When June becomes June again
06/12/84
The warm spell has broken for the moment.
June transformed back into June from a brief spout of August.
Sometimes these new and strange patterns of weather frighten me.
Too much, too soon, like some B-rated horror movie of the 1950s which has the world’s weather grinding civilization to powder.
But now to say this is only a product of some movie-makers bountiful imagination is a mistake.
Finally, The Times has decided to print what scientists have been claiming for years: the world’s weather is changing because of us, because of our cars, our factories, our bad habits.
We have taken God’s earth (if one chooses to still believe in God) and converted it into something dark and dismal.
I hardly believe that this was God’s intention when He granted us dominion. Yet, we have perverted so much else in our time that to think of our being trusted to do even this one thing was a grave mistake – even for God.
The true saints of the world are those that preserve it as it was created:
“Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
What was God thinking that He would grant such license to fools like us?
Perhaps the words were misinterpreted.
Perhaps dominion means caring and maintaining as well as ruling over.
Perhaps we were supposed to do our best to keep such creatures alive.
And if so, then we are all doomed to hell, or better, to another life (as Buddhism would have it) as those very creatures we destroy.
Does God have a sense of irony?
Is he wise enough to teach us in the most fitting way as punishment for our crimes?
I hope so.
For the God that people describe to me in everyday practice seems too cruel to ever have created the world.