by Lowell Bliss

This blog post is the last bit of work that I will do before going down to the basement and collecting my backpack and camping gear.  I’m headed to the mountains.  From our new home here in Ontario, I’m equal distance from the Adirondacks and the Alleghenies.  I don’t know yet if I’ll turn east or west once I cross the border.  My trip is something of a send-off by my wife, who has been worried about my emotional endurance.  “Where can I find happiness?” the Boy Who Spoke to the Earth asks in the illustrated children’s book by the same name.  
 
"'The journey to happiness is difficult, but I can show you the way,' said the Earth. 'Are you willing to make the journey?'

'Oh, I am,' said the Boy, and he meant it."
 
Robynn had just returned from a Frontier Ventures event in Pasadena, and we were sitting on the couch while she, in turn, listened to my week.  “You should get away,” she said.  “We’ve been talking about you going hiking.  Either do it or don’t do it, but you need to make a decision.” She then walked into her office and came back with a children’s book.  
 
“I found this at the Santa Monica Mountains Visitors Center.”  Robynn is a spiritual director and is always on the look-out for children’s books to use in her practice.  The Boy Who Spoke to the Earth is written by award-winning photographer Chris Burkard and illustrated by David McClellan. Dreamling Books, the publisher, released this YouTube preview in 2015.
 
The Earth sends the Boy on a journey: to the ocean, to the waterfalls, to the forests, to the desert, to the mountains, and to the top of the world.  The Boy variously “wades and wanders,” “steps and strides,” or “hikes and hauls” as he leaves each landscape behind.  “I see the water and the shells,” said the Boy as he leaves the ocean, “but I don’t see happiness.”
 
The Boy speaks again to the Earth and the Earth simply asks, “My Boy, did you look without seeing?” The Earth sends the Boy back along the trail: “but this time,” the Earth tells him, “stand still for just a moment.”
 
It’s no spoiler to tell you that the next six double-page spreads contain no words at all. The Boy is simply set as a small and silent figure in some of the most glorious drawings I’ve ever seen in a children’s book. The reader can’t help but “stand still for just a moment” before each page.
 
I don’t know what I will be looking at in the Adirondacks or the Alleghenies--I don't even know what range I will choose--but my wife, writer Chris Burkard, illustrator David McClellan, and the Earth itself have just reminded me to stand still for a moment and “see” for a change.  Do you have vacation or travel plans this summer?  May you find what the Boy finds in the same way that he finds it.  (And may your spouse or friend buy you this book at the earliest convenience.)

by Lowell Bliss

​I’m an American now residing in Canada who lived for fourteen years in India, and still I don’t know Celsius. I think the reason is that while kilometers can be travelled, and liters can be bought, degrees Celsius are felt. We absorb that knowledge through our skin. “Boy, it’s hot outside,” we say, and an Indian and Canadian can tell you: “Yes, it’s almost 40.”
 
Actually, besides 0 (“freezing”) and -40 (where the two scales converge), 40 degrees Celsius was the one temperature reading I knew how to convert to Fahrenheit. It equals 104°F. It was close enough to 100 for me to know both rationally and experientially that a trip to the bazaar that afternoon would be excruciating. It was also the thermometer reading that we young parents feared the most for our feverish children. Nowadays however, if we had remained in India, it seems that we would have to come to grips with a new number: 50°C. This week in pre-monsoon North India, temperatures are hovering around and above 50°C, which is 122°F. Welcome to the unwelcomed new normal of climate change where 11 of the 15 warmest years on record in India have all occurred since 2004. 
 
We left in 2007, but we still knew the India heat. During our first June in Varanasi (in 1995), we ran a desert cooler in our bedroom, but one night I had to get up in the middle of the night and walk across the marble floors of the living room to get to the bathroom. I advertently touched one of our cloth curtains and immediately jerked my hand away. It was hot to the touch, obviously not hot enough to burn, but hot enough to spark an instinctual response, like if you touched the edge of a stove but not the burner itself. I remember stopping, looking at the fabric, and thinking, “That’s it; we’ve gone past the point of no return.” Fortunately, that next day the long-anticipated monsoon rains came and temperatures dropped.
 
Fast forward two decades and I am now a certified Climate Leader with the Climate Reality Project, which means that I have been trained by Vice President Al Gore himself to give the latest version of his slide show made famous as “An Inconvenient Truth.” In 2016, his daughter Karenna invited me to a conference to be on a panel with her dad entitled “The Gospel and the Ecological Crisis.” I went to New York a day early because I wanted to catch Mr. Gore giving his slide show to these faith leaders. He has a staff which revises the show on a weekly basis, incorporating new photos and graphs from the latest headlines and the latest science. This show would additionally be geared to a faith-based audience.
 
