Don't Look Up - Look Around

As We Await the Mass Extinction Event

I stood at the altar and looked out at the congregation. The table was set. We were saying grace, ready to share the sacred meal.

Don’t Look Up.

This happens now and then. The longer I am in this gig, the more often it happens—the random thought that is not so random. The altar is a portal. It opened. And I stepped through.

Don’t Look Up is a movie, released in 2021, about a meteor headed toward planet Earth. This meteor is big, a planet killer they call it. The astrophysicists know the exact date, exact time, exact location that it will hit. Nobody will survive it, nobody. They bring it to the attention of politicians who first laugh, then believe, then figure out how to use the information to their political and economic advantage. After, in their greed, they fail to avert the mass extinction event, a select few hop into a spaceship and leave, while the blast and subsequent earthquakes and tsunamis extinguish the rest of us. My thanks to Hannah Gadsby for that phrase which has now entered my vocabulary.

The movie is an allegory about the very real extinction event that faces us today. Greta Thunberg and 97% of climate scientists have been telling us for years about the reality and the dangers of our current global climate change. Have we reached the tipping point yet? Complicated question. But it’s so much more fun to debate that question than do anything to prevent it, isn’t it.

Those who benefit from the fossil fuel industry have the answer—don’t look up—while they build their enclaves and security forces that they hope will protect them for the last decade of their own personal lifetimes.

My question is, once we break through our denial about the upcoming extinction event, what next? The movie portrays the answers that people turn to—put their heads down, distract themselves, pursue pleasures. Once the meteor becomes visible, and every night grows bigger to the naked eye, people get angry—riots and looting ensue. And shooting their guns at the thing.

Standing at that altar, looking out at people I am coming to love, I remembered one of the movie’s final scenes.

A family gathers. It is a family that has grown to include people who worked together, played together, sometimes hurt each other, plus a nearly random stranger who invited himself. They forgive each other the hurts they have caused. They prepare a meal, a feast. As the minutes to impact count down, they go around the table, each giving thanks. It seems that somebody should say a prayer. But nobody knows how.

Except the stranger, who pulls out the best truest words they have heard in a long time. And it speaks to the souls of people who have never been to church in their lives.

When the blast hits and the room shakes, they take each other’s hands. And the lights go out.

Our own nonfiction extinction event is not so sudden. It is killing off the poor and the weak first, next others in the paths of tornadoes, hurricanes, landslides, and wildfires. There are those who continue to hope that we will turn this thing around. I’m not sure what they hope will happen. ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and the politicians they own will get religion?

What next? For you, for me. What next?

That’s a lot to go through one’s brain while standing at the altar, between the words:

               The bread which we break is a sharing in the body of Christ.
               We being many are one body, for we all share in the one bread. . .                              

and

               The gifts of God for the people of God.

But my brain can work like that. And as I said, I had stepped through a portal.

What next? The answer was right in front of me.

We form communities. We nurture communities. We gather. We tell sacred stories, including our own. We confess and we forgive. We give thanks. We take each other’s hands. We feast.

We celebrate all the goodness, the love, the music and magic—the gift of being residents on this exquisite planet, for as long as we are here.

That’s what’s next for me. I do it in a community nurtured by this weekly gathering and feasting in church. And I try to contribute to it— I am writing as fast as I can!

I hope you have a place to do that. You’re surely welcome to come to mine.