Dear ones,
Today it is time to get to work. Today we begin our fourth week together, after celebrating our Earth's abundance in week one, grieving and reckoning with loss in week two, and reconnecting with the sources of joy and love that sustain us in week three.
It is time to (re)commit to building a different way of being, with each other and with Mother Earth. It is time to (re)commit to co-creating the Beloved Community. Instead of “sacrifice zones” where people suffer so that the rest of us can have cheaper energy and goods, we will build communities where people share equally in both burdens and benefits. Instead of treating workers and animals alike as expendable resources to be used for profit, we will value all lives, and relate to each other, as Martin Buber taught us, as I and Thou.
In committing to building the Beloved Community, we're not just talking about changing laws and policies, although changes in laws and policies are urgently needed. But changes in policies alone will not ultimately work unless we transform the dominant culture and way of being.
As people of faith, we are uniquely situated to help bring this about, by keeping our actions grounded in our principles and values, by a spiritual practice of reflecting on the effects of our actions, and by intentionally, faithfully looking to the voices and leadership of those marginalized by the current dominant paradigm.
So let us create the stories, songs, prayers, and rituals that inform our vision; and let us work in our communities to make it reality.
Your Commit2Respond Resource Team,
Rev. Sofía Betancourt
Rev. Peggy Clarke
Tim DeChristopher
Kat Liu
Jennifer Nordstrom
Just joining us now for Climate Justice Month? Sign up at the bottom of this page to receive the final week of daily messages in your inbox. You can read past daily messages here.
Commit2Respond's Climate Justice Month intends to take you through a transformative spiritual process leading to long-term commitments to climate justice. At the end of the month you will be asked to SHIFT to a low carbon future, ADVANCE human rights, and GROW the movement. Learn more and start thinking about how you will #commit2respond to climate change.
Showing 1 reaction
Sign in with
Once within our time,
SkyPrince and SunGod talk,
as usual,
endlessly actually,
sending their radiant messages
out toward mutually gravitating receivers,
no Yins allowed.
SkyPrince wonders if SunGod might consider turning down his heat,
and wanders aloud as Sun burns enlightening minds,
“I’m worried about EarthGoddess,
she seems wilting
and actually melting on her polar caps.”
SunGod wishes this were funny,
or wrong,
just a mistake somehow,
maybe her time of this post-millennial period.
“Business As Usual,” echoes SunGod.
“My fire burns her waters into that amazing green-blue skin of hers.
Climate change pathology evolves like wind through your air-brained
SkyPrince head.
Business As Usual!”
Meanwhile,
WaterPrincess keeps her primally balancing distance
from SunGod’s overheating reign.
Still,
very still,
too still,
she melts within EarthGoddess.
And, with her Earth’s diverse species
until EarthGoddess’ soil becomes dry as dust.
Her cooperative economic and ecological soul
unravels dishumanic culture,
preparing for her transmutation
into Yin’s cold hibernating cave
of deep ecological nightmares,
galloping full horsepowered,
feverishly racing racism,
to prove we are chickens in our own messy soup
melting together and flying apart.
WaterPrincess weeps and seeps down in to Earth’s Core
overheating compost’s ecotherapeutic heart.
SunGod notices WaterPrincess,
too frequently absent from his divine comedy.
“She fails to feel my good humored rays
of wise warm radiance.
This feels more feminist Left than justly Righteous”
glooms SunGod’s manic calculating ways.
He glimpses dissonant doubt
where his regenerative organisms had been competing virgins
to cooperative sex,
much less mutually maximizing economics,
or crystal mirror echoes of ecologic myth and language.
SunGod weeps and wilts his PrincessWater.
Earth Goddess succumbs toward SunGod’s redeeming shaded fears.
Her revolutionary octaves fill with pregnant repurpose
and rehabilitating permacultural designs of herstory.
Her justice joys his peaceful recommitment
toward balancing polycultural praxis.
Family ecotherapy wins our enculturing history.
YangGod kisses EarthYinGoddess
as Left deductive embraces Right inductive primal balance
as human nature competes to cooperatively regenerate
what nature coincidately incarnates
to sing full octaved Earth Day Opera,
remembering future tales of SunLeft equals EarthRights,
as Earth resolves Sun’s pay-ray-forward gifts,
happily ever after now and here.