I’m sitting five rows back and toward a corner, as befits an unobtrusive auditor. The lights are dimmed. I’m tracking the Vice President through some familiar talking points. And then he turns his attention to the latest heatwave in India. “It’s so hot,” he says, “the streets of New Delhi are literally melting.” Then he shows a short video clip of an older Indian woman crossing the street. I could “feel” the scene. In New Delhi, you must cross quickly since the traffic will close the gap soon. This woman is an “Auntie” like any other I had known. She is wearing a polyester saree and walking with the grace and dignity that only Indian women can convey in conveying themselves. She was wearing rubber chappals, what you and I call “flip flops.” Suddenly, in the video clip, one of her chappals gets stuck and her bare foot steps down into the black, mucky tar of the road. I and the rest of the audience cringe. She reaches down to try and retrieve it but then stumbles again. She looks up to make sure no traffic is coming. Finally, she abandons it altogether and hobbles through the hot tar to the side of the road.
 
The whole audience cringed, but I uncontrollably burst into tears. The two men sitting around me were polite enough not to notice, but I had let out an audible sob before I got back under control. I didn’t know this woman, but I knew aunties like her. I had loved aunties like her. Her pain hurt me. And I know this is funny to say, but I had also known chappals, or rather I had known what was lost in abandoning one, what it was like to cross the ground unprotected. Once I was visiting my friend John in Bengali Tola, an old and poor section of Varanasi. We passed by the door outside one of the rooms on the second floor and I saw a pair of rubber chappals left (politely and sanitarily) outside by a servant. We’ve all seen worn out flip-flops, I’m sure, but imagine two flip-flops so worn down that the heels were missing, carved out in perfect half-moons. The toes were also worn out so that the front part of the chappals was also missing, scalloped out in five small waves where the toes should be. This servant was so poor that she couldn’t even replace these chappals.
 
“Climate change is stealing chappals from poor aunties.” That’s what I thought. Like Celsius, this is knowledge which is more felt than rationalized, and hardly seems like the basis for a global transition to renewable energy, but nonetheless. . .  when Mr. Gore continued on, he had my renewed attention. 
 
Dag Hammarskjold once said, “It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.” This seems to me to be the attitude we need to adopt for climate change mitigation and adaptation: we each need to identify one single auntie, connect to her pain, and resolve to love her well.

by Lowell Bliss
 
Some passages of Scripture are such a part of missions to unreached people groups that we are just as likely to quote them in the King James Version, such as Acts 1:8: “But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the EAARTH.”
 
Wait. What?
 
For the Great Commission itself, Matthew 28:19-20, a translation like NIV works just fine: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the ANTHROPOCENE.”
 
Okay.  What’s going on?
 
What’s going on is that the world changes.  When is the last time you received a missionary prayer letter post-marked from “Asia Minor?”  (When’s the last time you received a prayer letter that was post-marked at all?!) Modern workers, for security purposes, might use the name “Asia Minor” to refer to a modern Euro-Asian country that separates the Black Sea from the Mediterranean, but they still aren’t writing from the same fields in which Paul preached, nor from where the Cappadocian Fathers prayed.  For that matter, they aren’t even writing from the same field that existed in 1968.  Times change. Geography changes.
 
Missionaries were once called, as per Acts 1:8, to the “uttermost part of Earth.”  Now, for the sake of adjusting to new realities, we are advised to take Bill McKibben’s lead and talk about the “uttermost part of Eaarth.”  That’s the title of his 2011 book, Eaarth: Making Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.   He starts his book, similar to how Al Gore starts his slide show, by describing the Apollo 8 photo of the planet called “Earthrise” taken on Christmas Eve of 1968.  Then he writes:
 
“But we no longer live on that planet.  In the four decades since, that earth has changed in profound ways, ways that have already taken us out of the sweet spot where humans so long thrived.  We’re every day less the oasis and more the desert. The world hasn’t ended, but the world as we know it has—even if we don’t quite know it yet.  We imagine we still live back on that old planet, that the disturbances we see around us are the old random and freakish kind.  But they’re not.  It’s a different place. A different planet.  It needs a new name.  Eaarth” (2.)
 
But what about time?  Jesus has still promised to be with us to the end of the age, right?  Yes, but it’s now a new age that he has promised to unfailingly shepherd us through.  In 2002, geologist Paul Crutzen writing in the journal Nature first suggested that we live in a new epoch. He wrote, “The Anthropocene could be said to have started in the late eighteenth century when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane.”  Last week, Nature reported an important decision.  A panel of 34 scientists, a working group convened by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, has issued their committee report: they will indeed propose to the ICS that “the Anthropocene” be officially recognized as the epoch which brought an end to the Holocene.   For many of us, our missionary careers began in one geological age and is concluding in another.  
 
