Most frightening for many, the spill is perilously close to, or may have already reached the Loop Current (see graphic), a powerful ocean current that feeds directly into the Gulf Stream:

Water flows through the Gulf of Mexico deep under the surface.  It enters with warm water from the Caribbean between Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and Cuba, loops south of Louisiana, then exits around the Florida Keys.  This could bring oil up the US East Coast in the Gulf Stream Water. This was mentioned a few weeks ago in this report, and now scientists believe it is already on the move in that direction.

A researcher tells the Associated Press that computer models show the oil may have already seeped into the powerful water stream called the loop current. A boat will be sent later this week to collect samples.

William Hogarth is the dean of the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science. He says one model shows the oil already in loop current, while another shows the slick three miles away.

[UPDATE:  Check out this infographic... click on the picture to see it full size.]

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece that was picked up by a number of people – “How do you pray about an oil spill?” That concept has now been developed by others into a full website:  http://www.oilspillprayer.com that I urge you to check out and bookmark.  In particular, read “The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Tragedy: How Your Church Can Help!” by Kendra Juskus of Flourish (http://flourishonline.org).  Beyond calling us to prayer, Kendra offers some very good suggestions about how to become more informed and even how to move to action if God leads you in that direction.  This is a sample of what is on offer:

A number of organizations are recruiting volunteers to help out with immediate efforts in the areas impacted by the oil spill. The links provided here will bring you directly to the volunteer opportunities provided by these organizations. Please note that experience relevant to oil spill clean up and skills associated with wildlife observation and handling are in particularly high demand. But there is also a need for folks to take photographs, tend databases, and staff phone banks, so check out these opportunities and see where you might fit in:

• National Wildlife Foundation Gulf Coast Surveillance Teams – Volunteers are needed to track and report on the impacts of the oil spill, support the wildlife rescue and rehabilitation effort, and restore delicate coastal ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Audubon Society – One of the more detailed volunteer registration forms available, which may helpful in determining where you can plug in.
• Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana – This aggregate of organizations is just asking volunteers to register at this point, with the understanding that they will be contacted when appropriate opportunities emerge.

Pray we must – but action is called for as well.

Let me know what you and your church are doing.

The “official” estimate is 210,000 gallons per day (5,000 barrels).  This is almost certainly way too low.  Some outside experts (non-government and non-oil industry) put the rate at more like 1,050,000 gallons (25,000 barrels).  BP itself has admitted that in a worst-case scenario the rate could be more than double that pessimistic amount, or 2,520,000 gallons (60,000 barrels).

Whatever the amount, it adds up fast.  NPR has designed a Widget that I have installed to the right ———>>>

You can use the slider to adjust the rate and see what the current total would be if it were leaking at that rate.

Again, no one knows.  But what we do know is it isn’t going away.

Lord, forgive us.

[If you are reading this post on FaceBook or on Networked Blogs, you will need to come over to http://ourfathersworld.org to see the widget.]

Situations like the oil spill in the gulf tend to leave us deflated and discouraged.  It’s good, therefore, to be reminded that amid the rubble that we have created in God’s world, he occasionally shows us that there is (still) beauty and wonder when we can shout “Stop!” and look. This post from our friend Donn Ring is a perfect counterpoint to the last one on praying over the oil spill.  Enjoy, and spend some time pondering his fantastic photography.  Then get yourself *outside* today and look for some wonders yourself!

A few weeks ago we heard rumors of wild flowers in bloom on the south side of the Superstition Mountains east-northeast of Phoenix. We hopped in Dennis’ Honda Element “Pudge” and charged up the road from Arizona City. Once spring temperatures heat up, desert flower displays can be very short lived. We must move!

We left behind all our Taoist Wu Wei philosophy of moving naturally and contemplatively along the energy contours and flow of the topography (what we unceremoniously call “dinking”), and blasted down wide highways that had been blasted straight and level through rolling deserts framed by ghostly slag heaps and bare naked tailings of recent mines shut down. We were aggressive voyagers in the mode of Nietzsche’s Will to Power to possess our particular currency of beauty no matter what.

(It amazes me in my many years of wandering the sanctuaries of religion that zealots in the pursuit of the most intimate, profound and beautiful insights can shove and bully and legislate and condemn and destroy, leaving ugly slag heaps of bitter history as witness to their rape of truth meant to liberate. One of the greatest Taoist sayings is found in the ignored Beatitudes of Jesus: “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the Earth.” We were not meek this morning. — Excuse this brief diversion to scratch an itch).

