Category Archives: Creation care

Presence and Love Dancing by the Dead-Ash Fire

Dancing by the fire image“The Affair,” a flawed yet riveting Showtime series, weaves over five seasons a web of sin and sorrow, of poor choices and consequences. One character’s inability across decades to stop harming loved ones and himself is horrifying.

Yet as Noah ages and life holds him sometimes brutally accountable, his heart opens. Noah tells a traumatized Joanie, whom amid tangled choices he once believed his daughter, of epigeneticist Eddie’s theory. Eddie believes trauma can reshape how our genes are expressed, meaning trauma can be biologically passed down. So if your ancestors lost a child you might feel effects without directly experiencing it.

But Noah also tells Joanie, “If trauma and pain can echo through generations, then so can love. If abandonment can ripple across time, then so can presence.”

Ever since that episode, the hope that not only the bad but also the good can ripple down has haunted and inspired me. I think I see it again in Steven Petrow’s Washington Post column (March 7, 2021) on “How you will be remembered depends on how you live today. So, too, does your happiness as you get older.” Petrow begins with poignant examples of what his parents’ tombstones say. His dad’s describes, “Journalist and Professor”; his mom’s testifies, “Beloved by all.”

Petrow explains that his father’s identity was so wrapped up in résumé-building that he had a terrible time adjusting to the loss of his professional perks as he aged. But his mom, though quite professionally accomplished herself, made the transition to “eulogy virtues,” the gifts to life and loved ones that linger even after death.

Petrow also reports his own temptation to live “more like my dad, with much of my energy focused on earning more, beefing up my résumé looking to achieve greater success.” Then he attends to Arthur C. Brooks. “‘After 70,’ Brooks wrote in an essay, ‘some people stay steady in happiness [while] others get happier until death. Others—men in particular—see their happiness plummet.'” And Petrow connects this with his quest to shift “from résumé virtues to eulogy virtues.”

It strikes me that résumé virtues can help pass on trauma and abandonment. In “The Affair,” Noah’s passion to be a best-selling author catalyzes considerable damage. Eulogy virtues may be more likely to pass on presence and love.

This matters to me because Petrow and I must be nearly the same age, and I’m in the thick of wrestling with résumé versus eulogy priorities. My heart is on the eulogy side. But I still miss parts (not all!) of the days my life revolved more than now around professional commitments and weighing this or that decision with potential to change lives for good or ill.

Now sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night from dreams of being back having too many meetings all the time and even navigating the anger of a colleague who was angry because I couldn’t schedule the appointments he thought I owed him quickly and often enough. That phase seemed soul-damaging while I was in it and often was. Yet in the dreams there is a frisson to being endlessly busy and in demand that can haunt me when I awake to its absence.

So though I’ve long aimed not to live like Petrow’s dad, I resonate with his late-life pain. And I’m glad Petrow ends with love for a father whose happiness declined because of lost résumé status but who even so had fostered eulogy values:

Soon after he died, and more than 15 years after he retired, his colleagues and students profusely acknowledged his résumé virtuesbut their tributes also eulogized his humanity, noting he had been “a wonderful mentor and advocate,” and not least of all, “an amazing man with a kind heart.”

Petrow concludes, “I wish my dad had been able to hear that.”

I won’t be able to hear what’s said at my funeral, but Petrow helps me continue the move from résumé to eulogy activities. This seems to me particularly urgent now in a country and world unraveling as politicizing everything destroys us; climate extremes tear at bodies, souls, and power grids; a pandemic rips up customs that once spelled home. These are such large forces the temptation is to see the résumé buildersthe powerful peopleas our main hope now.

But what if that ceaseless restless quest for more better best is not only a solution to but also a cause of what needs healing? What if for those of us who attend to the teachings of Jesus, Petrow is updating give up your life to find it, take up your cross and follow me, for what good will it do you to gain the whole world and lose your soul?

What if urgently called for today are eulogy values? What if that means a vital need is to  pass on—even in tiny ways—presence and love, soul-pursuing rather than world-chasing, to echo Jesus? In this eulogy-centric stage I draw some comfort from that.

And I dare I hope I’m participating in that process even through treating ash trees and with dead-ash fires:

As nights no longer get cold enough to kill emerald ash borers, billions of ash trees are dying. At our house we treated one majestic ash. It was already borer-riddled but the tree guy said just maybe not too late. Last spring luxuriant new leaves crowned the tree. One limited yet glorious miracle. Let that ash tree live long enough for someone to bring a leafing branch from it to my funeral.