I don’t know about you, but I want to finish strongly in my time and I want to work with “what is there,” not with what I remember or what I wish was still there.  Called to the ends of the Eaarth in the Anthropocene means making myself aware of the impacts of environmental crisis on my people group and adjusting my compassion, my strategies, even my preaching accordingly.  Of course, to say that "the world is changing" goes without saying for missionaries, but we often apply that thought only to modernization or globalization.  New terminology like Eaarth or the Anthropocene simply opens our eyes to the environmental issues which affect our witness (Acts 1:8), which affect the making of disciples (Matt 28:19-20).

by Lowell Bliss

Reverse Spoiler Alert—If you have not seen the movie Avengers: Endgameand have no intention to do so, many of the specifics in this article will not make sense to you, though the general themes will.  If you have not yet seen Endgame but still want to, then you may want to wait and read this article later, but please watch the movie with this suggestion: “consider the birds.”
 
I returned to the theater last week to watch Avengers: Endgame for a second time.  I had a specific purpose in mind, which I’ll explain shortly.  Right before I went however, one more article popped up in my newsfeed: : “'Catastrophe' as France's bird population collapses due to pesticides.”

• Bird populations across the French countryside have fallen by a third over the last decade and a half, researchers have said. Dozens of species have seen their numbers decline, in some cases by two-thirds, the scientists said in a pair of studies – one national in scope and the other covering a large agricultural region in central France. . . . The problem is not that birds are being poisoned, but that the insects on which they depend for food have disappeared.

 
There is a moment in the movie Avengers: Endgame when after the Hulk has reversed Thanos’s “snap” with one of his own, the superheroes are left wondering: has it worked?  Has that portion of creation—half of all living creatures across the universe—been restored?  Scott Lang hears the sound of birds and walks to the window.  A handful of birds are flitting in the trees and Lang turns back with a huge smile on his face. Rachel Carson’s spring is silent no more.
 
I confess to having forgotten about the animal kingdom when I was watching the sad conclusion of Avengers: Infinity War, the Part 1 to Endgame’s Part 2.  Thanos snaps his fingers and I watched T’Challa feather away to ash.  I teared up at Peter Parker’s fading appeal to Tony Stark.  There was no indication that any creature other than family and friends were gone. If anything, the savannah of Wakanda, the site of Infinity War’s final battle scene, was as glorious as ever. In Endgame’s evocative opening scene, Clint Barton’s family is gone but his farm seems untouched.  Later, Steve Rogers tells Natasha Romanoff that he has just seen a pod of whales swimming up the Hudson.  I had just assumed that the animals were still there.
 
If Thanos had obliterated half of the animal kingdom as well, as Lang’s discovery seems to indicate, then that seems like an unnecessary injustice, because in reality we human beings had already done that work for him on planet Earth.  The Living Planet Report, released last year, claims that wildlife populations have declined by over half since 1970. That means that Thanos would have taken an additional 50 percent more of the remaining.  Stark advises the Hulk to only bring back what Thanos had taken. This of course means everything to Barton who, while Lang goes to the window to see the birds, gets a phone call from his lost wife.   What Lang sees, however, is only the restoration of what biologists are calling The Sixth Extinction.
 
I went back to see Endgame because I wanted to track the themes of grief and our responses to it, particularly grief over a lost world and our seeming powerlessness to do anything about it.   I was primarily interested in just that one section of the film that begins with the title slide “Five Years Later.”   The movie starts, as you remember, at the moment of Thanos’s snap as experienced by Barton thousands of miles from the chaos that was going on in Wakanda.  We then skip to Stark and Nebula adrift in space 21 days later.  They are rescued by Captain Marvel but when they are returned safely to Earth, they find the remaining Avengers still in shock at their unbearable failure and their intolerable loss.  The Avengers discover that they have the means to locate Thanos. Perhaps, they hope, they can retrieve the Infinity gauntlet and reverse their loss.  “This is going to work, Steve,” Romanoff tells Rogers. “I know it is,” he responds, “because I don’t know what I’m going to do if it doesn’t.” And actually, it doesn’t. . . work, that is.  Their plan doesn’t work. They find that Thanos has used the Infinity Stones one last time to destroy them completely.  The Avengers have no hope of reversing Thanos’s destruction.  Thor in a fit of useless rage decapitates their enemy.
 