As we barreled up the road at 75mph (120kph) a flash of brilliant red caught the corner of my eye. I yelled at Dennis, “STOP!” Dennis did his best to pull Pudge over onto the gravel shoulder while semis rumbled up our tail and roared by. A few other cars, pickups and trucks flipped their greetings at us. He backed up slowly along the gravel strip. The car rocked with the air compression wake of every thundering truck.

Here, isolated, next to this racetrack highway, growing out of a pile of rubble in a ditch collecting scattered debris was a most brilliant Firecracker Penstemon (pentsemon eatonii) in full bloom. Dennis pulled Pudge further off the road and we unloaded our cameras. This was the only Firecracker Penstemon we saw on this trip. But as we nestled down with macro lenses to get our close-up photos we were dive bombed.

A female Anna’s Hummingbird (calypte anna) did not take kindly to our intrusion of her feeding spot. She whizzed around us, stopping, backing up in mid air, buzzing this way and that, her iridescent green back flashing in the desert sunshine. She was sizing up the danger of these strange interlopers, finally whirring up to the top of the gully and sitting on a pile of dead branches and waiting for us to leave.

(Hummingbirds are the only bird that can make such maneuvers. Their variable wing attitudes can beat as high as 90 times per second; they have been clocked flying 60mph in spurts, their heart rate pumping up to a 1000 beats a minute. Their metabolic rate is so rapid that daily they must consume their body weight in nectar. Without a source of rich nectar they are only hours away from starvation. No wonder she was disturbed at our visit. We could see no other flowers in sight. At night, to conserve energy, they go into a hibernation-like state with their heart rate extremely reduced.)

Dennis and I decided to sit absolutely still and become part of the landscape and gain her trust. The cacophony of noise from the highway echoing in this bulldozed gully with a carpet of tossed fast-food wrappers didn’t lend itself to bucolic nature watching. With some caution she approached the penstemon, ignored our motionless hulks and then with determined necessity began feeding close to us. So delicate and agile was her dance from blossom to blossom — truly a winged ballet among the rubble. We were blessed by this island drama of beauty-in-the-wasteland that forced us to stop cold in our thoughtless rush.

It’s a legitimate question:  The news is getting worse by the day for those of us many miles away, and no doubt by the hour for those living in the area of impact.  This morning we learned that some experts believe the amount of oil leaking may be much more than even the revised estimate of 5,000 barrels per day. More worrisome than that, there is now real concern that the oil may join the Gulf stream ocean current, which would send it around the tip of Florida and all the way up the East Coast of the United States, staining beaches and killing wildlife as it goes.

There are already complaints that BP didn’t act quickly enough, the Federal Government didn’t step in fast enough – but to my mind these complaints are very much beside the point.  What would the Feds have done if they had stepped in 15 minutes after the explosion?  This disaster – easily on track to eclipse the Exxon Valdez spill – is far, far beyond anything any human agency can do.  This picture is a parable for me of the entire situation.  Does anyone really believe that these puny streams of water could have made the slightest impression on a blaze of this magnitude? Some genies simply cannot be put back into their bottles.

Which takes us right to the subject of this post:  When you can do nothing else, maybe it’s time to pray.  We will skip over a couple of tempting side arguments here:  On the one hand, there is an implicit assumption in this statement that prayer is real and worth doing, and on the other, the legitimate argument could be made that maybe one should have been praying long before the disaster arrived.  Setting those aside for another time, how should we pray in a time of disaster such as is now bearing down on all those who live in the gulf coast area?

The topic came up in a phone conversation yesterday.  “Maybe we should pray that God will keep the winds blowing offshore to protect the marshes.”  But that would only blow the oil somewhere else – and as today’s news suggests, “somewhere else” could be the entire East Coast.  We could pray for good weather – but it will take a lot more than a spell of good weather to clean up a leak that is still increasing in volume.  We might, I suppose, pray for a genuine miracle – the complete disappearance of the entire slick and miraculous healing for every bird and fish being poisoned.

I can imagine how God might respond to these requests:  “But my children:  I already did my part – I hid the oil safely away from harm underneath solid rock below 5,000 feet of ocean.  Is it really my fault that you thought you could dig it up without any thought for the consequences?”

If we are to pray over this situation, we need to be  very clear about one thing:  This is not an act of God.  We have done this to ourselves.  This does not mean we cannot pray – it actually means the opposite, we will find no solution unless we do pray.  But it suggests how we ought to pray.

