Most of you know that I am to science what Victoria Beckham is to grand opera.  It’s not my thing, so I confess to being mixed up by the debate on global warming.  I note that this summer’s soaking, like the floods of last year, gets put down to it, an argument I’d find easier to swallow if the roasting of the year before hadn’t been ascribed to exactly the same thing!  It seems to me that, whatever the weather, some expert in green wellies will tell you it’s all down to our consumption of fossil fuels at a rate that imperils the planet.

But there are, of course, other experts who tell you that nothing much has changed, that floods and heat waves mark no more than shifts and variations that have always taken place – witness the fact that the fossils at Wren’s Nest were formed at the bottom of a tropical sea – according to those who know about such things, so I confess to being mixed up.

Furthermore, I have to admit that I’m hardly a zealot when it comes to the ‘green lifestyle.’  For though I see the need for a cleaner lifestyle, I do drive half a mile to collect my newspapers instead of using my legs to keep the planet and my cardio vascular system in good nick.  I’ve been known to spray chemicals on unwanted greenery in the garden instead of weeding by hand.  I’ve bunged rubbish in skips destined for landfill sites, and I do wonder if Walsall Council’s decision to give me three bins for rubbish – together with the threat that I shall be fined if I don’t sort it out in a way acceptable to some jobsworth in the Town Hall – has more to do with cutting costs of public services than saving the planet, by forcing me to become Government’s unpaid dustbin man!  For that must at least be a possibility in a world of political double-speak.

But there are, of course, other possibilities, and one of them is the uncomfortable fact that, as a child of my time, I need to learn new tricks.  Take an example – and I tell you of an experience that changed my life:  Two years ago, I spent a few days in the north of England with my grandson, then aged 14 and his stepbrother aged 9.  To accommodate granddad and grandma they gave up their beds and slept in a tent in the garden.  On the second evening of our stay I sat in the garden at dusk as the kids crawled into their tent.   Suddenly, a piercing shriek sent the hairs on the back of my neck skyward, and my grandson shouted – “a snail!”  In an instant I spotted three things: a snail about to make its way into the tent, a grandson with a look of disgust on his face, and a camping mallet within his reach.  Now I swear that I only encouraged my grandson not to be a wimp when I called out “you’ve got the mallet, hit it!”  He did, and I can report that it didn’t suffer! At any rate he didn’t know what had hit it!

Now viewed through my eyes, a little local difficulty had been resolved, and the matter would not have been given a second thought had not his stepbrother nailed me on the following morning: “Gareth got a proper telling off from Mum,” he said “She’s told him it’s wrong to kill anything!  And that you’re wrong.”  Oh dear, I’d boo-booed!  So I apologised and assured my daughter in law that I should in future take full account of her respect for life, when under her roof, and do all in my power to encourage her kids to be a more vibrant shade of green than St Francis of Assisi.

But here comes the rub:  I still ‘do’ for the snails that invade my flowerbeds if I can catch the blighters at it.  But there’s now a difference.  These days I can’t assassinate a snail without feeling a touch of guilt, and thinking of how my grandson’s world is a different place from the world I inhabited at his age.  For, when I was his age, it was deemed harmless, if not healthy, for a boy to have a collection of bird’s eggs; for frogs and toads and newts to become fair game for any lad that hunted them, and for fish that got caught to stay caught. They didn’t get thrown back when I was his age.

But my grandson, by contrast, is aware of the delicacy of the created system, and of the interdependence of its life forms.  And I’m glad he is!  He understands that creation is not indestructible, and that its balance id easily disturbed in the drive to provide a steadily increasing lifestyle for a rapidly increasing population, by axing rain forests, turning rivers into sewers and burning – in a twinkling of an eye, in relative terms – the planet’s storehouse of fossil energy built up over millions of years.

In short, my grandson sees, in a way that I didn’t, that creation is finite, not infinite.  He sees that there’s a limit to literally everything; to the number of creatures you can shoot without putting species at risk; to the volume of pesticides and fertilisers you can spray on the land which drains into ditches, streams and rivers, without poisoning the oceans.  And there’s a limit to the fumes you can pump into the atmosphere without damaging the protective layer of ozone that keeps out the harmful rays of the sun.

So the question raised by the debate on global warming isn’t “Is there a limit?”  We know the answer to that!  The question is “How close have we got to the limit?”   And that question must be answered by people with greater competence in scientific disciplines than I possess.

So what do I do?  As a grumpy OAP I could sit back and leave such things to others.  But, curiously, I still feel a need to contribute to the debate.  And perversely, I need to clear the decks by mentioning a couple of things I shall not go.