Marvel takes comic book liberties to set their storylines in our times and they make this explicit repeatedly in Endgame, not only with their time-stamped title slides (i.e. “New York 2012,” “Asgard 2013,” etc.) but also with all their contemporary pop culture references.  Similarly, unlike DC Comics with their “Central City” or “Gotham,” Marvel has felt free to set their stories in a real Queens or a real Brooklyn.  Technically, Endgames is sci-fi, but it is not futuristic.  Consequently, when they say, “five years later,” they mean our here-and-now. When I entered the theater, I already felt emotionally like I was living in that “five years later” space when it comes to creation care. I recognized that I was feeling depressed about creation’s loss and my powerlessness to stop it.
 
Five years later, how are the remaining Avengers coping? Steve Rogers leads group therapy sessions for average citizens.  “I keep telling everybody they need to move on,” he tells Romanoff after a particularly hard session.  “Some do, but not us,” he admits.  He is trying to therapize himself but with minimum success.  Romanoff is trying to keep the organization together.  She is joined by the other military types (Captain Marvel, Col. Rhodes, Okoye) who seem to persist from a sense of duty.  Their response seems admirable, but there is no energy in their meetings. They seem to simply be going through the motions. Tony Stark is retired at a lakefront property.  He and Pepper Potts are raising a family and Stark just wants to be left alone.  Barton is so full of rage that his superhero persona Hawkeye has become a bloodthirsty assassin. He swats desperately at the cartels and the triads, but they are a smaller evil, and Barton’s revenge is never satisfied.
 
And then there’s Thor—indolent, obese, and alcoholic.
 
I feel like I’ve tasted of each of these responses.  The storyline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) extends far back through the plotlines and character development of 21 previous movies.  What the Avengers are feeling “five years later” doesn’t simply begin with the snap of Thanos’s fingers.  Similarly, I understand that our current environmental crisis can’t be blamed on the 2016 election in the US, but nonetheless that single Tuesday in November 2016 feels to me like the snap of Thanatos’s fingers.  I don’t want to refer to Trump, but rather to Thanatos, the Greek god of death from whom Thanos, the comic book villain, derives his name.  I remember how happy and excited I was back in 2015.  Things weren’t perfect, any more than the MCU was free from Ultron’s or Hydra’s violence.  Nonetheless I was happy in July 2015 at Gordon College when the US and Canada Lausanne WEA Creation Care Network convened for the first time.  And I was happy in December 2015 when the nations agreed on the Paris Agreement for climate action.  Since Thanatos’s snap however, and with a relentless release of headlines—birds in France, Koala in Australia, IPCC 1.5-degree reports, EPA betrayals, death by ocean plastic—I have tasted of each of the coping responses depicted in Endgame.   I have perhaps gravitated most to Roger’s response: ever the optimist, ever the minister, always trying to help my fellow human beings.   Perhaps the weekly video series on hope that I produced last year was simply my version of group therapy.  The missionary in me and the Midwesterner in me has kept me on task.  I am dutiful.  (Incidentally, Romanoff admits that there is more than duty that he keeps her close to headquarters; the Avengers is the only family that she has ever known.  I too have found a family in creation care and environmental missions, and don’t want to disband those partnerships.) Like Stark, I have often given up and self-righteously blamed others.  Like Barton, I’ve had moments of anger, murdering oil execs and political operatives in my heart.  Like Thor, I’ve often sought solace in Netflix, food, and exploring craft beers.
 
My wife Robynn is a certified spiritual director and she has been a big help.  For instance, she has taught me the very wording that I employ about depression.  I don’t say, “I am depressed.”  If one is clinicallydepressed, then that is a disease, and we don’t identify ourselves with our diseases.  We don’t go around saying, “I am cancer.”  Emotions are an important part of us, but they are not the whole of us, and so neither do we conflate our identities with them.  So, I say, “I am feeling depressed,” as a way to identify my emotion, differentiate it from other things I am may be feeling at other times, and yet also maintain some distance from it.  I also like to use the phrase, “I recognize that I am feeling depressed,” because it even further puts me in a position of co-participant with God whereby I can ask myself, “So, Lowell, what do you want to do with this depression?  So, God, what are you trying to show me here?”  Recognizing my feelings of depression additionally reminds me that it is natural that I will seek out a means of coping.  I WILL slide into something.  Heck, even Norse gods like Thor are “only human.”  If I can co-participate with God in my depression than I can identify what my natural coping mechanism is and eventually decide whether I want to stick with that strategy. (“How’s that working for you, Lowell?”) Barton so desperately needed that kind of help from his friend Natasha.  I try to be kind to even the worst parts of my self.
 