Our model for a prayer suitable for a tragedy we have brought on ourselves might be that of the prophet Daniel.  Living in Babylon in the sixth century BC, Daniel was a Jew exiled from his homeland.  He had endured the destruction of Jerusalem, a disaster unparalleled in the history of his nation – and one that had been predicted by earlier prophets and directly tied to the disobedience of Daniel’s people.

In chapter 9 of Daniel’s prophecy, we find him meditating on the fate of Jerusalem:

I, Daniel, understood from the Scriptures, according to the word of the LORD given to Jeremiah the prophet, that the desolation of Jerusalem would last seventy years. ³ So I turned to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and petition, in fasting, and in sackcloth and ashes.

Daniel’s prayer is a model of how to pray when the disaster is our own fault:  It is a prayer of confession.  It is an important principle that we cannot appeal to God for something that is our own fault unless we also admit to him that it is our fault.

Listen to Daniel:

⁵ We have sinned and done wrong. We have been wicked and have rebelled; we have turned away from your commands and laws…

⁷ “Lord, you are righteous, but this day we are covered with shame—the men of Judah and people of Jerusalem and all Israel, both near and far, in all the countries where you have scattered us because of our unfaithfulness to you…

¹² You have fulfilled the words spoken against us and against our rulers by bringing upon us great disaster. Under the whole heaven nothing has ever been done like what has been done to Jerusalem. ¹³ Just as it is written in the Law of Moses, all this disaster has come upon us, yet we have not sought the favor of the LORD our God by turning from our sins and giving attention to your truth. ¹⁴ The LORD did not hesitate to bring the disaster upon us, for the LORD our God is righteous in everything he does; yet we have not obeyed him.

But why should I, living safely in central Wisconsin, have to confess for the sins of a multinational corporation like BP?  What does it have to do with me?  Or you?

From today’s New York Times:

“In the furor over the Gulf disaster, a hard-to-overlook fact: America needs the oil.”

As an individual, I do my part to feed our oil- and coal-driven economy by pumping gas into my car, by burning electric lights and using all kinds of oil-derived plastics to sustain my “lifestyle”.  As do you.  (You are reading this on a computer screen… enough said).  Collectively, we have created an economic and political system that cannot run without these fossil fuels, and we bear collective guilt for this.  Yes, guilt.  We could have designed an economic system that would have functioned in harmony with God’s creation rather than in opposition to it.  We did not.  We are guilty. [See my article on this topic here.]

Another prophet’s confession comes to mind here:  “I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips…” (Isaiah 6:5)  BP may have pulled the trigger, but you and I bought the gun.

If the disaster is our fault, what is the point of confession and prayer?  It remains our fault, right?  True – but confession allows us to throw ourselves on God’s mercy.  Listen again to Daniel:

¹⁷ “Now, our God, hear the prayers and petitions of your servant. For your sake, O Lord, look with favor on your desolate sanctuary. ¹⁸ Give ear, O God, and hear; open your eyes and see the desolation of the city that bears your Name. We do not make requests of you because we are righteous, but because of your great mercy. ¹⁹ O Lord, listen! O Lord, forgive! O Lord, hear and act! For your sake, O my God, do not delay, because your city and your people bear your Name.”

We know historically – and many of us know personally – that God will sometimes step in to help in a situation like this, not because we deserve it but because we don’t.  He will act for his own sake when he does not have to act for ours.  This is mercy.  And we need it.

Maybe it really is time to pray.

Event Alert: The National Day of Prayer for Creation Care was planned many months ago, but its timing as a possible response to the disaster unfolding in the Gulf could not be more appropriate.  Join us May 25 in Washington DC or plan an evening of prayer and confession where ever you happen to be.

While I appreciate Pastor DeYoung’s sincere desire to “build a Christian foundation” (his very good image) under the concept of Earth Day, the ‘bricks’ he is using to build that foundation, most of which were purchased somewhat uncritically from Jay Richard’s Environmental Stewardship in the Judeo-Christian Tradition, could have been baked a little longer.

Here are his ‘bricks’ and my thoughts in response:

1)”We must distinguish between theological principles and prudential judgments.”

This argument has been around for quite a while, and still astounds me.  The idea is that while the Bible is clear that we have to care for God’s creation (at least we agree on this basic premise), taking actions in response to threats to that creation is a “prudential judgment” that ought not to be made.

Really?

