Picking a Cause

"We should hand the world over to the teenagers", commented a friend sharing the latest speech by young Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg. I thought of the ones whose rubbish I'd picked up from around the church this sunny Good Friday afternoon, and reflected how little I'd relish the prospect of very much at all being handed over to them apart from litter-pickers.

Perhaps the solemnity of the day promotes melancholy reflections, but it wasn't just that liturgical influence. I have at least two friends who've joined Extinction Rebellion's protests in the capital, and wondered what, if anything, I should do about it myself. Hornington has an active XR group: I could lie in the main road in Swanvale Halt for a bit with a sign saying 'Down With This Sort of Thing', or picket the garage. I know them in there, anyway. Perhaps I should blockade the one I don't use.

The litter in the churchyard and the other bits I picked up on my journey home from the Liturgy of the Passion of the Christ brought home how hard it is to imagine thorough change. Quite a proportion of human beings show a strange psychological resistance even to picking up after themselves when a serviceable bin is three feet away, let alone engaging in the degree of radical sacrifice that the science suggests will be necessary to keep human society functioning at all. And here in Britain, where the public seems agitated but not really willing to give anything up for long-term climate security, we're doing comparatively well in cutting our carbon emissions, down nearly 50% since 1990 thanks mainly to destroying the coal industry and heavy manufacturing; yet, sixth-biggest economy in the world the UK may be, we contribute a tiny amount to global carbon emissions, and it's hard to envisage the US or China shifting much, whether by 2025, 2050, or 2100, by which it will long be too late. By the end of this century (and I am increasingly glad I won't see further than the middle of it) it will become very likely that there will be wars over migration and access to resources, and that those wars could be fatally destructive, quite apart from the heating of the Earth reaching self-perpetuation by then. It all looks strikingly similar to the picture painted in the Book of Revelation, funnily enough, so perhaps this is it: perhaps these are the conditions preparatory to the End. I suspect the chances of modern society surviving the next two centuries are small, and those of human beings making it through in any form no better than 50-50. I'm already starting to think differently about the babies I'm baptising, and what they may face over the course of their lives. 

Naturally the matter has arisen in discussions among people I know on LiberFaciorum, and though I am not normally easily shocked I have been perturbed by the ease with which extremely violent language comes to hand. People should be shot, hanged, maimed. These are not strangers using these terms: these are souls I have known for years, acquiring apparently a new rage, resentment, and scorn. It was this that persuaded me my role should not be campaigning on the climate, but promoting the standard, unexciting Christian virtues of love and sacrifice, and the will to understand the truth. Whatever happens to us, human beings will need those, and, the crucified and risen one shows us, they are at the heart of all things. 'One God-ground deed endures/When this ring of diamond-and-gold is dust.' Or when we all are.