Theologian Walter Brueggemann, the basis of so much of my Hope series, defines hope as “a bold conviction about an alternative possibility.”  I expanded his definition to say that biblical hope is “a bold conviction about an alternative possibility for the future in and through a good, free, and sovereign God.”  In Endgame, Antman pops back from five hours spent in the “quantum realm” and has “an alternative possibility for the future” to present to the Avengers.  It becomes the plan by which Thanos is ultimately defeated and the curse is reversed. Lang’s sudden appearance on the scene highlights a new dynamic for those of us who are depressed and coping “five years later.”  Lang’s idea has never been heard of before.  It is labeled as impossible.  The knowledge for it doesn’t yet exist.  It is ridiculed as so much “Back to the Future” nonsense.  Even when the details are worked out, the execution of retrieving each of the six Infinity Stones from back in the past is a long-shot. The interesting psychology is in the different pace at which each of the Avengers finally say, “Let’s go for it.” When an alternative possibility for the future opened up, which of the Avengers was the most ready to act on it? I want to be like him or her.
 
Let’s not include Scott Lang in our answer.  Having just returned from the Quantum Realm, he really wasn’t living with the others in the “five years later” period as much as he was in that scene at the beginning of the movie: shocked but ready to do something.  Clint Barton is eager to act, but he is, more accurately, suicidal than heroic.  If that first test run back to his farm had killed him instead, at least he would have found peace.  Let’s recognize that Stark and Thor were the slowest to come around, such are the effects of self-righteous escape and self-indulgent escapism.  Rogers and Romanoff are relatively quick to take the lead. Optimistic service and faithful duty are good soils for alternative possibilities for the future to germinate in, however fallow those soils might feel at the time.  In the end though, I am going to argue that the quickest Avenger to respond to Lang’s idea is the one Avenger that we have not yet discussed, the one whose coping strategy we’ve not yet labelled: namely, the Incredible Hulk.
 
One of the jokes as we were all anticipating Avengers: Endgame’s release was the question of where in this three-hour movie with no intermission, does an old guy like me be able to leave the theatre to use the restroom without missing any of the important stuff.  One website advised: at the one-hour mark, when you first meet Hulk at the diner.  (The other suggestion was at the two-hour mark when the title slide for New Jersey comes up.)  But if you had skipped out of Lang pitching his idea to the Hulk at the diner, you would have missed the explanation of why the Hulk was still big and green but now wore the visage and demeanor of Mark Ruffalo (the notoriously understated actor who plays Bruce Banner.) You would have missed the clue of what made Hulk/Banner so quick and ultimately useful at executing the plan, including being the one to retrieve the Time Stone from an initially reluctant Ancient One.   The alter egos of Dr. Bruce Banner and the Hulk had finally stopped fighting each other when they first met each other in the context of their defeat.  The Hulk had been defeated by Thanos in the movie Thor: Ragnorok.   Banner had been defeated by Thanos in Infinity War.  The two could finally integrate, but only by acknowledging and accepting their current defeat.  Most creation care activists and environmental missionaries I know are resurrectionists.  They live in that hope and they think in those terms and they work with such metaphors. But there is no resurrection without the crucifixion.   And Martha and the women would not have been the first to walk in the new alternative possibility for our future unless they had been visiting the tomb “three days later.”  
 
There is so much more in this set of movies, films which I believe are so rich in human meaning, we dare not dismiss them as superhero flicks.  For example, we witnessed the sacrifices that Romanoff and Stark were willing to make, and I know many of my creation care colleagues who would not hesitate to make the same choice if it was called for.  They love God.  They love his creation.  They love the generations who are succeeding them.   Such a choice to “lay down one’s life for his or her friends” (John 15:13’s “no greater love than this”) has historically been the decisive moment, but rarely do we achieve that moment if we don’t deal with our sense of loss and powerlessness first.
 
 

by Lowell Bliss

If ever you are having trouble generating a new post for your creation care/environmental missions blog, just go outside for a walk.  You are bound to stumble upon a morality tale.
 
I live in Ontario on the north shore of Lake Erie.  It’s a short fifteen-minute walk to Nickel Beach where this morning I saw a body of a cormorant (family Phalacrocoracidae) laying on the sand.   “Oh, it’s dead,” my wife said sympathetically when I showed her this photo.  “Yes, things die,” I said cavalierly.  It would have been more disturbing if I had returned home with a photo of a dead Fowler’s toad; they are an endangered species endemic to our little portion of the Niagara peninsula.
 
“Yes, things die,” I said, “but look at this photo and see if you can tell me how the bird died.”
 
She was first afraid that our dog had attacked it, greatly overestimating our dog’s prowess and her husband’s strength on the other end of the leash.   I had walked up to the bird expecting to find bits of plastic—straws, Tim Hortons coffee lids, etc.—extruding from its belly, like in so many of the photos that my conservationist friends post on my Facebook wall.  But no.  No outside force—animal or human—killed this bird.  It had committed suicide, albeit inadvertently.
 
