POINTSOFVIEW | AT HOME ON EARTH
By Kyle Kramer
It’s a Wild World
EarthandSpiritCenter.org
M
ost of us want to believe that the world is fundamentally predictable and safe. I know that I don’t do especially well with uncertainty and risk. Even when I’m doing something adventurous like rock climbing, I don’t want dramatic surprises; I want to know that I’m on route and that my gear will prevent disaster. COVID-19, however, threw certainty and safety out the window. Every week has brought new reminders of what uncharted territory we are in and how no one really knows what exactly lies ahead. It shouldn’t have taken a pandemic to dismantle the illusion that there is such a thing as certainty and safety in this world. Disasters and upheavals of various kinds are always waiting around the next bend. Economic turmoil is inevitable; it’s not a question of if, but when. Natural disasters—including those brought about or exacerbated by climate change—are always waiting in the wings. Most of us can also count on at least a few personal catastrophes as well: a lost job, a health crisis, a broken relationship. Being alive is a risky business; we never know what’s going to hit us. MOVING FORWARD
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By the time you read this, more will surely have become clear about how the gradual reopening of society has affected coronavirus infection and death rates. Regardless, the false
veil of certainty and safety has forever been torn in two. How do we live with that epiphany both now, in the midst of the pandemic, and once we are beyond it? One of our great temptations is to double down on what hasn’t worked: trying to force our unruly world to conform to our knowledge grids, management strategies, and desire for security and control—much like addicts return again and again to the substance or activity that they mistakenly think will make them whole, even as it destroys their lives. Maybe this takes the form of giving our blind allegiance to large institutions—government, corporations, even the institutional Church— in the hopes that they will give us solid answers and guarantee our safety. Or maybe we do the opposite: Hole up in bunkers, load up on food and ammo, and try to fend for ourselves. We have another option, though. Even though our Christian Scriptures, creeds, catechisms, and hymns are filled with proclamations of certainty and safety, the Christian mystics have always claimed that God, life, and our faith are deep, inscrutable mysteries. Neither God nor our world is tame; there is wildness and unpredictability woven into the very fabric of reality itself. Facing this truth, the only appropriate response is humility, which is always and everywhere the cure for human hubris. Part of humility is intellectual, which is
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Kyle is the executive director of the Passionist Earth & Spirit Center, which offers interfaith educational programming in meditation, ecology, and social compassion. He serves as a Catholic climate ambassador for the US Conference of Catholic Bishopssponsored Catholic Climate Covenant and is the author of A Time to Plant: Life Lessons in Work, Prayer, and Dirt (Ave Maria Press, 2010). He speaks across the country on issues of ecology and spirituality. He and his family spent 15 years as organic farmers and homesteaders in Spencer County, Indiana.
LEFT: COURTESY OF KYLE KRAMER; RIGHT: FILADENDRON/ISTOCK
Kyle Kramer
