We Are Coming to a Period of Consequences

Went yesterday to see AIT, Al Gore's movie on climate change. I've been trying since then to organize my reactions into something coherent, but, really, how do you do that? How do you watch a documentary about the end of your own civilization, not to mention thousands of other species, and then organize your thoughts? So, here are some reactions, although not necessarily integrated into anything resembling an essay or an article.

First: Go. Don't wait for the DVD. Go tonight. Go today. Go this week. Go. Pay people if that's what you have to do to get them to go along with you. Go. I fancy myself a rather well informed eco-feminist, but I've never seen this information presented this clearly, this starkly, this compellingly.

Second: I wish this had been Gore's campaign. This slide show. This is his passion and that comes through in every single frame. And Americans who won't go see the movie really need to see this.

Third: For a very long time in my early adult years, I would read things written by mystics and just throw up my hands. I wanted rather desperately to understand what they experienced and how they managed to get to that point, but nothing that they wrote made any sense to me. I was recently reading something in a book that Prior Aelred sent to me that reminded me of how I used to feel. This passage would have made NO sense to me at one time:

"The ultimate reality that is known in contemplative experience and in unitive wisdom has been called simply the center. It is the metaphysical center of all reality and also the center of the human person. Corresponding to the presence of this reality at the center of the human person is a unitive Self: atman, true self, Christ-self. This is the human person, fully participating in the unitive divine Source; it is, therefore, being-in-communion, the person as essentially relational. This unitive reality, as the center of the person, is also the ground of human consciousness. Human consciousness and all of its operations are grounded in a unitive participation in the absolute divine Reality." Second Simplicity: The Inner Shape of Christianity by Bruno Barnhart.

I'd have had no clue what Barnhart was going on about. How DO you "participate fully in the unitive divine Source"? What does it mean to say that "Human consciousness and all of its operations are grounded in a unitive participation"?? I'd have given up.

But, like having sex or eating oysters or finally really dancing instead of "doing dance steps" -- once you have had a mystical experience, then all the descriptions of mystical experience and instructions for how to "get there" suddenly make sense. Until then, no one can really tell you in a way that will make any sense.

Which is a long way round to say that one of the first descriptions of a mystical experience that ever hit a chord with me comes from a novel about Stonehenge called Pillar in the Sky. In that book, one of the builders of Stonehenge looks at the structure that is being erected and says, "I am with my father's father's father and with my son's son's son's." So many writers about mystical experience say that the mystical experience is "timeless," that "time ceases to exist," that "time stands still." But I like the Stonehenge description better.

Watching AIT yesterday, I felt as if I were having the mirror reaction. Suddenly, instead of time not existing, I felt that time not only exists, but is, for the purposes of our civilization and possibly our species, coming to an end. I can't be with my son's son's son because, within the lifetime of my son's son, the world may end.

I'll end this part of the discussion by noting that my first mystical experience involved really seeing sunlight on tree leaves. Watching Gore's slides about deforestation just made me incredibly, incredibly sad.

Fourth: What you have to realize as Gore discusses much of the land mass of India disappearing and large sections of the Earth experiencing water deficits is that there will be massive social disruption. We saw how, even on the scale of New Orleans -- which will be as nothing compared to, say, India -- people showed up with guns at bridges to keep all "those others" from coming into "their" territory. Now imagine India with hundreds of thousands of homeless refugees needing somewhere to go.

India has the atom bomb. So does China. We're seeing wars now over oil. We'll soon see wars over land and water. People will look for an "other" to blame for "God's wrath." Women, gays, minorities can expect to be persecuted on an increasing basis. Times of social upheaval often cause people to turn to authoritarian leaders. Civil rights and human rights are going to suffer.

That's the logical consequence of driving Hummers, refusing to join Kyoto, leaving George Bush in the White House, and allowing Enron and the oil companies to meet in secret with Dick Cheney. In the end, Gore's quote from Churchill is spot on: "The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing, and baffling expedience of delays is coming to a close. In its place, we are coming to a period of consequences."