I had a discovered a morality tale.  Please don’t worry, we humans are off the hook in this incident.  It wasn’t plastic in our waterways; it wasn’t because of an oil spill; it wasn’t what the fishing industry calls unintentional “bi-kill.” We humans are off the hook, unless we fail to learn the lesson of this “tale.”  (And there, I’ve given you two clues in that last sentence about what killed this cormorant.) Examine the photo again.  Protruding out by the bird’s tail can you spot the outline of a mouth?  Up at the top of the bird’s stomach, can you see the scales?
 
A cormorant is a sizeable bird, but so was the fish (which may be a large mouth bass) that it had tried to swallow.  This bird was killed by its own inadvisable greed.  
 
I admit to being impressed that it could have even swallowed such a large fish.  How is that possible with that beak and that jaw and that throat? As an aside, part of this bird’s misfortune was being born near the Niagara River, as compared to the Nagara River in China.  A type of fishing called ukai uses trained cormorants and has been going on uninterrupted for 1300 years.  A ring is placed around the cormorant’s neck so that it can swallow small fish only.  The large ones get caught in the bird’s throat and the fishermen can retrieve the fish as part of the day’s catch.
 
But I find myself impressed by a lot of the technology that fuels our deadly consumeristic habits. For example, we all know about the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform that exploded in 2010, killing eleven workers, and leaking 3.19 million barrels of oil into the Gulf Mexico.  Biologists estimate that the oil spill killed 82,000 birds of 102 species, cormorants among them.   But what you may not have ever heard is that a year earlier, the Deepwater Horizon had set a record for drilling the deepest oil well in human history, a vertical depth of 35,050 ft (10,683 meters.)  It could drill a mile below the surface of the ocean.  Wow.  But like our cormorant discovered: just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.

by Lowell Bliss

A man passed away yesterday whom we should likely acknowledge as the greatest creation care advocate of our time.  You may think it an unlikely honor to bestow on him when you learn to whom I’m referring, but Jean Vanier taught us to love most deeply that part of creation which is simultaneously our most cherished inheritance and our greatest suffering.  Jean Vanier taught us to love the human bodies among us, including those bodies which most confront us with how broken in beauty, and how beautiful in brokenness, we and all of God’s creation truly are.
 
Jean Vanier passed away yesterday in Paris following the suffering attendant to thyroid cancer. He was 90 years old.  A theologian, Aristotelian philosopher, and former Naval officer, Vanier was the founder of the L’Arche communities in which the spiritually disabled and the physically disabled lived together and found. . . love. As reported by the BBC: “There are now 147 L'Arche centres in 35 countries, where people with and without disabilities live together as equals. There are a further 1,800 Faith and Light support groups, for people with special needs and their families and friends, across 80 nations.”
 
I was first exposed to L’Arche through the writing of Catholic priest Henri Nouwen, who lived at the Daybreak Community in Toronto for the ten years until his death.  I’ve long since misplaced my copy of Nouwen’s book  Adam: God’s Beloved where he introduced us to his companion Adam Arnett.  Adam could not speak nor could he move without assistance.   Here’s the one thing I remember from the book: Adam had one job and one job only.  Adam’s job was to be loved by God.
 
In the book For the Beauty of the Earth: A Christian Vision for Creation Care, Steven Bouma-Prediger said something about God’s various creation which Vanier seemed to know intuitively and what Nouwen came to learn through much personal anguish:  "We care for only what we love. We love only what we know. We truly know only what we experience."   I have not had a great deal of experience with people with disabilities—which is the nomenclature that Vanier used—so the main way I enter into Vanier’s and Nouwen’s stories is through creation care.  I’m not a utilitarian, a resource extractor who might stand before a West Virginia mountainside and demand that its coal seams contribute something useful to society. But I am a "One" on the Enneagram—if you are familiar with this typing—and so I have had to learn how to simply “be present” in the face of the imperfect.  A One is a reformer.  A One is a perfectionist.  I have a constant voice in my head of how I can improve myself, and how I can improve what lies before my eyes.  But those who write about the Enneagram say that Ones, in particular, find being out in nature therapeutic.  To be out in the woods, I am surrounded by the imperfect—by the decaying and the dead, by the broken branches, by the unstraightened deer trail, by last year’s messy leaf-strewn floor.  Nature is broken, and it is beautiful.  The thought of trying to "reform" it doesn't even enter my head. It is perfect in its imperfection.  It demands nothing of me except that I be fully present to it, that I love it.  
 
