Well, the journey home was rather more straightforward than the journey to Milano!! It only took 21 hours from Milano to home.
It was great to meet such a diverse bunch of people, from all sorts of different churches, and all doing something, or wanting to do something to enable their churches to respond to the environmental and ecological crises that we face.
I do however worry that we are just not taking stock of the reality of the situation. Personally, I feel that there will be such huge social changes which are going to come about through oil becoming increasingly expensive, and the impacts of climate change that we need to be training disciples to cope with these massive changes. I often feel that we have been so enculturated into the dominant mode of being (individualistic, economic beings) that we can't actually act in the truly radical modes of the gospel. I say that because I know that to be the case in my own life! Local to me there is a housing co-op offering a night shelter to asylum seekers in their home, and providing training in all sorts of ways on environment and peace making. They are doing the churches' job for them! But they are not a faith based group. Where are the churches offering these alternative structures? Yes, the churches are offering support to the work with asylum seekers, but we are not creating alternative ways of doing life - living in community, opting out of the economic system and so on, which are going to be essential (I think) to our survival post oil. I'm scared to do this, because I'm a product of this dominant mode of thinking and being. But I do long for courage to be able to live beyond 'economic security', and live a life of sharing and giving.
Also, I think that emotionally we are not taking seriously the challenges of the social distress that the future will bring about. How will we in the church provide a radical alternative to the grabbing mentality which will inevitably result when only the rich will be able to afford the niceties of an oil-fuelled system? Will we have the courage to follow the lead of Jesus, who in an era of 'scarcity' took what little there was and gave it away? Only in the process of giving was there a miracle. Yet how many of us can actually bring ourselves to do that? We've been indoctrinated into stockpiling, seeing our needs as 'essential'. Maybe it's just me that finds it difficult to give...
Over the last few years I've been trying to understand the nature of Christian hope, and more and more I am seeing it not as hope for a future world of which we know not a lot, but rather the hope in the midst of the crises that we face, that we are able to live differently, to live according to a set of values which don't make sense to the dominant modes of thought and action. Simply living generously now is to live in hope. In the middle of a 'grab all you can while its available' society, not to grab all you can is to live in hope. It is to live as a witness to a different mode of being which is informed by a higher set of values, linked to human integrity, human dignity, the human place in the web of creation, and our place in the praise that all creation offers to God.
So, I worry about the churches... will we able to respond to the social, economic , political, personal, spiritual, emotional crises that are coming our way? Will we be co-opted by the powers that be to respond just like everyone else: to protect our own, to draw up the bridges, to huddle together? Or will we be able to embrace a radical call of Jesus to open ourselves up to the pain that society will experience/is experiencing, offering our homes, our lives to work on behalf of our communities who are suffering already as a result of the cumulative effect of the industrial revolution? I only know myself, and know that I haven't begun to be able to work out what this means for me. But I know at least that I need to begin.
If you need a fantastic book which puts all this much more clearly, then read Alastair MacIntosh's 'Hell and High Water' which is very challenging.
