Good Faith To Heal Our Fragile Planet

Our actions can be like far reaching ripples on our global pond

Human beings don’t always realise it, but we are fragile creatures living on a fragile planet.

While the very earth beneath our feet may seem solid, the rock on which it stands is only a relatively thin crust covering a molten centre that occasionally erupts through volcanoes. That seemingly solid crust is itself made of “plates”, which are continually shifting causing earthquakes when they collide.

In recent decades we are becoming more and more aware of how human beings are causing untold damage to the environment that sustains us, not only putting the survival of other animals at risk, but threatening our own survival too. We have learnt how our actions can be like far reaching ripples on our global pond.

As Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it in the Foreword to the Green Bible (NRSV) published by Collins on 6 October 2008:

"I would not know how to think as a human being, how to walk as a human being, how to talk or how to eat as a human being except by learning from other human beings. I learn to be human by associating with other human beings. We are thus, according to the Bible, made for family. We're made for community, we're made for togetherness, we're made for friendship. We're made to live in a delicate network of interdependence for we are made for complementarity. I have gifts you don't have. And you have gifts I don't have. Thus we are made different so that we can know our need of one another. And this is a fundamental law of our being.

All kinds of things go horribly wrong when we flout this law - when we don't ensure that God's children everywhere have a supply of clean water, a safe environment, a decent home, a full stomach. We could do that if we remembered that we are created to be members of one family, the human family, God's family."

In this blog I want to explore a faith narrative to encourage ordinary people like you and me reduce the negative impact we have on the world around us and on other people, and to try to have a positive impact instead. If you have some helpful ideas to share here, too, that would be great.

I’ve called this blog “Faith for a Fragile Planet”, because I believe good faith can help us change the way we think, helping us to understand the impact of our actions on others. There will be plenty in this blog for people who don't believe in God or struggle with the concept, but if you do believe in God I hope it will help you discover ways to live out your faith in ways that relate to the world around you in the 21st century.

While many British and European people no longer believe in God our culture remains heavily influenced by ideas from the Bible and the way the Medieval Church understood it. This is why, on occasion, I shall use this blog to think about how people have interpreted the Bible in the past in ways that have resulted in damage to the environment or harm to other people, as well as to share new ways of interpreting the Bible to bring healing and hope for us all.

It isn’t all doom and gloom. There is good news, too. 😃 We can all do something to make the world a better place, one day at a time, one step at a time.