When I first step into the woods, I often have my camera out.  I’m determined to chronicle my hike, as if I were carving my initials into the scene.  I’m determined to acquire something to aid my unreliable long-term memory.  I might even rehearse what I’m going to write about the photos when I get “back home to Facebook.”  At some point—and it happens quicker and quicker now that I am older—I realize that I have taken enough pictures and that none of them satisfyingly captured the joy of this moment.  I put my camera away and I just stand there and try to soak it all in.  I try to be present.  And I’m present in my body, in the very same substance that I see laid out gloriously before me.  I love. I imagine that Nouwen had many such moments with Adam: the bath is over, the dishes washed and put away, nothing (and everything!) to do but just sit there and hold Adam’s hand.
 
Two weeks ago, I was listening to an episode of Krista Tippet’s podcast On Being where she replayed an interview with Jean Vanier from 2007.  In the story of one long-time resident at L’Arche, I heard how I want to form my own heart toward God’s creation.  “But L’Arche is based on body and on suffering bodies,” Vanier says. 
 
“They are seen as useless, and so we welcome those who apparently are useless. It’s a suffering body which brings us together. It’s our attention to the body. When somebody comes to our community and is quite severely handicapped, what is important is to see that the body is well. Bathing, helping people dress, to eat: It’s to communicate to them through the body. And then, as the body can become comfortable, then the spirit can rise up. There’s a recognition. There’s a contact. There’s a relationship.
 
We see this with some of our people, like Françoise. Françoise came to our community in 1978 very severely handicapped. She couldn’t speak; she could walk a bit; she couldn’t dress herself; she was incontinent; and she couldn’t eat by herself. Today, she is nearly 30 years older — she has become blind and — a beautiful person.
 
There was somebody who came to our community not too long ago who saw Françoise, and the reaction was, “Oh, what is the point of keeping Françoise alive?” The leader of the little house said, “But madam, I love her.” It’s as if you come in to a home and grandma is in the home and she has Alzheimer’s, and you say, “What is — ” But she’s my grandmother. So it’s based on the body, and then from the body, relationship grows.”
 
 

By Lowell Bliss
 
Wake up in the morning in the moonlight grey
We got dirt to break, we got a note to pay
Gonna plow, plow to the end of the row
Gonna wake up in the morning and plow to the end of the row

Adrienne Young was determined to take up her place in the Creation Mandate. She was determined to “bless and flourish, rule and subdue, till and keep” (Gen 1:28; 2:15).  For Young that meant writing music.   Straight out of college, she ran right into thorns and thistles and the sweat of her brow.  She worked various jobs on Music Row in Nashville. “No one was interested in my music,” she said. “I was working in the music business offices, and everyone around me was doing what they wanted to do. It was driving me crazy because I knew I could do it, but you can't save up the money to do a record when you're making seven or eight bucks an hour.”  She reached out to a friend and confessed she was thinking of moving back to her home state of Florida.  “Do you really want to do music?” he e-mailed back. “Then you’ve got to plow to the end of the row,” he told her.
 
Down to the kitchen with my feet still bare
Children to the table, Papa say a prayer
Gonna plow, plow to the end of the row
Down to the kitchen, got to plow to the end of the row

Cornbread for breakfast, won’t ya boil the grinds
Got to cut the furrow ’fore the sun gets high
Got to plow, plow to the end of the row
Cornbread for breakfast and I plow to the end of the row
 
My contribution to the Creation Mandate seems to be to write about the Creation Mandate.  That’s what I was attempting to do in 2012 in my third try on a manuscript for William Carey Library for a book that was eventually published as Environmental Missions: Planting Churches and Trees. The Muse had flitted off to go inspire other more worthy authors, but nonetheless for me there was dirt to break and a note to pay.  I got out of bed in the morning.  I brewed myself a cup of coffee.  Right before I sat down at my computer, I pulled out my iPod and listened to “Plow to the End of the Row” by Adrienne Young and her band Little Sadie.  Back then you could buy a muse for .99 cents a download, but not the kind of muse that would do the work for you.

Sun just broke out over the trees
I got an aching in my back and a tremblin’ in my knees
If the mule won’t pull then the plow won’t go
If the seed don’t set, then the crop won’t grow
Chickens to the market, seven miles to town
Gotta make it home ’fore the sun goes down
Big storm coming, I can see it in the sky
Hope it don’ t rain ’fore the clothes get dry

Genesis 1:28 (NIV): “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’”  Genesis 2:15 (NASB): “Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.” It’s good work.  It’s a privilege, as ever much a privilege as I’m sure a young Adrienne Young felt about living and working in Nashville.  And yet there is so much beyond our control.  The strength is in the mule and the life is in the seed. What if they don’t go or set?  We might hope that the rains don’t come before we have a chance to get the clothes off the clothesline, but after that: what if the rains don’t come at all?  The Genesis account tells us that it will be hard work: “By the sweat of your face you will eat bread, till you return to the ground, because from it you were taken” (3:19 NASB). 
 
