Noah, Climate Change Hero

It's been said that genetics points to a bottleneck in the human population around 70,000 years ago due to a super volcanic explosion and ecosystem collapse. Right now, we are headed toward disaster of our own making. If contemporary man lacks the foresight to change, how small might be the human remnant after the collapse, if any survive. How devastated and simplified and barren will be the ecosystem the survivors would have to survive in? Will they remember the follies of their ancestors (us) and co-evolve with the newly complexifying ecosystem and new species to come up with a new type of world? I prefer to fight the collapse, degradation and extinction of the world and species God called good. But, on the back burner, I keep the hope that if we screw up, God will reach into God's big bag of possibilities and save and renew once more. Also, God could upgrade another critter and try again.

"Today we also have violent and corrupt social systems in which persons and groups routinely put greed for corporate profits and selfish interests first--way, way, before instituting costly ecological changes for the common good." Even the International Monetary Fund is recognizing now that the increasing fiscal inequities are threatening stability in society. The rise in the minimum wage is a good start. And there is Francis making a strong appeal. These may be good signs of some change. Maybe we will even get another Ted Hesburgh to lead the environmental rehab.

Not everything in the Bible is accurately pictured, something like a Thomas Kinkade painting, where exaggerated light gives a beautiful, but an unreal outcome. Such is the story of Noah I think, a beautiful outcome, a message, but unlike Kinkade’s use of exaggerated light, the message of the Noah story is shrouded in exaggerated darkness, mystery. Things certainly didn’t happen the way it’s pictured. What is the message? Is it that all creation must collectively come together to preserve its resources, under leadership of the human family such as Noah’s? That’s a good guess and I like it. I’ve never heard of an ecological meaning to the Noah story, but it does make sense. As with everything in the Bible there’s a primary meaning, followed by secondary, tertiary and as many other meanings that the Spirit might inspire for personal individual benefit. Thus I think, the primary meaning of the Noah story is about the Providence of God looking out not only for the wellbeing of materiality, which God called “Good,” at the creation, but for the spiritual needs of humanity as well, delivered primarily through the flow of the water of Baptism, poured over the head and down the face, of recipients, the way people drown in a torrential flood, head and body engulfed in water, as the Orthodox Church does in Baptism. Those wining and dining and engaging in unrestrained sexuality to the very end, unmindful of what Jesus would later call “the better part,” were swept away in reprobation, imaging “everlasting death” of those who choose to irrevocably turn their backs on the pursuit of Goodness, namely God and it is a choice. But for a moment getting back to Noah as an ecological sign, it is interesting to note that God is not “choosey” so to speak, or maybe he is precisely “choosey” about who gets the “call” to proclaim and live out a message from God. God chose Moses who was a murderer, David who was an adulterer AND Noah who was a drunk, unintended but one who got good and plastered at least once! The Good Book says God showed Noah how to ferment grapes and told him to drink thereof to “make the heart of humankind happy!” Noah forgot about the fermenting grapes and when he remembered he took a swig of the liquid and got good and drunk! The point is God left it up to human experience to learn HOW to use his gifts, much the same as he has left the good earth in our care to learn HOW to properly care for it. That’s another application of learned ecological sensitivity relative to the Noah story, respectful of the way the Biblical writer told the story, but probably I think, part of the storytelling “mythos” of the First Five Books of God’s holy Word. But I am no Biblical scholar. However, when it comes to Hollywood messing around with scripture it complicates the story sometimes to the point of fallaciousness. Those with at least foundational scriptural knowledge cringe, anti-religionists mock its farcical presentation, Believers accept as they wonder. I don’t think Hollywood is capable of doing a good Biblical movie. That’s why I haven’t seen the movie Noah, nor do I intend to see it. So then, probably I ought to keep my big mouth shut?