Say NO to the Keystone XL pipeline

Last night at the Abundant Table worship service, we talked about sacred places. "What place is sacred to you?" was our art prompt, and we each drew pictures - an orchard, a special doorway, a carwash, a church, a farm. Each person had a different place, and together, these pictures of places that we all placed on our altar showed that every place on Earth is sacred space.

In light of this, I've been thinking of the Keystone XL pipeline, a 1,700-mile oil pipeline that TransCanada, a Canadian oil company plans to build from Alberta, Canada, to the oil refineries near the Gulf of Mexico. It would pump crude oil through beautiful American wilderness and farmland. Acres of Canadian boreal forests have already been destroyed by the oil extraction process.

This pipeline will destroy countless sacred places, and cause more destruction through global warming. See this link (http://www.tarsandsaction.org/) to sign a petition asking President Obama to reject the requested permit to proceed. He will make a decision in the next week or two. And, if you live out East, consider joining hundreds of people, including religious leaders and scientists, who are sitting in front of the White House in peaceful protest of violence against our country. Let's take a stand for God's good and sacred Creation.

For more information on the pipeline, see this New York Times Editorial.

Also, the following video was created by Josh Fox, the Oscar-nominated director of Gasland:

Sod Farm
This green landscape is a living carpet
and one day it will be gone,
rolled up from the ground still clinging
to rich clods, roots snapping off this Plain
to be released some "where"
far from our long, flat desert near the sea
far in some other desert, perhaps,
where they will swing clubs
and thwack at the implanted sod
grown here by the sea
with miles of sprinklers
and sprays that roll off like syrup
into the ditch where today, I saw:

An egret,
poised, waiting.
About to step,
pausing.
Not tense but patient.
And I want to memorize this
so that I can tell my children,
Once, I saw a white bird, tall, with the green grass miles behind
and beyond that, the sea, where the runoff still flows.
It stood, for a long time, but only on one leg.

The Beast is Dead

During my sophomore year of high school, Bush was on the hunt for Sadaam Hussein and I was in a poetry class learning iambic pentameter. My use of rhyme and meter was developing along with my political views. Though both were, well, "sophomoric," I still resonate with who I was back then. I remember feeling the dissonance between my faith convictions and the language of war and revenge that I was hearing in the news. "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" did not exactly line up with the rhetoric of smoking terrorists out of their holes. With the killing of Osama bin Laden this week, I remembered a poem that I wrote during that class. As I re-read it, those conflicted feelings rose again and I couldn't shake the sense that, despite our jubilation at a tyrant's death, we are still circling beasts in a cycle of violence...

The Beast
The bombs rained down o'er Abram's ground,
Intent to kill the beast they found.
When all was ruins the people said,
"The Beast is dead, the Beast is dead!"

Greedy vultures come circling this terrible beast,
where it lies seeming dead, the birds peck at their feast.
But it utters a growl and it opens one eye,
birds of carrion flap back as it roars at the sky.

The lion bounds 'cross shifting sands,
and gloats in power within his lair;
the stealthy jackals come in bands,
their endless ranks surround him there.

Hornets drone round his head day and night without ceasing,
But the beast becomes still, by this enemies appeasing.
So his foes think him dead, on the eve of destruction;
surely beasts like the old will arise to succeed him.

- 2002


If you're interested, I recommend checking out a good article in Christianity Today this week: "The Death of Osama bin Laden: What Kind of Justice has been Done?"

And another step further, a piece written by a friend at the Oak View Catholic Worker: "Love Your Enemies: Remember That?"

Good Friday/ Earth Day Stations of the Cross

This year, Good Friday and Earth Day converged. As a Christian community living on an organic farm, this was too much of a co-incidence to let it pass! Together, we wrote a "Stations of the Cross" liturgy that, while remembering the suffering and death of Jesus, laments environmental suffering and the injustices of our food system.

An example from Station 10: Jesus is stripped of his garments.
When they came to a place called Golgotha, they offered him wine to drink, mingled with gall; but when he tasted it, he would not drink it. And they divided his garments among them by casting lots. This was to fulfill the scripture which says, "They divided my garments among them; they cast lots for my clothing.

Jesus was stripped of his dignity and left naked. Sit and take a handful of rich topsoil. There are over 3 billion microorganisms in your handful of organic topsoil...topsoil is a complex web of life divinely constructed to give us life. However, we are stripping topsoil from our Earth. Topsoil erosion, caused by mono-cropping, which is when a single crop is planted int he same field year after year along with chemical farming practices in conventional industrial agriculture, is causing us to lose our topsoil seventeen times faster than we can replace it. When we strip Earth of rich topsoil we become even more dependent on chemical fertilizer to give nutrients into crops. What will happen when Earth is stripped of topsoil? What will happen when our farming practices leave Earth naked? Consider a stripped, naked Jesus. His friends and family watching him being stripped of his clothes and dignity. Contemplating your handful of soil, consider a stripped, naked Earth. Consider us watching Earth as she is stripped of her soil, her dignity.

Prayer...

Though I wasn't able to attend (visiting home), friends said the event was really powerful. Here's an article on it in the local paper:

http://www.vcstar.com/news/2011/apr/22/stations-of-cross-event-marks-good-friday-earth/