But we had to pay $10,000 to take down other dying giants before they fell on our house. Then this: A year ago Joan and I went abroad. A daughter, her husband, and a six-month-old granddaughter joined us. By the time we flew back into panicked Newark airport crowds, our pre-COVID-19 customs were gone and have yet to return. Since Newark we’ve lived in a bubble in which we routinely see only the loved ones who flew back with us that fateful day.

Fridays they stay over into Saturday. Recently I realized our granddaughter really likes rituals, including helping me set up fires in our basement woodstove. Now before Friday bedtime I ask if she wants to go to the basement. Wriggling with joy, she makes me leap to head off her going down the steps herself.

We start the fire. With dead ash wood. Yet from this death springs life: She delights, the flames turning her face golden. She points to the TV. Not good. Except. She’s learned you can play music on TV. So we go to a music channel that’s not too wild but has mellow beats. She starts to dance. And it becomes clear that, like her mother who so loves dancing she’s taken lessons, she gets the beat. She jigs back and forth. She raises both index fingers to point, grinning hugely at dance partners, while she twirls.

I think of my family history. Trauma going back centuries, including depression, anxiety, suicide, and yes, abandonment. On Joan’s side the baby girl who lost her dad at 10 months, its own abandonment. The trauma ripples down and is for us and billions reactivated by COVID-19 wounds.

Then I wonder if also rippling down the generations will be that little girl dancing by the dead-ash fire, experiencing even amid Covid isolations presence and love and giving it back to us. And I dare hope such eulogy practices will linger even longer than the résumé activities now fading.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. Parts of this column were first prepared for a February 28, 2021, sermon at Salford Mennonite Church.

The Dog and More Too Soon Gone

    As national flames flare over babies torn from immigrant parents, how public figures are treated in restaurants, some Christians viewing a president as God’s new Cyrus of Persia while others see a swamp turned into a septic field,  death arrives. A beloved dog in our extended family dies. He has exuberantly pursued some creature into too small a space.

Shock and grief for many, young and old, is intense. Such a minor loss compared to the national furies over tariffs, taxes, environmental regulations, Supreme Court nominees, and so much more. Is the grief proportionate to the event? Multiple reasons for thinking so flood in.

We humans are built for the local. We connect with the day-to-day realities, relationships built not only of large things but also such small wonders as feet feeling a dog’s body under the blankets; coffee made just right not only for its own sake but as a ritual of love; the infant’s first latching of eyes, then grinning, then vocalizing enroute to first words; the monarch flitting around Joan’s flower garden so little yet laced with the milkweed on which the monarch lays eggs; fireflies so thick in tree fringes you need no backlit Kindle to read by their light.

We feel the depths of loss through the ripping of ordinary patterns and habits; the absence of the bark which made hens scurry up their run into shelter; the emptiness under the covers; the inability to share with my mom the hot dogs she was still thrilling to in her last weeks.

We feel the loss through remembering that once there was milkweed all over and butterflies in their millions; now herbicides kill the milkweed (and apparently decimate honeybees) and this year only that one monarch, not the clusters once routine, has appeared. We feel the sorrow as habitat destruction, light pollution, and pesticides threaten the fireflies whose lanterns guided many of us through childhoods in pre-development nights so dark we couldn’t see hands in front of faces until our eyes adjusted to the glimmers from fireflies and the now often-lost Milky Way.

When children are taken from parents, I’m horrified. Yet my path to the horror and the conviction that no country can morally do this starts with those local loves. My awareness of what a tear we make in the fabric of God’s universe when we separate children from parents, monarchs and fireflies and honeybees from their food and wellbeing, people from sustenance and respect and dignity, comes precisely from this: experiencing how attuned dogs and people are to each other; how beautiful the details of a nature in balance are; how intricate is the dance of eye contact, brain development, sound, touch, and layers of being and relating so deep awe and mystery mingle.

If we lose the ability to be tender with dogs, to have their deaths break our hearts, to share coffee and nurture each other from conception to birth through life to the fading years when hot dogs still offer bliss, to feel loss as monarchs dwindle along with the times we can read by the light of endless fireflies or see the Milky Way, then I suspect we’ll truly have entered our culture’s death throes.

So there is much more to love than a dog and much more to grieve than his loss. But he is one more reminder of why on finishing creation God, throbbing with pride and love and delight, saw that it was good (Gen. 1). And having death take him fills me with all the more passion to care about the things that matter before death takes us all.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column. 

Chainsaw, Riding Mower, and Planet Earth

During maybe the latest spring since we moved to our current home in 1993, I worked on my chainsaw then riding mower. I learned about expertise and limits. I wondered about connections with Planet Earth as some U.S. regions turned too cool while up where cold belonged it was too warm. I needed the chainsaw for trees that had fallen in high-wind, springtime “winter” storms. I needed the mower in case grass ever grew again.

