But what I have not been aware of so far is any serious discussion linking the event with global warming. I am not a scientist and I can prove nothing but I suspect there are many who do see a connection. I have just met a couple back from Hong Kong who tell of a frequent polluting haze over the city from a nearby industrial city in China. One thing seems certain: People don’t mind pollution if they are making big money – though it is often not the people who are making the money who are suffering from the pollution.
A contrary attitude to polluting in the name of progress and risking our children’s future is that of sacrifice. I forego something now for the sake of some future benefit. It is built into our experience. A mother gives up her sleep if her child is crying. A father gives up spending on his own pleasures in order to send his children to school. Some sacrifices we make because we have no choice. Others – we have a choice.
There is an Indian story of a king who meets a beggar and asks him ‘what can you give me?’ The beggar is shocked, thinking it is he who should be receiving a gift from the king. But he looks in his bag, finds some grains of wheat and gives one to the king. The king rides off and the beggar looks in his bag to discover one grain of gold. He is dismayed and cries out, ‘if only I had given him all I had!’
The widow of Zarephath who met Elijah (I Kings 17) did precisely that. She had only a little meal in a jar and oil in a jug. But when the prophet asked her for some she gave what she had and she was never short of meal and oil from that day on. And there was another widow in the gospels whom Jesus met (Mark 12:41) who gave ‘all she had’ to the temple treasury.
To give is good but to give everything one has to live on sounds foolish. Yet many, like Francis of Assisi, have done so down the ages as they tried to follow Jesus radically. They give us a sign that might yet avert some storms and save our planet.
Post published in: Opinions & Analysis