12 16 11 Winter Means Real Hope!

In an earlier entry to this blog I commented that one of the goals undergirding the permaculture philosophy is to develop a 30-year plan for the property. The idea behind this goal is to think through what kind of future the land will be able to provide for the human and non-human residents on the property; both need to flourish, and both need to flourish as well as possible.

When Cindee and I commented, recently, that we were taking the long view in developing our property, someone took issue with it. “Why put such time and energy in the kind of development that won’t bear fruit for many years? You might not even be there to see it through, and you certainly won’t be there to enjoy the outcome for very long.”

I don’t honestly remember our response. It probably had something to do with the notion that we don’t live our lives just for ourselves, but for those who follow us as well. Whatever our response, this notion has stayed with me that for too many in ours society it is not worth it for people to really put themselves out there for generations in the future. They honestly believe that living for ourselves, right now, is all there is.

I was thinking that yesterday as I was looking at the amazing amount of snow that has piled up in our area. Writers often depict winter as symbolizing life when it is bleak, cold and hopeless. Local food crops simply cannot grow in an Alaskan winter. At our house, down in one of the deep valleys created by the Chugach Mountains, the sun does not even make it above the mountain peaks for another month. It is cold, it is dark and, apparently, desolate.

Yet, this is the season for hope, not hopelessness. People who live with the land have always known this. Winter is the season for making plans for the spring. Farmers are gathering seed. Builders are designing the homes they will build in the not-so-distant future. Hunters and gatherers are restoring their tools and getting ready. This is a season of waiting, but waiting in a way that prepares for a wonderful tomorrow.

It is easy to lose track of hope. We live in a moment of history where people seem to have three choices. They can see the magnitude of the problems facing our existence and fall into a wintry despair. They can see the magnitude of the problems and either deny that they are real, or claim it is all a part of God’s plan and therefore deny that we need to take action, or they can join together in faithfully living into the change—the future—that is coming.

This, of course, is the heart of a Christian understanding of faithfulness. We build it into our common life as a community of faith. Beginning four Sundays before Christmas, as the darkness and cold of winter descends, we celebrate the season of Advent. In this season, we recognize that the problems of the world are real, and we must face them with a mature (or at least maturing) faith.

The problems of the world are real. In fact, there are any number that deserve attention, but let me lift up a few that absolutely must get world attention if there is to be a future that looks good for people. Try these:

• Overpopulation – We have overpopulated our habitat; current life on the planet is not sustainable if we have this many people, and if we want any economic justice. A great die-off is inevitable if we do not deal with our population growth.

• Financial/Economic Bubbles – Just as the housing and investment bubbles created the Great Recession we are in, there are other bubbles waiting to burst (the debt-bubble of world governments is only one of several). Further, our current economics is based on short-term profit and short-term vision. The environmental costs of business, which are mostly ignored on our current economic system, are building a bubble that will burst someday—and whichever generation experiences it will wonder what the previous generations were thinking.

• Carbon Emissions—our best projections on how our fossil fuel emissions (gas, coal, etc) will affect the climate and the oceans tell of a near-term disaster in the making.

• Peak Energy—tells us that cheap oil is a thing of the past, making the life we know harder and harder to maintain. We have two tasks. We must reduce our use of energy, which means we must change our lifestyle; and we must change to renewable energy sources as fast as we can, so that some of what we have can be maintained. This, of course, represents an economic boom for some companies, but an economic bust for much of the status quo.

• The US Supreme Court has elevated corporations’ voice above that of natural persons by determining that money is speech and corporations have the same rights as any natural person in being heard. Corporations therefore cannot be restricted in campaign spending—and they have the money. The result is that, when there is conflict, our current elected officials must work for the corporations’ concerns above the concerns of human citizens, or they will likely lose their next election attempt. This means any political action addressing the other problems in this list through government will have to wait. Any political action that is not heavily influenced by big business will be impossible unless we change U.S law, probably through a constitutional amendment insisting that “We the people…” means human citizens and not corporations.

If that is not enough to get our attention, what is? We are living in a time of either wintry despair, blind denial, or something else.

Even so, Christians have alsways insisted that hope is real. The hope comes from God, who calls to us from the future to take hope and be active in the present. In fact, the Christian witness is that we nearly always go through all three of these realities. We go astray, but insist for a while that we are OK: denial. Our eyes are then opened, and we realize that we are not only off-track, but probably incapable of solving it. We hear God’s call from the future, and realize that something bigger than ourselves is at work, and we can be a part of it.

Winter is that season of recognizing that God is with us now, and then of hearing the possibilities of the future. It is a time of rethinking what we thought the plan was. It is a time of allowing God to capture us, and to reshape our imagination. It is a time of becoming ready to join-in on the new thing that will be born.

Yet, if this winter-hope is to be real hope, it requires that we become ready to move and take action when the time is right. God does make changes, but the biblical account describes the changes as taking place when God gets involved in history with real people and real events.

If Advent is about waiting with expectation for the birth of the Savior--and it is, see my next blog entry!--then faithful living now, two millennia after that birth, is about joining-in on what God has been doing since and will be doing into the future. Faithful living that has real hope means that we, the people who are alive now, will listen for God’s call from the future and join together in living for that future.

Yes, we are in winter right now. Good or bad, this is where we are. I hope that we will choose to understand winter as a time of hope. I hope we will look at the problems listed above choose to live for a future that has seen these problems addressed. The problems are big, but God is bigger. There is a lot of financial and political inertia behind the status quo, but there are seven billion people who can put their weight behind the call for change.

The question is where to start. I am starting with winter. This is a season for examining my own heart, recognizing that I am as much a part of the problem as the rest of my generation. This is a season for asking God to change my heart. All future action will have to come from there.