Hot Love

The earth is cooking and no one can turn down the gas. That seems the necessary conclusion from this sizzling summer. 2010 is on track to be the hottest year on record, measuring average temperatures of both land and ocean.


Temperatures to date are 1.22 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th-century average (figures from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association). In June the temperature map for the continents showed hot weather pretty much everywhere, which is unusual. Moscow is experiencing a prolonged heatwave with temperatures constantly in the nineties, while smoke from wildfires in the surrounding countryside create an apocalyptic event, obscuring the sun and making the air unbreathable. Carbon monoxide levels have been six times above safe concentrations. Elsewhere a giant ice sheet broke away from a major glacier in Greenland, an enormous frozen pizza four times the size of Manhattan and over sixty stories thick. As it floats south its melt water is adding volume to the ocean equivalent to the annual outflow of a major river.

Here in upstate New York it has been hot but there is also another geophysical feature that grabs attention and underlines the significance of all this. The landscape here is marked dramatically by the last ice age, with deep long gouges in the earth indicating the paths of the great glaciers. The neighborhood in Syracuse known as “The Valley” is actually the physical product of an enormous glacier, and you can follow its spectacular path miles farther to the south along Route 81. The great ice rivers melted and retreated roughly ten thousand years ago, a mere blink-of-an-eye on the geological timeline but of immense importance to humankind. It was during this brief breathing space that agriculture and civilization developed and virtually all established culture defining who we now are and how we live as a race. Our current human experiment emerges in an astonishingly narrow frame of time, and seeing it in this way means three things.

First, time truly time is of the essence. Everything for us has always happened in an accelerated manner and the biblical urgency that “now is the favorable moment” and “walk while you have the light” is founded in anthropological fact. We have relatively very little time in which to find our meaning and peace as an intelligent life form. Second, geophysical factors strongly shape this narrow frame of time. Jesus himself used meteorological examples when he told the Pharisees to read the signs of the times (“You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky...", Matt.15:3), as if he already connected the weather and the general human crisis he was confronting. Third—and against the first two—it is now an absolutely typical arrogance of our dominant culture almost completely to ignore this intimate connection and instead see itself in divine and metaphysical terms separated from the earth and from time itself.

Even as they jacked up the AC in their paneled rooms the Senate blocked any form of climate legislation this session. Meanwhile down in the Gulf if there ever was a sign for the times here was one. The venting of 4.9 million barrels of oil from the broken stack was run continually on national TV, like some horrible sci.fi. spigot of grease for basting and roasting our planet in its own built-in oven dish. Surely it should have impressed our body-souls with how borderline our situation truly is. But no, the metaphysics of greed and wealth have trumped all realism and truth. What can possibly restore good sense?

Only love. You can argue the facts of climate change until you’re sweating and superheated yourself but that only fuels the reactive vigor of metaphysics. We are beyond justice and good sense. But, in deeper truth, care for the planet is rooted in love, in Jesus’ loving wisdom of flowers-more-glorious-than-Solomon and birds cared for by the Father. A Christian community living intentionally in the Holy Spirit will restore the planet each and every time it loves. Only love overcomes metaphysics. Only love contains its own built-in environment in which everything can live and is already fully alive. Therefore, the rising red in the thermometer requires an equally rising vein of charity. For every degree of heat the planet goes up we are inspired to create a new angle of love, an added degree of love for each person, for our enemies, for ourselves. We cannot know how this will affect things, how it will redeem the planet from its present crisis. But we can be sure that love hopes and believes all things. And, in addition, love from the Holy Spirit is a prism in which we can already see the earth green and crystalline as in the eye of God, as God created it to be. We can be sure that this earth will one day exist, that this is how the actual earth will be, because the eye of love never blinks.