Ascension Day - Looking Up and Looking Down at Creation

An environmental reflection on this liturgical day

In the more liturgically-minded Christian bodies, today is a day known as Ascension Day.  It is a day that remembers when the resurrected Jesus returned to heaven and s a story recorded in several of the Gospels and in the book of Acts.  My favorite part of the story is in Acts 1:10-11 where, after Jesus has ascended, we read this:

While [Jesus] was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

I love imagining the disciples standing there gawking up at the skies and then these “angels” standing near them and snapping their fingers and saying somewhat sarcastically, “Hey! Eyes down here!”  There’s a looking up and a looking down and a message for them to get to doing what Jesus has called them to.

This looking up and looking down is speaking to me in a different way today.  Not as much about looking up for the divine signs of Jesus but instead when I looked up and saw a sign in the sky earlier this week and then a few days later when I looked down and saw something that broke my heart.  Oh and in between listening to a podcast that freaked me out.

Earlier this week, I was walking Scout (surprise) and saw this front moving in as we were about halfway through our walk.  I was just struck by the nearly clean line between the darker clouds and the others.  And sure enough, as it moved over us...we got wet. 

Signs in the sky.

And then signs below...

Two mornings ago, Scout and I were walking at Winton (checking out the benches of course) after we got a lot of rain the night before.  Most of the benches were fully under water but what really stuck out to me was everything that I saw floating in the water.  There was, of course, plenty of dirt and branches but I saw so much else.

2 liter bottles.
A football and a basketball.
Empty cans.
Bags.
Cups.
Wrappers.
Water bottles.
Something that looked to be the bloated body of an animal.
Other pieces of trash that were clearly not natural.

Where will all that go as the waters go down?  Some of it will be cleaned up by the wonderful folks from the park but some of it will sink into the lake and some will go downstream from the lake and just join all the other things that we are putting into our water and into the ecosystem.

The next day, I listened to this episode of The Daily from The New York Times while I was driving to pick up my son from college and honestly, it freaked me out.  Descriptions of the mass coral bleaching that’s taking place in our oceans.  Ocean temperatures spiking the last few years like they’ve not done in modern history.  The North Atlantic current starting to slow.  A huge “blob” (their words) of cold water forming off the coast of Greenland as the Greenland Ice Sheet is melting.

How Changing Ocean Temperatures Could Upend Life on Earth

This is in addition to a story my wife shared with me a few days before:

Where Seas Are Rising at Alarming Speed

There’s a lot of other examples I can give but God’s creation is crying out to us.  We look in the sky and we see the rising levels of greenhouse gases that are collecting in the atmosphere and we look down and see the effects of what we are doing to the environment and the changes happening in our climate.  There are plenty of scientists playing the role of the two in the Ascension story who are saying, “Hey!  Eyes down here!” and telling us that we need to get to work to make changes and soon.

I am by no means a perfect environmentalist.  I love red meat even as I know the harmful effects that red meat farming has on the environment.  While one of our cars is an EV, I know that its power is derived not fully from renewables.  As I listened to the podcast linked above, I was driving a non-EV vehicle 300+ miles to bring one of my children home from college.  I do a lot of recycling and reuse but I also consume and use way more single use things than I like.  So I am by no means perfect.

There are things that help.  Recycling helps.  Composting helps.  Changing food patterns helps.  Driving less helps.   Electrifying helps (somewhat).  But what has to change is what our leaders in our country and other countries are doing right now, but especially so in our country.  In the United States right now, we have a reality of a two-party system that isn’t serving most of us well at all but it is what we’ve got.  Neither party fully reflects my positions on the issues we are facing overall (social, economic, etc) but one of them has a much stronger commitment to the environment than the other and that is one of the central reasons I will be voting that direction come November.  If we continue down this road that we are on, none of the other issues will matter at all.  Are the other issues important?  Yes they absolutely are.  But all of them are conditional upon us having an environment in which we are all able to live.

So, on this Ascension Day, I am looking up and I am looking down and I am hearing that clarion call all around us to stop just standing around.  It is (past) time to act.

That’s what Ascension Day means to me today.

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