Enticing difficulties await us, children, in the Life After Shopping. Yes, with a feeling of heady freedom we face the void of the night sky, and gape at the beauty of it, and then notice that the stars have become little derisively laughing faces...
You see, children, when the billboard disappears, then we find that nature was waiting directly behind it, and a terrible storm is brewing. A tsunami is more than a slap in the face. The earth is not necessarily social. We Americans might discover that soon, as we awaken from our consumption stupor. The earth was not shopping with us. The earth loves our music but hates our traffic. Oh god help us, enticing difficulties await us in the Life After Shopping.
The relief is that we now have a reunion with our long lost relative, the Fabulous Unknown. The night sky rushes in after the billboard fades. Can we fathom what this is? We are the prodigal children, returning to our loving home after years lost zonked in a super mall. We are waking from years of product-drunkenness and we want to return to that wonder, like when we were kids and looked up and had that jolting moment of - THIS UNIVERSE IS BIGGER AND DEEPER THAN... than anything... wow...
The stars might be laughing at us, children. It's alright. Your pastor advises: Don't worry about it, just pray with it. And we don't stand on ceremony here because we noticed the earth doesn't. A prayer might be the split second hopeful thought that you have while spitting. That's OK. We need to be glad that we're back and get to work. The universe will make fun of us or seem to ignore us, but remain more impossibly beautiful than your latest shopping binge... Mostly, the earth expects us to get to work saving ourselves.
Life After Shopping is what we all want, if it's not too late. Death While Shopping seemed so inevitable for so long. ...Blessings and Wildness! -Rev
Rev offers today's reading: from "The Creation" by E. O. Wilson
By Billy Talen
"The modern technoscientific revolution, including especially the great leap of computer-based information technology, has betrayed Nature, by fostering the belief that the cocoons of urban and suburban material life are sufficient for human fulfillment. That is an especially serious mistake. Human nature is deeper and broader than the artifactual contrivance of any existing culture. The spiritual roots of homo sapiens extend deep into the natural world...
Rev interjects: ....and skipping ahead a half page... this is in the chapter called "Ascending to Nature" and oh can I preach this? It needs a cooing choir behind it, or you could Youtube a good sermon with this language - with the church stranded in some grand wilderness, with robes and hiking boots. Amen?
"Granted, many people seem content to live entirely within the synthetic ecosystems. But so are domestic animals content, even in the grotesquely abnormal habitats in which we rear them. This in my mind is a perversion. It is not the nature of human beings to be cattle in glorified feedlots. Every person deserves the option to travel easily in and out of the complex and primal world that gave us birth. We need freedom to roam across land owned by no one but protected by all, whose unchanging position is the same that bounded the world of our millennial ancestors. Only in what remains of Eden, teeming with life forms independent of us, is it possible to experience the kind of wonder that shaped the human psyche at its birth.
Rev remarks: ...from the beginning our Stop Shopping Church we've had two big beliefs. One: Let's not consent to be consumers, because then we're idiots and Two: Consumers are killing the earth.
Amen! Sometimes it's hard to connect the two ideas, one is so personal and the other is so universal, so Reverend Wilson thank you.