A Day for the Earth

There are five window wells around the foundation of our house. They bring light into the basement nearly doubling the living space under our roof, which is good. They are also, unintentionally, a trap for toads, which I will rescue if I happen to see them. More often, I find dried toads months later, which is bad.

One spring I found a pair of baby bunnies still kicking in the well below our bedroom window. I got my garden gloves on and lifted them to freedom. They were so cute as they hopped off into their safe place the garden. I will share lettuce. I will happily send bunnies home to their mommy.

My feeling about the moles who ate through the window screens and the rats living under the patio are less warm and fuzzy. Earth Day is a time to reflect on this dissonance between instinctive interspecies aggression and kinship with all creatures, great and small. 

Isaiah 11:6 is, I think, a metaphor about peace among our kind, not a literal utopia in which the lamb and the wolf and the little child are best friends.  That is not the way it works in this universe. Understanding how it actually works is necessary to prevent our kind from messing up the balance as we strive to make things comfortable and safe for our children. We who exterminate the unloved have not understood. We have made love our god without noticing what that means for things we do not love and for the system that has spawned us. 

So let me recall forgotten wisdom
to help us see more truly where we stand.

God is not love.

God is the arbitrary, uncaring, competitive Everything
from which love arises
in the cosmic game of chance.
When the future is yet indeterminate,
God is in the possibilities.
While we agonize over options,
God is in the choosing.
When we have chosen,
God is in the consequences.

The game has brought us here
where lamb and wolf need each other,
prey as sustenance
and predator as discipline.
If a child subverts the game
by loving lambs but not wolves,
then a merciless God
will roll the dice again and yet again
until truth prevails and life persists
or not.

Where is love in this?

It is the balm that makes truth tolerable,
and keeps us in the game we cannot win.

The truth is
that winning means losing;
and so we have a choice,
to love the Earth,
though it be wild and dangerous,
or lose it.