Moderator Mardi Tindal's blog: Where is the hope after Copenhagen? It continues!

Hope-filled conversations about my letter of January 17 continue, and I am deeply grateful for your dozens of blog comments, other blog postings, hundreds of e-mails, and many newspaper articles and letters to the editor. Here’s the opening to an opinion piece (“Let’s bring some hope to our fragile planet”) published just last Saturday, February 20, in the Kamloops Daily News (Kamloops), page A12, written by Dawne Taylor:

These days, most Kamloops folks and many around the world are focused on and excited about the Winter Olympics underway in Vancouver and surrounding areas. Will the snow hold? What will the world think of Canada—for medals, facilities and hospitality?

Prior to the Olympics, the world’s attention and compassion were focused on Haiti and the incredible destruction there after a major earthquake. Will any more survivors be found? How can relief supplies and medical help be delivered? What about long-term needs?

Before Haiti and before Christmas, the Copenhagen climate talks made headlines world-wide, although these talks probably produced less excitement than the Olympics and were less urgent than the situation of the Caribbean island. Nonetheless, the international climate talks have a wider impact on the global future than either the Olympics or the Haiti reconstruction effort.

Taylor went on from there to quote from my letter, helping to keep an important conversation alive.

It’s critical to keep conversation going. As Phyllis Tickle so eloquently puts it in her insightful book about the history and current life of the church, The Great Emergence (available from UCRD):

[N]o one of the member parts or connecting networks has the whole or entire ‘truth’ of anything, either as such and/or when independent of the others. Each is only a single working piece of what is evolving and is sustainable so long as the interconnectivity of the whole remains intact.…

Thus when pinned down and forced to answer the question, ‘What is the Emergent or Emerging Church?’ most who are will answer, ‘A Conversation,’ which is not only true but which will always be true.

As you are no doubt aware, there is a good deal of comment online and in other places about the credibility of data from climate scientists and also from others, including the Friends of Science. May our eyes remain open to God’s truth.

And may we continue to remain fully engaged. As our United Church of Canada Song of Faith puts it: “In grateful response to God’s abundant love, we bear in mind our integral connection to the earth and one another; we participate in God’s work of healing and mending creation.” The hundreds of folks who have responded (by e-mail) with enthusiasm for deeper prayer, broader learning, and creative action—as individuals and as congregations—have been invited to join the Greening Sacred Spaces Network or l’Église Verte. With this, I invite you as well, with hope that you will want to be part of these growing networks of mutual support, learning, and prayerful action with others in The United Church of Canada and other faith communities.

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Comments

Scott B.

Posted on: 03/04/2010 22:33

I agree that we can keep the converation going. I've interviewed people in my community that are showing leadership in reducing their impact on the environment. You can read their green success stories to get inspired to not only discuss changes, but to make changes.