A logic
of despair drives our society careening like cattle down to the slaughter. The
cattle say to one another, well, what choice to we have? We have to do this. And
besides, everyone is doing it, I don’t want to get left behind. And besides, so
far nothing really terrible has happened, so the warnings we’ve heard are
probably exaggerated. If we stick together, we’ll be fine. And so they console themselves, and so down the chute
to the slaughter they go.
So do we. While our climate warms and our oceans acidify, and the warnings grow urgent, we actually accelerate our emissions. We actually increase our mining; we actually increase our spending on new oil, gas, and coal. Now our Congress wants to build the Keystone pipeline, on reasoning no more sound than, “We have to, because we need the business.” No imagination, no hope, in that thinking. We don’t have to, of course. Nor do ‘we” need any of it. We can say no. The arguments for Keystone are silly, meaningless. “We need the jobs.” This is nonsense; the economy has added 3 million jobs in the last year and unemployment keeps dropping. The few temporary jobs created by Keystone mean nothing. . “We need the oil.” Also nonsense. We have so much we are cutting back production and oil prices are falling. The real reason is obvious: the energy companies want the profits from getting the tar sands oil to market cheaper, which the pipeline will enable. All the rest is just smoke and mirrors. Let’s see through it, let’s stop going backward. It is a vision of death, a vision of despair. If the tar sands reserves are fully mined, sold, and burned, the earth’s climate could well change so much that it will exceed human capacity to adapt. If we want energy and jobs, there are better ways to get, much much better ways, and they are well known.
Meantime, terrorists are busy about their mayhem. They shoot up a magazine office in Paris. They slaughter children in Pakistan and Nigeria. They spread madness and hatred. But their actions are driven by the same logic as the oil companies and the U.S. Congress: a logic of despair. They bring about their own destruction and the destruction of all they touch, and how quickly they are destroyed and all who listen to them are destroyed even by their own hand, for the Prince of Lies persuades them to blow up their own bodies and call it "necessary." The terrorists say, "the best we can do is kill everyone we don't like and then kill ourselves." That's a very bleak conclusion, a conclusion suggested by the Prince of Lies. The same Prince of Lies who wants only death and who tells us the best we can do is keep the gas pedal floored over the cliff edge, whether we are oil companies or consumers, whether we are the US Congress or ISIL.
The combination makes the world a dark place.
So our role as people of faith is to say “no” to despair. Terrorism and fear are signs of despair. We say no to terrorism and to fear of terrorism. Keystone is a sign of despair. It says we can’t be influenced by our responsibility to the earth. We must obey the demands of our generals in the oil lobby. Clearly the Senate republicans think so. But they are sheep and tools, not leaders. We say no to such despair.
But
the logic of Despair, the counsel of Death, is everywhere. It preaches “necessity,”
and “efficiency,” and “requirements,” and “the economy” and other idols. It spreads the lie of “we have to” and the lie
of “this is practical” and the lie of “we have to face reality” when in fact it
drives us further from Reality. Yes we
have to face Reality, but Reality is not what the Counselor of Death claims it
is! Reality is that the oil barons will make a killing on Keystone. Reality is that the ice sheets melt, the temperature climbs, the oceans acidify, and the
inevitable comes over the horizon, death, destruction. Yet our emissions grow,
our emissions accelerate, because we
say “what choice do we have?” That is the question driven by Despair. That is
the word of Despair.
We
can change, but only if we reject the lies of the Counselor of Despair, and
turn to our Faith. Our faith as human beings is as universal as it is simple: that there is something beyond us, some
“Good”—whatever we call it, whether we like the Greeks call it Truth or whether
like the Christians, Jews and Muslims we call it “God” or whether like the
humanists we call it “Honor”. We don’t know much for sure about this greater
Reality, but it is there. It is Real. We all know it. Every human being
knows it in their bones, though they conceive and imagine it in a thousand
myriad ways based on their own history, experience, culture, feelings, and
thoughts. But each of us has but to choose it, and find then the freedom to
really live as a human being. (Christ’s moniker for himself was “son of man”
which translates in the modern idiom roughly as “The human being.”). Let us be human beings.
In
this strength we can read the signs and we can see. The world in every age
pursues lies and despair-power, profit, money. And the work of truth is forever
being crushed. It will continue to be crushed, and so we are invited to Despair. We must and will struggle against it, but like very generation before us, truth will be crushed in the short term by Power and Money and "Necessity." And so what is Hope? Hope is the knowledge that in every
generation from the beginning of time, the Human Beings spoke for and lived by
and worked for and kept alive the light. They kept alive the truth. They kept
alive the Faith in what is beyond. They passed that message on to those who
came after them, perhaps modified by their own generation’s experience. And
that is our role in this generation--whether we are activists resiting the oil barons in North America, whether we are villagers resisting terror in the Sahel, our role is the same. To keep the Light alive. To carry the struggle forward. That is all we
are asked to do. The rest will be taken care of by the Light itself. So live
your life by the Light, by Faith, by what you know to be Good, not what is “necessary.”
Choose to live with Courage. With Hope. With Honor. Let us be fully human.