As a boy I ruined many an item by taking it apart. I also learned that if you really attend to nuts and bolts and springs and doohickeys amid modest theoretical grasp of what does what, you can sometimes get an “I fixed it!” high.

So: The chainsaw engine won’t turn. I take spark plug out. Engine turns. Plug back in—freeze. Finally I get it: frozen by accumulated unburned oil from gas-oil mix. I drip in raw gas. Pull/flush, pull/flush. Thaw. Back together. Roar! Smoke! Fix-it high. Dead. Gas spurts out the bottom. What?!

Apart again. After 30 years, rotted gas line. Take even more things apart to attach new line. At last: Roar! Smoke!

Fizzle. What! Apart. Broken electrical wire. Solder. Back together. No roar. No smoke. Gas out the bottom. What!

Apart. Ensuring the gas line is permanently connected requires disassembling the (I think) carburetor. Now so many pieces I don’t remember what a chain saw looks like. Gas line attached. Where do those choke pieces go? Memories of where they belong have faded as badly as my 1981 Greek training.

You can tell my dear spouse wonders about priorities but with remarkable maturity forbears judgment. She knows her husband hates to let go of old things, especially now he’s becoming one, and how excited he’ll be if he fixes this old thing.

Another half day goes into turning 50-some pieces back into a chain saw. Roar! Smoke! Run out. Cut cut cut limbs. Huge I-fixed-it high.

Time to get the mower ready. Battery down. Charge. Engine turns. But won’t start. Confident after proving chain-saw expertise, I jump the battery. Roar! Smoke! Silence. Nothing nothing nothing. I’ve fried the electrical system. I will be the customer fix-it shops love: I’ll take it to my friend who fixes just about anything and plead, “Could you fix this thing I ‘fixed’?”

Pride shattered, I think about the strange weather that drew me into these triumphs and tribulations. I ponder how borderline my expertise is, how much I rely on trial and error and vague understandings of how things work. I think of some eight billion of us humans bringing this approach to an entire planet.

This makes me more alarmed about the relentless clues something is wrong Planet Earth appears to be giving us, amid word that the jetstream and Gulf Stream may be turning erratic. Yet countless ones of us whose expertise is no greater than mine with chainsaws or mowers are sure we know what’s happening.

Experts as good at their analyses as my shop friend is at his do confirm danger signals. They tell us that lifestyles like mine, in which even as I try to live lightly on the earth I use chainsaws and mowers and contribute to what is likely the environmental crime of western lawns, feed the vicious cycles. No matter where I’ve traveled this month, the yard-loving and world-destroying engines seem to be buzzing and roaring and whining like never before, as a too-wet spring yields to sizzling summer and we belch yet more poisoning fumes.  Whether or not we believe God gave us dominion over the earth (Gen. 1), we likely have the power to demolish it as our home.

My chainsaw-fixing self hopes people who disagree will accept this before we’re all dead. But then my mower-breaking self says hold on. Have some humility: none of us can fully grasp what’s happening or what to do. Take seriously the possibility that together we all figure this out or together we die. Maybe we can start by learning how to help our lawns be more often heaven and less frequently hell for wildlife.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published the first version of this post.

Bless the Lord and the Wild Things

KCGuestPostDanHertzler300x300x72The writer of Psalm 104 had an appreciation for wild things. I have a somewhat limited appreciation for wild things. If they threaten my garden, as do woodchucks and raccoons, I go after them. If they are only passing through as wild turkeys, I enjoy them.

As our environment unravels and the wild things are threatened, Psalm 104 catches my attention. The psalm is one of what William P Brown calls “the seven pillars of creation.” The other six are Genesis 1 and 2, Job 38-40, Wisdom in Proverbs 8, Ecclesiastes and Isaiah 55. Verses 24-35 of Psalm 104 provide the essence and deserve reflection.

The second creation account in Genesis tells of a man and a woman in a garden. They had what they needed but were expected to take care of it. The story tells us that they blew it. The history of humankind follows this pattern.

Whenever people get organized they seem to do one or both of two things: 1) beat up on somebody or 2) trash the environment and the wild things. The psalm writer observes that the wild things look to God “to give them their food in due season.” But evidently the food they needed was not always available.

At the end the writer puts his finger on the human problem and hopes “that sinners be consumed from the earth and that the wicked be no more.” That’s too much to hope for. Somehow we need to acknowledge our own sinfulness and recognize that having “the wicked be no more” is too broad a prayer request.