I got rocks in my shoes, dirt in my eyes
Working like a dog till the day I die
You got to plow, plow to the end of the row
I got rocks in my shoes when I plow to the end of the row

I always waited with anticipation for the end of the song, because it reminded me why I was doing what I was doing.

My baby’ s waitin’ for me at the end of the day
She likes to ball the jack in the sweetest way
Gotta plow, plow to the end of the row
My baby’ s waiting’ for me so I plow to the end of the row

Love waiting for me—my “baby,” my wife, my kids, my family, my sweetest way, my completion, a glorious sunset.  (I looked up what “ball the jack” means.  First, it is a railroad term: jack means a train, and to highball it means “to proceed.”  Secondly, it is the name of a high energy ragtime dance from 1913.  And thirdly, OF COURSE it is a euphemism for sex, sex, sex!). Love is waiting for us at the end of the day.   “It is required of stewards that one be found trustworthy (I Cor 4:2 NASB). We are stewards of creation, just as in this verse the apostles were “stewards of the mysteries of God.”  Stewards are to be found faithful.  They are required to plow to the end of the rows that the Master has assigned them.  While I do long to be found faithful to Christ, more than that, I long to simply be found in him.  Christ Jesus waits at the end of the Creation Mandate to find us. We can look into his face and see his lips begin to form the words, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”
            Young’s song doesn’t end there however, because until the day you die or until the day of the Lord’s return, there’s another moment of strenuous privilege laid out before you:
 
Wake up in the mornin’ in the moonlight grey
We got dirt to break we got a note to pay
Gonna plow, plow to the end of the row
Gonna wake up in the mornin’ and plow to the end of the row
 
 
“Plow To The End Of The Row,” Adrienne Young & Little Sadie,  ℗ 2004 Addiebelle Music (BMI) Will Kimbrough Music (BMI); released on 13 April 2004;  provided to YouTube by Virtual Label LLC here.
 

by Lowell Bliss

​It’s been one year since our Creation Care at the Frontiers of Mission (CCFM) conference out at the Frontier Ventures campus in Pasadena, and it’s been a busy year for one of our keynote speakers.  Katharine Hayhoe didn’t even have time to properly celebrate Thanksgiving.  She was one of the lead authors of the Fourth US National Climate Assessment, and here’s how she describes its snap release on the Friday after the holiday:
 
"The Monday before Thanksgiving, I was in full pie production mode. The counter was covered in apple peels and flour, and so were my hands. My phone chimed. Another message, this time from a colleague. “We’ve been told the report is to be released this Friday!” it said. “Sending proofs right away!”
 
I immediately reached for my laptop. With floury fingers, I opened the PDFs to see what I had to do and try to figure out how long it would take. The pies went straight into the freezer and the next 60 hours was a flat-out marathon for all of us, with emails and phone calls through the day and well into the night. I finished my own final checks in the car on the way to family Thanksgiving, and sent off my documents in the next pocket of phone coverage we found, driving through rural Virginia."
 
This past year, perhaps more than any other, has added a “time element” to creation care, at least to climate action.  A different report, the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, was released in October.  The Guardian and other newspapers were quick to run somewhat misleading headlines like “We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN.”  The National Geographic was more measured: “These solutions all require unprecedented efforts to cut fossil-fuel use in half in less than 15 years and eliminate their use almost entirely in 30 years.”  IPCC spokespeople simply said, “The next few years are probably the most important in our history.” 
 
Time frames are problematic and that’s why, while I take up the urgency of these climate reports, I am glad that Katharine’s personal story of Thanksgiving 2018 ties us back to “time” as followers of Christ understand it: the kairos moment and not just the chronos one, God-governed seasons, harvest, holidays, holy days, proactive Sabbath-like mechanisms which turn our attention back to the Creator God with faith and hope. 
 
I spent a portion of my time on Thanksgiving Day praising God for what a wonderful time we had together at CCFM 2018.  Many of the presentations, including Katharine’s talk “Loving Our Global Neighbor” are available as nicely curated podcasts at www.creationcaremissions.org . The urgency of our times—“the next few years are probably the most important in our history”—makes me pleased to deliver this announcement:
 
Save the Date!  
​CCFM 2020 is scheduled for March 19-21, 2020.
 
(Exact location to be announced.) This will be a Thursday-Saturday event which includes a meeting of the US Lausanne WEA Creation Care Network on Thursday, and a “Young Leaders” program on Friday, with our traditional CCFM programming on Friday night and Saturday.  Coinciding with the conference, we will be hosting a “hackathon” for young computer and design students who will, adding to award-winning work done recently at Urbana, create technological tools to help “see movements to Jesus which express the fullness of the kingdom of God [in creation care] among all peoples.”