03 06 12 Awareness and Caring for our Elders

I promised to write a blog out of my understanding that the biblical witness describes human beings as the youngest members in the Creation Family Tree. This is one way of understanding both our relationship with God’s creation and our responsibility to it. In earlier blog posts I already described why I think that is so (here and here). I suggested that it truly is appropriate to treat Genesis 1:1-2:4 (the six days of creation, plus the Sabbath) as a genealogy. Further, I pointed out that the Bible calls on the younger members of the family to honor and respect the older generations of the family. What my colleagues have asked me to do now is to spell out some examples of why I think we are failing in our task to honor and respect the older generations.


As I have thought about it, I realize that I can’t cover it in one blog entry. How do we engage in caring for nature-as-our-elders in a way that will truly make a difference today? There are over seven billion people on the planet now, and I have seen estimates that we will add another 2.5 billion in the next forty years (I have not seen what happens after that!). Clearly, there is much to say. So I will dedicate some of my writing to this over the next weeks.


Today, I want to lift up the importance of simply being aware. I begin with an example from my life, living in this bioshelter.


Living in our bioshelter home has required a certain sense of humility. The original designers and builders of our home were Bob and Luanne Crosby, an engineer and an interior designer/artist. I stand in awe of the level of commitment, ecological awareness, keep-it-simple engineering and style they exhibited in the 1980s when they built the house. Cindee and I could never have thought it up or pulled it off. We are the grateful recipients of what others have put together, and are now doing our best to care for what they built, and to add to it in our own way.


For people of faith, living on this earth takes that kind of humble gratitude even further. God created the cosmos, and the whole of the earth is only a small speck compared to the whole. The complexity of all nature, and of life here, is so amazing that we humans just fall back in wonder. Yet, humans have the brainpower and the physical capability to hugely affect the whole of life on this planet. The single most pervasive challenge to the living systems (including humanity) on earth today is the challenge of surviving the current human impact on our environment. It is time to connect the gratitude and wonder that living on this planet evokes with the kind of principled living that cares for life, and cares for human beings, too.


Awareness begins with the awe and wonder of creation.

Sometimes great wonder begins with small things. When we see a blade of grass grow, witness how it is a part of a whole patch of growing grass, watch as it is eaten and regenerates, as it receives the rain and its nutrients, and eventually goes to seed and produces offspring, we stand in wonder.


Sometimes the awe is evoked by a grand spectacle. When the particles in the solar wind strike the earth’s atmosphere along the magnetic field “lines” and create the aurora borealis, humans see the beauty of the color and movement filling the skies and are moved to awe (I once saw groups of pedestrians walking from their cars to a musical event stop and just stare at a beautiful aurora display—on a night when the thermometer stood at -30° F!).


Whatever the cause, we begin with an awareness that life is amazing, wonderful and a treasure. Only a little more awareness makes it clear that the web of life sustains itself and all the creatures in it, including each of us. We are dependent on this web of life sustaining us and, obviously, the web of life has become dependent on humans sustaining it.


We can allow the life systems of the earth to continue the path of deterioration they are on—but we don’t have to.


Caring for creation as our relative begins with an awareness and gratitude. We become aware of the wonder of it all. We did not create this earth, but it is a marvel. Nevertheless, we do have impact and we must take responsibility for how we impact the earth with which we live, upon which we are dependent, and for the life that has become dependent on the decisions we make.

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