But more than the psalmist could recognize, we know we depend on the environment and that we may be in the process of destroying it. Indeed it could happen that not only the wicked but everyone and all creatures could be no more if present trends continue.

Our psalmist lived in the time of the Fertile Crescent. There was power at each end of the crescent—Egypt at one end and Babylon at the other end. Palestine was said to be a land of milk and honey. It was also to be a land of political instability because the power people would go through it to get at each other. They would go through the crescent since they could not cross the desert.

But the psalmist is not concerned with politics. It is the wild things that get his attention. The earth is full of them and they are sustained by the hand of God. It is amazing to see what niches some of the wild things have found.

Take the monarch butterflies. These butterflies overwinter in Mexico or California. When Mary and I were in California in 1980 we saw a cluster of them wintering in California. In the spring these butterflies start north. They take three generations going north. They lay eggs and soon die. The next generation hatches, grows up, and continues the journey. These larvae feed on milkweed. Milkweed is poisonous, but the monarchs can handle it, which is good because then birds hesitate to eat them.

The fourth generation makes the trip south in one generation. I saw several monarchs on my flowers one year. I suppose they were on their way south. But now monarchs have a problem. They feed on milkweed and farmers especially in the Midwest use Roundup to kill the weeds. Then monarch larvae have nothing to eat. I noticed three milkweed plants along the edge of my lot last summer and left them there. Whether or not any monarch larvae had fed on them I don’t know, but I left them there.

As I say, a typical human tendency is to cut and slash But once in a while we find an example of someone who works at restoration. I used to get a magazine called Westsylvania. In autumn 2004, it carried an article on how the wild turkeys were brought back. According to the article, wild turkeys had just about died out through overhunting, but in the 1950s a program was devised to try to bring them back.

There were still some remnants in the Bedford County mountains and the program devised was to clip the wings of some turkey hens and put them in an eight-foot-high fence. Wild gobblers came in and mated with them, the eggs were collected, and then the hens were put in the pens again. “The breeding program proved so successful that it ended in 1955. By then, even the game-farm raised turkeys—who by then carried just one-sixteenth tame genes—had become too uncontrollable.” By 1968, Pennsylvania began the spring gobbler hunting season.

Recently I saw a flock of 20 turkeys in the field across the road. The best thing about turkeys is that I can’t see that they cause problems in my garden.

We have gotten caught in what is coming to be an environmental disaster. After Edwin Drake drilled an oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, oil became plentiful and as time went on more and more uses were found for it. Especially in transportation. Today we are trapped in our cars.

In his book Terra Nova, Eric W Sanderson says that we will need to get away from oil, cars, and suburbs. He says we need to live more closely together and go back to trolley cars and trains along with walking and bicycles.

When Mary and I built a house three miles from town we didn’t think about the implications of all the driving we would do. Also, Scottdale was a marketing center with grocery stores, clothing stores, and a good shoe store. Today with Walmartization all of those have gone away and Scottdale is basically a bedroom community of the big box stores at its edges. Yet those who live in town are less dependent on oil than we in the country. I have noticed that all of my grandchildren live in town.

Whether the changes can be made in time to save the environment from disaster remains to be seen. In his fantasy, Sanderson sees basic transportation changes as early as 2028. That does strike me as fantasy. However, I was interested to see in the September 29, 2015, issue of the Connellsville Daily Courier that a “Transportation alliance” is forming to represent all of our local counties. What this means I’m not clear.

In the meantime it is possible to do something about the problem of electricity generated by fossil fuel. I have signed up with a company called Ethical Electric which uses environmentally friendly generation. I noticed that the first bill based on this new system cost two cents more per kilowatt hour. I think I can handle that.

As an old farmer, I still like a place in the country, but I see that without recognizing it I have become dependent on a system that needs to be changed. I do not look forward to giving up my place in the country. But to maintain it I have an automobile, a pickup truck, a tractor, a garden tiller, and two lawn mowers. If I were to move to town I would need only the car and maybe a lawn mower.

DanielHertzlerTree
Daniel Hertzler and a spruce tree he had photographed by Maynard Brubacher as part of an effort to sell it. But so far there has been no market for it. Dan reports that “Mary planted the tree about 1960 and it keeps growing. What can be done with it remains to be seen.”

The writer of Psalm 104 had no idea what would come to pass in the era of oil, suburbs, and automobile transportation. I can only believe he would support efforts to save the earth for the wild things as well as for our descendants.

Daniel Hertzler, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, is an editor, writer, book reviewer and occasional preacher. He retired in 2015 as an instructor for the correspondence course, Pastoral Studies Distance Education. He is author of the memoir On My Way: The View from the Ninth Decade.