Saturday evening I headed up to the University of Victoria to listen to Thomas Homer-Dixon, the author of the best selling book, " The Upside of Down." I must confess I didn't know a whole lot about the guy and his writing, other than seeing various copies of his books lying around my house. My daughter Megan the Poli-Sci/Environmentalist Grad is a huge fan of his thinking on global perspective.
Homer-Dixon contends that five "tectonic stresses" are accumulating deep underneath the surface of today's global order:
- energy stress, especially from increasing scarcity of conventional oil;
- economic stress from greater global economic instability and widening income gaps between rich and poor;
- demographic stress from differentials in population growth rates between rich and poor societies and from expansion of mega-cities in poor societies;
- environmental stress from worsening damage to land, water forests, and fisheries; and,
- climate stress from changes in the composition of Earth's atmosphere.
Of the five, energy stress plays a particularly important role, because energy is humankind's master resource. When energy is scarce and costly, everything a society tries to do — including growing its food, obtaining enough fresh water, transmitting and processing information, and defending itself — becomes far harder.
The effect of the five stresses is multiplied by the rising connectivity and speed of our societies and by the escalating power of small groups to destroy things and people, including, potentially, whole cities.
Drawing parallels between the challenges we face today and the crisis faced by the Roman empire almost two thousand years ago, Homer-Dixon argues that these stresses and multipliers are potentially a lethal mixture. Together, they greatly increase the risk of a cascading collapse of systems vital to our wellbeing — a phenomenon he calls "synchronous failure." Societies must do everything they can to avoid such an outcome.
Lets just say it was a rather sobering evening, but in the midst of it all a word coined by Thomas Homer-Dixon captured my imagination...catagenesis ( breaking down-rebirth ).
Put simply, the catastrophe of collapse allows for the birth of something new. And this cycle of growth, collapse, reorganization, and rebirth allows the forest to adapt over the long term to a constantly changing environment. “The adaptive cycle,” Ecologist Crawford Holling writes, “embraces two opposites: growth and stability on one hand, change and variety on the other.” It’s at once conserving and creative – a characteristic of all highly adaptive systems.
Somehow we have to find the middle ground between between dangerous rigidity and catastrophic collapse. In our organizations, social and political systems, and individual lives, we need to create the possibility for what computer programmers and disaster planners call ‘graceful failure’. When a system fails gracefully, damage is limited, and options for recovery are preserved. Also, the part of the system that has been damaged recovers by drawing resources and information from undamaged parts.
Listening Thomas Homer-Dixon, I couldn't help but try to hear it through the lens of the Gospel...
Then I get to Sunday, I'm listening to the renowned Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, and he is talking about the problems with modernity...of it being a time where we have lost faith. And when he says faith, he does not speak of religion. He senses humanity has lost a sense of meaning of life. that with out meaning life becomes futile, meaningless and hopelessness. We need to re-capture meaning. Real life is in a sense...broken.
Listening to Charles Taylor, I couldn't help but try and hear it through the lens of the Gospel...
In the Book of Hebrews the writer speaks of a shaking, earthly things being shaken to there foundations so only the things of God would be left standing. It's not hard to read those words in the context of where we find ourselves today. To hear them in the context of Thomas Homer-Dixon's diagnosis of tectonic stresses underneath the surface of global order...and his coined term " catagenesis ", and Charles Taylor talking about life being broken.
There is not a place on earth that is not under going some kind of shaking. Poverty grinding up against wealth; financial systems; political systems; environment; global warming; religion and race...all seems to be shaking.
I look around me, I turn my ear to hear the faith conversation in the global village...what are the voices coming from the wilderness. Is the good news of the gospel irrelevant to what is going on around us. Has the gospel nothing more to offer than tickets to board a lifeboat when we've destroyed this planet.
I'm becoming increasingly frustrated by the denomination and faith community I'm involved in. Head in the sand they are oblivious to what is going on around them. Any attempts to initiate a conversation around global concern are quickly snuffed out and ignored. For the most part in the emerging/missional conversation there seems to be no prophetic voice proclaiming an urgency.
Jesus did not pitch his tent in the midst of humanity to build churches and make christians. If I can steal Thomas Homer Dixon's term...he was on a mission of " catagenesis." He came to fix the relationship...fix life that was broken...to show and teach us what it is to be fully human. The good news of the gospel is, it is a story of catagenesis...of redemption, taking the broken places and spaces of " all " humanity...and to rebirth them.
So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe—people and things, animals and atoms—get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross. ( Colossians 1 )
Its time to awaken to the imagination of God, to a gospel that seeks to redeem all the tectonic stresses that under gird humanity. The gospel is not about making christians...it is about becoming fully human. It is just not about individuals...it is about the whole human experience.
It is about creation, it is about global resources, it is about poverty, it is about global relationships, it is about inter-faith conversation, social and global justice, it is about politics...and it is about monetary and financial systems.
Where are the voices crying from the wilderness...that proclaim a gospel for the whole human experience?
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