Here’s what excites me about our climate crisis: It invites us to change. “We face a choice that is starkly simple: We must change or be changed,” writes Wendell Berry. “If we fail to change for the better, then we will be changed for the worse.” Okay, so the alternatives are either exciting or terrifying, but still: Dire circumstances give humans the opportunity to create something new, and this fills me with hope.
Berry’s words remind me of a novelist friend who signs her books, “Write, or be written.” I don’t think Elissa’s trying to make authors out of her readers; rather, she’s suggesting that everyone has the choice to accept the stories our culture tells about us or create our own. The climate story our culture has written is dictated by consumption and profit at the expense of the earth and the poor who live close to it. It’s a story written with highways and billboards, farming practices and diets, the movement of our money and the absence of money. It’s a story most people don’t question. We’re too immersed in it.
When I read the stories Jesus told and when I think about his life as a model, I see Jesus asking of us something similar. We can accept the dominant stories of our culture—“an eye for an eye,” for example, or a morality determined by the law rather than our hearts—or we can participate in a radically different story based on love and humor and subversion. Jesus doesn’t simply call us to believe in God’s realm; we have to create it, with thoughts and words and deeds. Write, or be written. Change or be changed.
These are tumultuous times, and, as every artist knows, creativity comes out of chaos. As Christians, can we pioneer a new story based on justice and kindness and faith? Let’s get to work.
–Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew