Environmental Fundamentalist

Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “it is mine to avenge; I will repay.” – Romans 12: 19 (NIV) 

I take my own ceramic cups to hotels for my early morning coffee. I do so ostentatiously.  

I tell clerks no thank you to bags, paper or plastic. “I have my own.” 

I have an electric car. I drive it with expensive pride. 

I carry the world on my shoulders and get a cold sweat every two or three nights about whether I should fly on airplanes. I really want to go see so-and-so or go to that meeting, but how do I avenge my carbon footprint? Usually I fly, shame-faced. 

I don’t like the way the cleaners at our church pour my office’s blue-and-white baskets into the same plastic bag and set it out in the dumpster with everybody else’s mixed recycling buckets remaining recycled free. Staff separate; they combine. I am the impotent boss. 

I despise Amazon and wander around my neighborhood looking with scorn at all the boxes on my neighbors’ porches and in their driveways.  

I picked a fight with both neighbors on both sides for watering their lawn during the drought this past spring. I used grey water and ostentatiously carried my buckets out to the garden while waving at them so they could be sure to see my superiority through the glint of their sprinkler’s water. 

I guess it is obvious what the problems are in my so-called solutions. Anybody else have any ideas for me—or you? 

Prayer
Holy One, help me return the universe to you every day in every way and un-flummox my environmental fundamentalism. Restore unto me the joy of my salvation. Amen.

About the Author
Donna Schaper is the Pastor of the Congregational Church of Austin (COA). Her book Rooted in Resurrection is a garden memoir and includes spiritual and horticultural advice in its meditations.