We may have
entered a new geological epoch. The
suggestion continues to obsess me. The
fear is that human activity is shaping the structures of the earth itself. Permanent evidence of industrial pollution, nuclear
activity, plastic waste, carbon dioxide release and antibiotic contamination are
being laid down. Human influence on the
cycles of global cooling and warming will be affecting sea levels and thus shaping
future land formation and loss. Human
activity looks set to give rise to the next mass extinction of species. So the suggestion is that the Holocene
(simply ‘the most recent’ epoch) has given way to the Anthropocene (the ‘human’
shaped epoch).
My obsession
isn’t about decisions to be made by those entrusted with geological
nomenclature. It is about how this reaffirms
and refocuses our doctrine of ‘original sin’.
Not so much ‘our mythical first ancestors initial disobedience, grasping
of knowledge and consumption of creation, gives rise to a fatal intrinsic predicament
for every one of their descendants’.
Rather ‘our shared human choosing, discovering and living inescapably embeds
us in damage, destruction and the death of others’. Either way, the same insight into human
nature.
It obsessed
me to much that I focussed on it again yesterday, the Sunday between Jesus’
apparent departure (Ascension Day) and the fresh gift of the Holy Spirit (the
day of Pentecost). Not quite the absurd
idea of ‘a Sunday of the absence of God’.
More the Sunday calling out “Come Holy Spirit and renew the face of the
earth” (as well as “Thy kingdom come on earth”).
I couldn’t
quite bring myself to domesticate those cries into the Church of England’s
invitation to use these days to pray for the religious conversion of five
specific acquaintances - when what ought to give voice to those cries from originally
sinful humanity is the vast need for the renewal of the whole earth and of God’s
rule over it.
A central fragment
of our set scripture reading then stood out for me like a parable.
Paul and
Silas’s activity has provoked anti-Semitic persecution which results in their
own flogging and their confinement in chains in a prison’s inmost cell. There, as midnight approaches, they pray,
sing hymns, and fellow prisoners are strangely attentive to them. When an example of God's acting is suddenly there,
they do not quickly run towards their own personal freedom which this opens up,
but call out reassurance to those driven to suicidal despair by the strange
radical nature of the change being wrought around them. Those habituated to the system of confinement
ask what technique might be available to them to escape it as well, and are
told that the only technique is to trust God can do what our sinful embroilment
means we will always fail to do. (Acts
16.19-32).
So our own
ingenuity and skill provokes horrific unintended consequences, brings down vicious
punishment on us, and ultimately shackles our ability to move or respond. As the Doomsday Clock is edged closer to
midnight, the only faithful option left is to pray and sing, longing for God’s
activity to release us. Those who have
been observing our longing cries, and those disorientated by any sudden
luminous example of the way those cries can be answered, ask “how can I too be
freed from the consequences of the human predicament?” and are promised that “God
is already on to that”.
The story
and parable does continue with baptisms, for all we know possibly even of five people
(Acts 16.33-34).
And,
although I didn’t mention it on Sunday and need to look properly at it again
soon, I’m taken back again to the same Paul telling us that creation itself is watching
for and longing for precisely this revealing of a new humanity – almost a poem with the
apo- and ape- intensifier for eager-expectation (ape-kdechetai), stretching-towards
(apo-kapadokia) and un-veiling (apo-kaluphin) (Romans 8.19).
The new welcome Bronte Society originated sign at the foot of the Haworth Church steps points out a better way, albeit still one which involves bumping across cobbles.
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