Dispatches from the Burning Bush

I've been dreaming about the end of the world. Of things going up in flames. Leaving home. Walking down cool gray roads with my sister and my dog. Driving between tall pines which are burning but not consumed. Seabirds starving because there are no fish to eat. A yellow haired man saying, "There are plenty of fish. Take and eat to your heart's content!"

I took up these themes at a more hopeful moment in my first blog. The twenty-first century was young. Many of us trusted that the ability to name an issue marked the first step toward solving it. In 2002, I attended a retreat at Mt. Calvary Monastery in Santa Barbara with author Barry Lopez. If its subject was beauty, Barry's opening sentences traveled a different direction: poetic, global and dire. "The news is not good. One billion Chinese are poised to turn the keys in the ignitions of their cars." During that same year, a spectacular dust storm off the Gobi Desert crossed the Pacific to turn up as an orange-brown cloud rising like a portent over the San Anselmo Hub. Its strangeness evoked Barry’s definition of Beauty as “something which brings what is unlike together, line and color, light and shade.” It was not a comfortable beauty, but it had the advantage of observing us from the future, hands poised before ignitions yet unturned.

They turned. Beijing rests under a quilt of smog. They don masks which lend to their faces the suggestion of gasping. We do not stop driving.

Nearly two decades after, Barry has again emerged.  "Hell is coming," he told a 2019 gathering at Toby's Feed Barn in Point Reyes Station. I recalled my dream with its firestorm of trees.

Barry's image resonates with Biblical overtones, with Moses seeing the way out of slavery in Egypt and across the long desert trek of redefinition. The Israelites never fully got what Moses was trying to teach them any more than Christians understand how Jesus could both be executed and announce "the ruler of this world has been condemned."

Exiled from their own, both Moses and Jesus harrowed versions of Hell. In different ways, each attempted to free their people from enslavement to destructive practices. Both sought a new country where people might be fully alive. Both have been imperfectly understood.

Sometimes I find images more comprehensible than ideas. The Burning Bush is one. Paradise is another.

Moses returned to God before his people entered the Promised Land. Many believe Jesus died to save us. I am sure this was his intent, but I'm less certain of any general amnesty or salvation. My Buddhist friends say it is up to me to do the work of enlightenment, which I do by awakening my own Buddha-nature. For Christians it is our Christ-nature. For others, it is nothing more and nothing less than tapping the best in our human nature, which is what the first two are about.

The way we are behaving toward the planet, her life and each other gives a reliable sign that we are far from where we need to be. How did we lose our way?