I am seeing God create life once again. The power of Jesus himself is unfurling that leaf, and his joy reverberates in the bird’s happy chirps. I know that as I ponder the mysteries of a leaf’s tiny veins I am studying God’s word – his revelation of himself in Creation – just as surely as if I were reading John 3:16 in the original Greek.

And there’s even more. For as winter seems to assault and defeat the forces of life, God’s creation is under assault in our world today. On every side, from toxins in the water to destruction of God’s great forests to the melting of glaciers that have lasted for thousands of years, it feels as if winter is upon us. It is a winter of sin, selfishness, greed, cruelty – and the snow is deep and the winds are bitter. But there is hope! Winter can’t hold back spring, and the forces of evil that would destroy God’s good creation cannot hold back God’s ultimate purpose of restoration and redemption.

Why? Because God himself is the one doing this. And he is doing it by the same power that raised Jesus from the dead, the power that brought us our salvation. Why else would these words be found in the middle of Romans chapter 8, that great passage about redemption? “…the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.” Things may look grim from time to time – as when one more late spring snowstorm comes barreling out of the plains onto my poor flowerbeds. But when spring comes, it always feels as if it was inevitable. Because it was.

At Care of Creation this is our reason for hope. And we hope you share it with us, and will work with us to prepare for spring. It – and He – is coming!