Because some actions would be “prudent” we ought not to take them?  Environmental concern is the only area in which I have ever heard Christians argue against prudence.  We wear seatbelts.  That surely is a prudential judgment.  We pay a penalty in the present by purchasing auto, property and life insurance to cover ourselves for hazards that will almost certainly not happen to most of us.  Prudence.  We avoid smoking, and in extremely undemocratic fashion we ban smoking by others so that we and our children won’t have to inhale second-hand smoke.   Why?  Prudence – we would rather not get lung cancer or emphysema.  Most of us would condemn a person who doesn’t buckle up, doesn’t buy insurance and exposes his children to cigarette smoke as reckless, foolhardy and negligent.

But acting to care for God’s creation is wrong because it is a “prudential judgment”?  Please.  This is just silly.

2) “People matter most.”

Well, of course they do.

But people cannot live without a wholesome, healthy, flourishing environment.  One wonders, reading a statement like this, what Pastor DeYoung might have eaten for breakfast the morning he wrote his piece.  One would expect it was plant or animal, and probably both.

It is a simple fact that we are part of God’s animal creation:  We need to eat, drink and breathe to live.  We cannot survive without the plants and animals that support us, the clean water they provide, the air they filter for us.  We can’t even eat breakfast without them.  It is also fact that much of the human suffering in the world is directly tied to environmental degradation.  Haiti is exhibit #1.  Add to that if you care to, Kenya, the Philippines, Indonesia, Rwanda, Uganda, Bangla Desh, India, China and the asthma suffering children of America’s inner cities.

The most effective way to love and to care for people is to care for the world in which they live.  This is the premise Care of Creation has been built on.  Perhaps we can paraphrase James here:  Show me how to love people without caring for God’s creation, and I will show you how (better and cheaper) we can love people by caring for God’s creation.

3) “People are producers, not just polluters.”

Again, yes they are.  God gave us dominion over his creation and wonderful creative abilities by which we can work with the stuff of creation and do amazing and wonderful things.  And there is no question that if Jesus tarries and God give us time, it is only by the use of these abilities that we human beings are going to be able to solve the serious problems we have created for ourselves by our abuse of God’s creation.

The problem with the “producers not polluters” principle is that it ignores the problem of sin.  Human beings who are unredeemed sinners are in fact polluters – materially and spiritually.  That’s a theme we repeat often here:  “Environmental problems are sin problems.”  And this idea ignores what I think of as the ‘mathematics of sin’:  More sinners, more sin.  An explosion of people (4 billion of the current 6.8 billion people on earth right now have been born since I was) means, necessarily, an explosion of sin – unless genuine, spirit-led evangelism keeps up.  That is the spiritual reality behind the scientific phenomenon that we call the environmental crisis.

We need to build a better Earth Day.

I agree whole heartedly!  But let’s do it biblically and logically:

1.  Good theology must lead us to reasonable prudence in our lives and in our policies.  The biblical call to mercy argues that we should care about the effects of our consumption on the poor.  Our (biblical, surely) obligations to our own children and grandchildren as well as the rest of the not-yet-born demands that we act selflessly, not selfishly in our use of resources and our management of earth-systems.

2. Love for people must compel us to do all we can to heal and restore the life-giving and life-supporting properties of God’s creation so that there will be clean air, clean water, a healthy climate and food for all.

3. Recognition of the almost infinite capacity for sin and pollution in our own lives and those around us should drive us to repentance and evangelism, as well as to tree planting and watershed clean up.

I’ve been working in the field of environmental stewardship for almost 10 years, and have been presenting the Our Father’s World seminar material in various forms for close to three.  We’ve been in half a dozen states and will be adding several more in the coming year.  The normal subtitle to the seminar is “Why Christians Should Care about the Environmental Crisis”.  It has always seemed to me that this is straight forward enough, given that that is what we’re talking about.  No one who has been to the seminar can or does question the reality:  There is a crisis, it’s real and it’s happening now.

However, we have encountered several instances where our hosts have asked that we “tone down” the title just a bit. It appears that using the word “Crisis” makes people uncomfortable.  Change the subtitle to “Why Christians Should Care about God’s Creation”, for example.  It reminds me of a conversation with a close relative several years ago:  “Ed, you are doing great work.  I guess I agree with you.  But you need to be careful not to sound to alarmist. You don’t want to scare people…”

Which brings me back to Mr. Smith and our parable of the ship that is taking on water.  (Previous post)  There are a number of ways the people in the meeting might react to his announcement:  Can you tell us how bad it is?  How much time do we have?  What can we do to help you, and to prepare the passengers for whatever might happen?  One or two might react with hysteria or panic – but I’d like to think that’s not too likely.  These are leaders who have jobs that need to be done and who are responsible for many others on the ship.