Firstly I shall not engage in scaremongering.  For I admit that I have, from time to time, stood in the ranks of the prophets of doom who gloomily  prognosticated that humankind’s imminent fate is to be pounded, populated and polluted out of existence.  Now I see that the apocalyptic utterances of my youth need to be viewed in the light of happier things that came to pass.  For in spite of my gloomier prophecies, the Berlin Wall came down; the ideological conflict between communism and capitalism went away; Mandela got released from prison and, what the hell? We all woke up this morning able to scan the obituary columns.

So these days, although I have no doubt that humanity faces massive problems, I have the hope that the problems are not beyond solution.  Indeed, I suspect that we do not lack solutions.  What we seem to lack is the corporate will to address the problems, and I see that as a theological problem.  Whatever, there will be no scaremongering from me.

Second, I shall do nothing to widen the gap between science and religion. For the truth is that I come further adrift than ever from those religionists who seem to take delight in flying in the face of a scientific understanding of the universe.  And I mean the creationists and second-coming merchants who see the future as Jesus of Nazareth returning in person to wreak havoc in the world God loves.  In my view, fundamentalism, of the Muslim variety or the Christian sort, is the enemy of true religion.  Indeed, these days as I sit in my pew in Willenhall, chuntering moodily at some of the stuff I hear, I tell myself that I have less trouble with the atheists who deny God than with believers who belittle him!  For it seems to me that some believers are so fixated on belief that they are insensitive to the sacredness of human life – never mind the compassion in the heart of the God they deem to be so great – when it suits them.  And I refuse to tow that line!

So what do I offer to the global warming debate?  You might think it odd to use as a bench mark the passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans we heard earlier, (ch 8: 18 – 27a) for it borders on the apocalyptic as he dreams of immortality.  But that’s what I want to do.  We heard how Paul thinks of the creation groaning because it has been overtaken by some moral catastrophe.  He likens it to a pregnant woman in painful labour as it strains in expectancy of being delivered by a redeemed humanity.  He admits that we are far from seeing the ultimate, but argues that we are helped , in the meantime, by the groaning of an indwelling spirit whose ‘speechless sighings’ are in tune with God’s purpose.  In other words, he assumes there is a “mind” beneath our consciousness that validates immortal longings.

Now you of course can say “hang about, Paul was a Jew of the first century who had no understanding at all of science as we know it.  Furthermore, as a child of his time, he took the view that the end of the world was so near that it was a waste of time to get married!  He got that one wrong, didn’t he?”

He did indeed!  You will get no argument from me about that!  I’ve told you I’m no sort of fundamentalist, and you’ll never catch me imposing the first century’s understanding of the world on the twenty-first century, without massive adaptation.

But I still reckon it’s a question worth asking.  Is there a ‘mind’ that under girds everything?  Does something mystic and mysterious rumble in nature’s gut?  You see, I want to argue that it does.  I don’t deny the findings of my brothers in the scientific community, I see science and religion as complimentary, not conflicting, disciplines.  One seeks to know the “how” of things and the other asks the question “why?”  And to me it’s a pity when either seeks to deny the validity of the other.  So I tell you a true story that, for me, became a lesson in life.

Thirty five years ago I became pally with a university teacher who went on to become Dean of the of the Faculty of Science at a Midlands university.  We still meet up in retirement to chew the fat, and I tell you of one of our recent discussions.

We were talking about the resurrection of Jesus and, liberated by retirement to say such things, I voiced my intense private frustration with those preachers who take the gospel writers’ disparate, even conflicting, resurrection stories and bung them together as the record of a particular day in history.  And I went on to say that if religion doesn’t do less to promote resurrection as a one-off historical event, and more to explore it as the on-going spiritual discovery that the values that Jesus lived for did not die with him, then religion can hardly expect science to respect it.

The professor looked thoughtful, and said “ I think I agree.  But if I were you I’d be careful about dismissing things you can’t possibly know on the basis of the bits you know already.”  He added “Too many of my colleagues do that.”  And he told me this tale:

“By training I am a geologist and, as such, I always knew that the continents of earth originally belonged together.  Look on an atlas – you can fix them together like pieces of a jigsaw.  And, if you do, not only do they match on the surface, the underlying strata match too!  But my colleagues in the physics department said “No, there’s no known theory by which that could have happened.”  But the day then dawned when physics discovered the theory by which it could have happened, and probably did happen, so I got told that it was now OK for me to believe what I’d always felt to be true!  I find something arrogant about that, and I don’t think you should make the same mistake.”

