The wet blue ball that spins in space has its own belief system. How can we join THAT church? Earthalujah!
We are watching the Earth, sitting here with Jehovah, Christ, the Prophet or the thousand gods of secular humanism. We are watching the Earth's amazing Wikileaks, sharks swimming across Australian shopping malls, freak storms dropping from the jet streams, water, mud, fire escaping everywhere... We nervously check our holy books -- did we say this would happen?
We've had a lot of best-selling apocalypses. We sought to survive the end of time by selling it in cineplexes. "Eternity" has been our obsession, from our position back here in the present tense of life. What is after death? What is before birth? Blackbirds fall on the Missouri streets in articulate patterns. The language emerges from the unknown that we crave and fear.
We sing in large harmonized crowds, "My Lord! My Lord! I'll pay you the rent if you keep the unknown away from me!" Earth-life listens to our stupid culture. The Fabulous Unknown was always our only audience. And it agreed to give us our private moment with eternity -- this thing called Life. What a gift! Then we find a way to be confused by the deal of Life. We pray till we can't think, we shop, we bomb -- we demand to be born again.
The power industries, gas and oil and coal and all the CO-2 emitters -- they are sly retro-fitters of eternity. They drill and dam and dynamite so that the Earth-life must burst into flames for us. In imitating the apocalypse, they are causing it to happen when it doesn't have to. What's REALLY clever is that they then make billions on forestalling our death for a few minutes, by leaving us in the throes of paralyzing comfort. We lay back on our couch, in the room that floats in the stream of time at 80 degrees. We're muscle bound with passive exertion, our remote raised like the sword of old, gallantly confronting the pixilated apocalypse. (So much of our entertainment is apocalyptic, but we can't get out of our chair to do anything about it... )
Meanwhile, Earth-life waits in our window. And then our time is up. The ocean blows across the room. Sharks swim up Main Street and they are not special effects, freak storms full of insects drop from the mountaintops and blackbirds try to eat our fireworks. Our violence against eternity, gathering power for our inadequate present life, sustaining our born-again luxury watching HBO from the bed -- collapses inward. The Earth has come for its human beings.
The mudslide, the wall of fire, the thirty-years drought -- are moving toward us now, and we will die. We were alive the first time we were born, which is to say this: We are alive now! We have everything; every freak storm imaginable is inside us, at this very moment. This is the form the gift takes. The Earth believes in this generosity. Earthalujah!