Something I would not expect is that the people around the table would accuse Smith of being an alarmist.  He clearly knows what he’s talking about, and look:  His shoes and his pants are soaked up to his knees.  If Smith says we’ve got a leak, and that this means we have a crisis on our hands, chances are pretty good that we do indeed have a crisis.  Rather than waste time arguing about it, we need to decide what to do.

Which brings me to my recent trip to the Philippines.  I presented the Our Father’s World seminar in Manila two weeks ago, the first time this material has been used in an overseas setting.  As it happened, I arrived less than a month after the city had been inundated by Typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng.  According to some estimates, more than 80% of the city was flooded, including middleclass neighborhoods that have never flooded before.

The President of ISACC, the organization sponsoring my visit, had to ride out the storm on her top floor, wondering the whole time whether that was high enough to allow her to survive.  [Her moving account of the experience is available here.]  Hundreds of people lost their lives.  Opinion is unanimous that the massive damage was due to environmental degradation including deforestation, lake siltation, and the removal of wetlands as well as the unusual intensity of the storm which may or may not be tied to global climate change.

With this background, I wondered whether it was a good time for a seminar, though the event had been planned almost a year earlier.  However, my hosts were insistent:  “We need this message now more than ever,” they said, and the poster they designed expressed their feelings.  “After Ondoy and Pepeng, Hear the call to Care for Creation.”

The difference between this audience and the many I’ve stood in front of throughout the US was dramatic.  Presenting environmental seminars in evangelical churches in the US is an uphill battle.  American participants tend to feel that a five-hour seminar is long, and attendance is always a struggle.  By contrast, the Filipinos expanded the format to two full days (about 16 hours total) and some 75 people attended.  It is of passing interest that although foreigners (read missionaries) were included in the targeted publicity list, the audience  was 95% Filipino.

They listened eagerly, and asked intelligent questions. This material includes theological teaching that is deep and profound in its implications for our understanding of the gospel.  I was impressed by how quickly and completely these brothers and sisters grasped not only the essence of what I was teaching but its far reaching implications for the church. The climate change segment was of great interest, and there were no arguments about the reality of global warming, no cautions about alarmism.

We had time for an hour long breakout session to discuss ways to respond to the call to care for creation under a three part Tagalog slogan:  Pagsisihan! (Repent!) Pagyamanin! (Restore!) Paghandaan! (Prepare!).  The reports that came back from these groups were substantial and comprehensive, leaving me with confidence that this seminar was only the start of what many of us hope will be a significant movement toward creation care among the evangelical community in the Philippines.

Why such a difference between this group and most of those I’ve presented to in the US?

The answer is simple.  Their feet were wet.  They didn’t have to be persuaded that the environmental crisis is real, and they were listening as if this crisis was happening to them – because it is.

For us In the US, the environmental crisis feels like the HIV/Aids crisis in Africa.  It is something sad, but it’s happening to someone else.

Except that it isn’t.

[Want to bring the Our Father’s World seminar to your church?  Find details on how to contact us here!  Bookings are now being made for the Fall of 2010 and Winter/Spring 2011.]

[Urbana is coming – I will be presenting two seminars at Urbana on creation care, details here, and Care of Creation’s new Urbana09 website is here.  Hope to see you there!]

]]> http://www.ourfathersworld.org/2009/11/24/if-we-lose-the-ship-part-2/feed/ 0 http://www.ourfathersworld.org/2009/11/22/if-we-lose-the-ship-part-1/ http://www.ourfathersworld.org/2009/11/22/if-we-lose-the-ship-part-1/#comments Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:54:10 +0000 Ed http://www.ourfathersworld.org/?p=331 My recent experience of presenting the Our Father’s World seminar material in Manila, Philippines, triggered the following thoughts…

There is a story – a parable, really – that I use at the end of my Our Father’s World seminar presentations.  It goes something like this:

Let’s pretend that we’re on a refugee ship of some kind.  We’re part of a Christian ministry, and we’re taking a ship load of refugees to a new land, where they can start their lives over again.  The ship is crowded, and we have a lot of work to do to care for the passengers and to keep things running smoothly during the three week voyage.

We have organized ourselves in to work-teams:  Food service, sanitation, medical, children, and so on.  And to we are in the habit of holding a meeting every morning in the Captain’s conference room to coordinate activities and to minimize confusion.  These meetings are usually pretty routine (Sanitation: “We have two bathrooms out of order today, so please let people know…”; Medical: “Vaccination of under-5’s this afternoon on Deck B…”) but one day we have a new person in the circle.

The Captain introduces him:  “This is Mr. Smith, our ship’s engineer.  He has something that you will all need to listen to.”  And Mr. Smith makes his announcement: “We started to take on water during the night.  As of now, we do not know what is causing the leak, but we do know that it is bad enough that if we can’t get it fixed, we will not make it to port.”

Remember – I’m telling this story to a live seminar audience.  I usually stop at this point and say something like this:  “Okay, let’s hit the pause button.  How does Mr. Smith’s announcement change the conversation around the table?”

The answer that is expected is this:  It changes nothing, but it changes everything.  All of the normal activities of the work-teams have to go on.  People still need to eat.  Bathrooms still need to be cleaned and repaired.  Sick people need to be cared for.  But there is now a bigger, overriding concern – the ship is in danger of sinking.  If the leak isn’t found and fixed, nothing else will matter.

This is obviously a parable:  The ship represents the church, or a church.  The work teams represent all of the many different kinds of ministries that churches participate in, from soup kitchens to prison ministry to youth programming.  And the leak in the ship represents the environmental crisis.

The point of the parable (in case you haven’t got it yet) is really quite simple:  Creation care is different from every other ministry a church (your church) might be involved in, because when the environment is destroyed, other ministries cease.  If we lose the ship, nothing else will matter.

Hurricane damage in Haiti

Case in point:  Haiti.  Most of Haiti’s problems, and they are many, arise from an environment that has been damaged beyond the point of recovery.  Population growth has led to massive deforestation, agricultural decline, incredible poverty, relocation from rural areas to the city, and political unrest and general violence.  Haiti used to be a common destination for summer ministry teams from the US.  Not so much anymore – it’s too dangerous.  ‘Normal ministry’ has had to be suspended because the environment has been destroyed.  If we lose the ship, nothing else matters.

That is how I usually tell this story, and how the talk usually ends.  However, it occurred to me recently that it is possible to imagine another response to Mr. Smith’s report of a leak in the ship.  And that is the subject of our next post.  Stay tuned.

The Philippines recently experienced a major typhoon and massive flooding of the capital city, Manila.  Here’s a first hand report from Melba Padilla Maggay, who is the Director of the Institute for the Study of Asian and Church Culture (ISACC) the organization that will be hosting my visit to Manila at the beginning of November.  I’m posting this with her permission, and asking that you please both read it prayerfully and, particularly if you have connections to Filipinos, that you distribute it so others will understand what has happened.  The recovery will take a long time – keep these sisters and brothers in your prayers.

Hearing the Call of the Great Flood

“Ate, tubig! Dali, may tubig!” I was upstairs trying to finish writing a long-delayed book when I heard this shout from my sister down below. I rushed downstairs and saw water seeping through the door. ‘Where is all this water coming from?’ I asked, fearing that the Marikina River, about a kilometer from the back of the house, has overflowed. ‘From out front,” she said. True enough, the water that came rushing was mainly from the street outside. This means that the water was rushing down from some mountain higher up. The sight startled me.

But there was no time to lose. Within minutes, the water rose to knee-high. We grabbed some food from the fridge, carted up a precious charcoal portrait of my parents and other paintings, salvaged what we could of the electrical gadgets from the kitchen, and tried to lug the chinaware and other breakables starting to spill out of the cabinet. By this time the water was up to my chest. Then the fridge started to float, banging itself against the table and chairs whirling round the living room. We tried to get it up the winding stairs but couldn’t since we were only two tiny women. The one man in the house is my grandnephew, but he was out in school taking his exams. He himself got trapped and had to sleep on the third floor of his school building that fateful Saturday night.

In less than an hour the water hit the ceiling of the first floor and started to seep through the second floor. I realized I could do nothing from hereon and got on my knees to pray. Then a man knocked on the glass of the bay window in my study and asked if they could get in. There were two women with him standing on the roof of my dirty kitchen, one holding a baby. They swam through the flood from the house at the back of mine. I fumbled with the lock of the emergency exit in the bay window but the key has gotten stuck. We got the baby through an opening in the window of my bedroom instead and the three swam to the terrace on the side of the house and got inside. It turns out that their grand lola was still in their house, waiting frightened on the second floor. He went back to fetch her but she wouldn’t hazard swimming through the floodwaters. We figured it was best that she stay put. If the water rose and we all had to evacuate and rescue comes I gave my word we shall not leave without her.

