Good Friday In The Anthropocene

Dormant Oak tree at Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey in Carlton, OR.

The Sea is rising; the Arctic glaciers are vanishing; February was the hottest February in 137 years of records; God’s creation is being put to death; and many are beginning to mourn the loss of biodiversity as a religious act. The earth herself, Our Mother, is being Crucified.

For Christians, today is a funeral. After the long march of the via dolorosa, Jesus the traitor will be executed. Tradition has it that he hung on the cross from 12:00 to 3:00 pm in agony. Our Mother Mary wept. His followers are blindsided. They thought he was the Jewish Messiah, the one who would conquer the Roman State, and bring in a reign of Peace. He failed.

I sit in silence, barefoot, fasting. My Facebook Feed a mix of US politics, Easter reflections and dire climate warnings.

We are living in a New Age. The Anthropocene.

But just as the unseen sap flows into the swelling buds, Good Friday is not the end. There is a tension between movement and stillness. Like the restless hermits of the desert, who wandered, we too are pilgrims on a planet in flux.

Good Friday, like this moment in planetary history is a Stillpoint. A silence between death and life, between movement and stillness, between the old and the new. So much rests on what can be accomplished in the next short decades, but we cannot give up hope. For out of tension comes creativity, and out of death, new life.

We are at a stillpoint.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. –T.S. Elliot

Easter is a Stillpoint.

The Anthropocene, the age of seeming human domination, is a Stillpoint.

Yes there is death, but there is still so much life, so much beauty, so much love.

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