The old man's Sunday sermon to himself Probably the greenhouse gas report of the U.N. Environment Program shouldn’t have come out the week of Thanksgiving, a time when gassy emissions are quite heavy in the U.S. and people are likely to use the newspaper for guests to park their snowy boots on, but there it was and the picture is bleak, perhaps dire. The planet is heating up at a rate faster than scientists had ever expected, the U.S. is turning our back on the issue, and most people are dozing comfortably through it all. The press leaps when the White House tweets but it doesn’t know how to cover the major crisis of our time, the slow demise of Earth itself. Other species have undergone extinction and the only reason to think we may be exempt is the divine promise of eternal life offered to the faithful in most major religions. St. Peter tells us that God is not willing that any shall perish. But a moment later he says, “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.” The very sort of thing the U.N. report was getting at. In my experience, the Christian church comes down heavily on the side of hope and joy, Advent being its busy season, and it leaves the apocalyptic stuff to fringe groups. Norman Rockwell did not paint pictures of Main Street going up in flames, nor do you see a New Yorker cover of the earth passing away: we are a hopeful and humorous people by and large. I grew up in a fringe evangelical group and when a good evangelist was in top form, a boy could smell the fervent heat and imagine hot lava bubbling in the Lake of Fire, a phenomenal experience very far from Walt Disney and Mister Rogers. It made me feel odd as a young person, longing to be normal, listening to Don and Phil Everly who dreamed about holding someone with all her charms in their arms and then woke up with little Susie and were in trouble deep, but the Ultimate Fate of Mankind was not their concern. I was devoted to their music and the vividness of longing was stronger than the abstraction of the ultimate. Read the rest of the column >>> | 