From the study I watched agonizingly as the river swelled, the flood rising inch by inch, up the wall fence. Frantic calls for help were made. I managed to reach the head of the Office of Civil Defense, Anthony Golez, and asked for a boat, a helicopter, whatever. He said sorry, it was not possible for them to help. We tried whoever else we could reach with the remaining batteries of our cell phones. All too soon the cell phones went dead. We have done what we could.

I sat down behind my desk and swept the room longingly with my eyes. Maybe it was my way of saying goodbye to the things I love, — the books that have meant much to me and those I have yet to read, picked up from my various travels; the pictures and paintings, and especially the portrait of my parents done so lovingly by an artist friend. In the event the water finally engulfs us I figured I could manage to take my computer. All the rest will have to go. I put the most important books on the topmost shelves and thought of how everyone could get evacuated, – baby, lola and all.

Inside, in that place where the battle between hope and despair is waged, my faith in the Lord of wind and rain was being tried. I knew that this was nature striking back against all our environmental sins. God does not suspend natural laws he himself has built into creation. We violate these laws at our own peril. Still, I also knew he could stop the rain if he wanted to. I confess the shadow of a half-doubt began to creep when I felt the firewall slightly move with the swirling force of the waters. I prayed that the concrete wall at the back, which served as buffer against the raging current from the river, would not give way. I do not think I have ever implored the Almighty as earnestly and anxiously and tearfully as I did at that moment.

Mercifully, the rain stopped. The water crawling up the roof of my dirty kitchen halted to a standstill. Rescuers came on board a makeshift raft. We did not relish staying the night at the clubhouse as a temporary evacuation shelter. We decided to stay put in the house and trust that the worst is over. We cooked some rice and broiled fish over a stove made out of an old tin can of biscuits, with newspapers as fuel. We chuckled over the ingenious improvisation, glad and thankful just to be alive.

Darkness covered the waters of the deep. Somehow I felt I was being invited to enter the depths of ‘somewhere I have never traveled’, – the immense and fearful mystery of life and death, but also the forlorn helplessness of the poor in our land who always get buffeted by the wild winds of both nature and misfortune. I went to bed thinking of the castaways swept from the river banks, clinging for dear life on some tree or an old tire, or washed away by the floodtide along with the rubbish and rusted tin roofs of what used to pass for their houses. But tiredness and aching arms numbed and stupefied the mind for any more such thoughts. I went to sleep like a log.

Morning was eerily calm. It was also strangely beautiful. Along the river drifted a solitary man on a ragtag raft of banana trunks tied together. From a distance it all looked so picturesque, with the treetops visible on the surface of the now placid waters that have begun to subside. I learned later that many dead bodies were found floating on that river, some swept from as far away as Tanay.

It is now the ninth day since the Great Flood. Mud four inches thick had been cleared from the house. The yard is still full of mud, with mounds of things and furniture piled up in the muck waiting to be cleaned and sorted out. Life is moving on, and I am trying to make sense of what has happened to us.

For the first time, I was a flood victim. I thought this sort of thing happened only to those without means to live in decent places. I was, suddenly, on the receiving end of a thousand kindnesses from friends, kindly neighbors from Couples for Christ, and my own evangelical church who sent food and water, helped clear the mud and debris, checked the electrical wirings and in many other ways reminded me of God’s tender mercies in a time of great testing and vulnerability.

The poor have no access to such help. Even now, thousands are in evacuation shelters, with no homes, no families to go home to, no friends and relatives with resources to tide them over. In short, no social capital like those of us who are middle class and able to pull ourselves by our own bootstraps without waiting for government to dole out help that is too little and too late.

I asked God what all this means for me. So far, the one thing clear is that I am being asked to share in the ‘fellowship of his suffering’, in that great mystery of solidarity where the sorrow and degradation of one human being is the sorrow and degradation of all. Whether we are aware of it or not, we live in the presence of one another. The presence of the vast poor among us says as much about the rest of us as the kind of government we live under.

In a small way, I now know what it must be like for those who are swept to the margins, forced to live precariously in cities with no thought nor place for them, squatting dangerously along esteros, river banks and other waterways. Comfortable people tend to see them as obstructions, clogging our life systems. The truth is that it is a horrendous scandal that so many have nowhere else to go.

There is something very wrong with a society where almost everyone ‘turns away leisurely from the disaster’ as the poet W. H. Auden put it. In our vast carelessness and indifference no one anticipates the coming catastrophe until calamity crashes upon us. It is estimated that about 20 to 25 typhoons batter the country every year. But those whose business it is to prepare for such eventualities, like the National Disaster Coordinating Council, have no plan in place. In its stead is mere technical reflex, like releasing water, uncoordinated, from all four major dams all at once, without thought for the hapless people along the waterways.

