Earth’s Spirit
Today is a holiday that honors a blind belief for over a billion people of the planet. Wedded to a great myth about life and the reality of death, today is an attempt to obscure the end of being with hope that there is no end of life, only a transformation or transcendence from bodily being to spiritual or sacred being. The Christian symbol handed down across two millennia is a golden guide for sustaining an oligarchy through dissemination of myth and magical explanations that defy our experience of nature.
Defying nature is not benign. That same faith in the power of the supernatural is also obscuring the urgent need to be caretakers of our planet. We humans are individually and collectively a speck on a speck in a universe that seems miraculous and defies understanding. Science, not blind belief, is unfolding thread by delicate thread the complex and beautiful fabric of understanding our precarious existence and place in the the space-time of the universe. When too many people of our planet refuse to accept the foundations of science as a way of knowing and turn instead to unquestioned belief in assertions of uncertain authorship established and handed down across time as absolute guides for truth, we are individually and collectively doomed to die without understanding what has happened to us.
Today’s display of faith in the supernatural afterlife is followed by tomorrow’s celebration of our obligation of stewardship and honoring our Earth.
Perhaps our indefinite quantity and unlimited quality to strive for understanding is the real message juxtaposing Easter and Earth Day. That quest for understanding is, perhaps, humanity’s everlasting contribution to the universe. May our human power serve all to meditate in our own way and take personal action to assure that we will leave this life with hope for every future generation to venerate their contribution to sustaining all forms of life on Earth.