Well Amen!  He was absolutely right.  For here was a man of science saying that reverent agnosticism is a more fitting response to the fundamental mystery of things, rather than the diamond shaped certainties that science and organised religion want to trade in.  There is so very much we do not know, and might never know, so let’s all have some respect for things human beings instinctively feel to be true – even things that don’t match the neat and tidy theories of maths and chemistry – or theology.

You see, at this stage of my life and development, I’m prepared to argue that ‘gut feelings’ are the stuff and substance of religion.  It’s the duty of any religion to try to make apparent the fundamental mystery of those things that, though we try to touch them, we can only wonder about, and marvel at.  So, I repeat my question, was Paul right to assume that beneath everything that is, there is a Spirit that groans and sighs as it goads us to keep hoping and questing?

Paul uses the word ‘Spirit’ and we think of the Holy Spirit.  And fair enough! But I am left wondering if Biblical images serve us well in the green debate.  Think of Paul’s ‘groan from the gut.’  Let’s call it ‘God’s unseen presence and influence in the world.’  The men of the Bible ransacked language to come up with images to describe this.  All their images started life as similes which used the word of comparison ‘like.’  So the Spirit was said to be ‘like’ the wind, ‘like’ the fire or ‘like’ the dove.  Then the word of comparison got dropped and the Spirit became the mighty wind, the holy fire and the celestial dove.  Again, fair enough, but I wonder how this helps us to describe the underlying mystery that causes my daughter-in-law to hope for ‘something better’ when her son uses a mallet to clobber a snail.

You see, the problem with Biblical images is that most of them have to be explained in our society.  Take our gospel reading as an example, the parable of the sower.  You might think the message obvious, but hear this:  last July, the seven year old son of my next door neighbour came home from school proudly clutching a plant pot in which green leaves flourished.  He saw me, thrust the plant pot under my nose, and asked “What do you think this is, Dave?”  (I tell you there’s no respect when you get to a certain age!)  I said “I think it’s a bean.”  Yes, he said, and he told me how he’d planted it at school, watered it and watched it grow.

And my point is this:  The process of planting and nurturing isn’t immediately obvious to a kid reared in a highly urbanised community in which alienation from things agricultural is just about complete.  So if he is to avoid the conclusion that beans come frozen in plastic bags, he has to be educated in what were facts of observation in the world in which Jesus lived and moved.  And I reckon we need images drawn from our world when we speak of the things of God.

For a society in which kids tote knives and guns speaks to me of Paul’s image of creation groaning for a redeemed humanity.  For it’s plain to me that you can pass all the laws you like, build as many prisons as you like and aem all the policemen going, but if the life-chances of alienated kids aren’t transformed, you won’t solve the problem.  And what we need is a new understanding of the word ‘redemption.’

Furthermore, the people of what gets called the ‘credit crunch’ need, in my view, to hear the prophetic message that the travail of the years of famine is a built-in judgement on profligacy in the years of plenty!  But don’t we call that ‘boom and bust?’

Similarly, the gospel of the greens, that we need to be wiser in our handling of finite resources – food, water, energy – seems to me to be close to the Biblical doctrine of stewardship!  The message is that we are not the owners of the good earth, but stewards charged with the duty to hand on something worth having to those who will follow.

But I have given myself a task:  What image shall I use to describe the ‘cosmic groan’ that causes my world-embracing, non-church attending daughter-in-law to make such a fuss when her son clobbers a snail with a mallet?

I can’t help thinking of Isaiah’s dream of creation reconciled (ch 11: 1 – 9).  His vision is of the wolf and the sheep, the cow and the bear, grazing and sheltering together, of a child playing with a snake’s nest without fear of harm – when the earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.  Now that’s the work of a religionist waxing poetic about God’s plan to bring all creation into harmony.  But my question is: Where did his vision of the plan come from?  St Paul would probably have said: from the ‘speechless sighing’ of the Spirit.  And Paul Tillich, one of the 20^th century’s heftier thinkers, called this truth within us ‘the voice of ultimate concern.’

So what of my daughter-in-law’s yearning that my grandson shall live in harmony with all things – snails included?  Well, at the risk of being sneered at by scientists, I’ll call it ‘the voice of ultimate concern.’  And at the risk of being accused of heresy by the big brains of theology, I’ll even call it ‘the green voice of God.’

The green voice of God, forever whispering from the bottom of creation and goading us to hope that the future will be better than the past.  And, men and women, if you think something groans from the depth of your being, my tip is: listen well!  For it could be the voice of God.

 

Rev David Barker

© 2008