It is worth investigating why, after weeks of rain even before Ondoy, no one in Napocor or the National Irrigation Administration who have charge of these dams ever thought of releasing water before it reached critical level. Why did they have to wait until another typhoon came? My own experience gives me the impression that besides environmental degradation, the one decisive factor that made this flooding so devastating is the uncalibrated release of dam water, coinciding with the heaviest rainfall we have seen in forty years. I have lived where I am for nearly 20 years. All through that time typhoons stronger than Ondoy have come and gone. But the Marikina River had not overflowed the way it had in this recent deluge. This disaster is man-made.

To me, the biggest disaster of all is when we once again miss our historical cue, failing to hear the call of what this means to us as a people. One call is that we must change our timeline as a culture; transcend our present-orientedness and anticipate the floodtide of the future. For all who do care that this country should have a future and a hope, we must see to it that all our do-gooding is such that it finally puts an end to the unconscionable helplessness and uprootedness of our people. As a German poet puts it,

“Make it so the poor are no longer

despised and thrown away,

Look at them standing about, –

like wild flowers, which have

nowhere else to grow….”

—– Melba Padilla Maggay, Ph.D.

President

Institute for Studies in Asian  Church And Culture

A couple of the things our inquirer said:

I have to ask just what is “environmental sin”? If Jesus had wanted this to be our “ministry” wouldn’t He have stated it?  …Do you believe that we can do nothing to stop the “groaning” of creation which is under the curse of sin? …I can definitely see the need to couple the gospel with compassion but to couple it with saving a planet that God says will eventually be destroyed by Him seems…er impractical at best.

I responded as below.  Those of you who have read my book or heard me speak will recognize that this is essentially what I’ve been writing and preaching for at least the last 10 years or so…

Thank you for your interesting and thoughtful comments in response to our web material. It is clear that you spent some time on our website, and while I don’t have time for a lengthy reply, I do think you deserve the courtesy of at least a brief response…

It is true that Jesus did not himself address the issue of the ‘groaning creation’, certainly not as directly as Paul did in Romans 8. However, Christians in general take the entire Bible to be inspired and authoritative – certainly we do at Care of Creation – and a command from God is just that, whether from the words of Jesus, Paul or Jeremiah.

We base our case on a couple of easily understood points:

1)God clearly cares about his creation, and expects us to care for it. (This is what the “dominion passage” is Genesis 1 means)

2)God tends to get upset – very upset – when human beings abuse his creation.

Along these lines, a couple of Old Testament passages leap out:

Woe to those who join house to house,who add field to field,until there is no more room,and you are made to dwell alonein the midst of the land. (Isaiah 5:8)

I will lay your cities waste and will make your sanctuaries desolate, and I will not smell your pleasing aromas. 32And I myself will devastate the land, so that your enemies who settle in it shall be appalled at it. 33And I will scatter you among the nations, and I will unsheathe the sword after you, and your land shall be a desolation, and your cities shall be a waste. 34 “Then the land shall enjoy its Sabbaths as long as it lies desolate, while you are in your enemies’ land; then the land shall rest, and enjoy its Sabbaths. 35As long as it lies desolate it shall have rest, the rest that it did not have on your Sabbaths when you were dwelling in it. (Leviticus 26:31-34)

And a positively frightening New Testament one:
“We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty,
who is and who was,
for you have taken your great power
and begun to reign.
18The nations raged,
but your wrath came,
and the time for the dead to be judged,
and for rewarding your servants, the prophets and saints,
and those who fear your name,
both small and great,
and for destroying the destroyers of the earth.” (Rev 11:18)

It is clear from these, as well as Romans 8, that God cares about what happens to his creation – even to the point of driving out his own people because they had refused to give the land the Sabbaths (rest) that God had commanded them. One hesitates to think what God might have in store for our generation whose wholesale destruction of creation is unparalleled in history.

3)It is also quite clear in Colossians 1 that God’s redemptive plan includes all of creation:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities-all things were created through him and for him. 17And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. 19For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. (Col 1:15-20)

Simple principle of Biblical interpretation here: The ‘all things’ that Christ created in v. 16 has to be the same as the ‘all things’ that are reconciled in v. 20. Conclusion: Biblical redemption is more than human salvation – it extends to all of creation.

The conclusion is inescapable: If Jesus died to reconcile all of his creation to himself by his own blood, how dare we do less than our best to protect it, to care for it on his behalf?

There was more discussion on climate change but that need not detain us here…

Any additional thoughts?