Colin Ford has great hair. He had great hair as a little boy actor in “Dog Days of Summer,” a forgettable film that opens at an Edenton Steamers game, the summer league team in the small town next to my mom’s, and yes, I’m wearing their ball cap right now though, if you are like me, you might be wondering about a clam as a mascot. Not exactly swift around the base path…
Colin Ford had great hair in a film you might have actually seen, “We Bought a Zoo” with Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson. He had some pretty memorable scenes too, holding his own with actors with decades more experience.
Colin Ford has great hair in the recent Netflix series “Daybreak.” And that’s where the problem comes in. See, “Daybreak” is one of those post-apocalyptic series that has been in vogue for the last decade or so, and set in Southern California, where a biological weapon has turned most adults into something like zombies, and apparently has erased all of the small children, leaving a world controlled by gangs of teenagers, who are, of course, played mostly by actors who look nothing like teenagers. By the time the series opens, it has been months since the attack, since the collapse of civilization as we know it. Yet, Colin Ford has great hair, as do all of the other supposed teenagers in the series.
Where, you may ask, are they getting their haircuts? Okay, maybe you don’t ask, but I do. I am feeling decidedly shaggy these days, looking more like Daryl Dixon, an antagonist in “The Walking Dead,” than like a SoCal fashion model. This is definitely not a Hollywood apocalypse.
Not that I’m really complaining about not being able to get a haircut. Thousands are dying, millions are unemployed, and it is just a haircut. I’m just wondering a bit about an apocalypse that has salons. I mean, can the apocalypse be like a choose-your-own-adventure book? If you go to the tanning salon, skip to page 45. If you sew masks for the hospital, go to page 44.
Humans have always speculated about end times, destruction, eschaton, Day of the Lord, death-dealing comet. It has happened during horrible episodes in human history, natural disaster, plague, war. Mostly it was understood that the end of the world would be the result of divine action or cosmic misfortune, but during the Cold War, it became increasingly clear that humans were more than capable of bringing about the collapse of civilization, and indeed, of the conditions required for life on this planet, the only one we know of where this holy magic we call life exists.
Life is this amazing question mark. Like a burning bush that is not consumed, the power of life has gone on and on and on, reproducing itself, adapting, never consumes. It is just plain stubborn. It is part of something many of us think of as mysterious and holy and wholly improbable, the something instead of nothing, for statistically, we are an impossibility.
As we became culturally aware of of our human destructive power, of our suicide-bomber relationship with creation, as saints like Rachel Carson helped us see what we had previously chosen to ignore, a new super villain appeared on the scene, not in real life, though there were plenty of those, but in Gotham on the pages of Batman #232, June 1971.
Ra’s al Ghul, literally “head of the Ghoul,” is a bad guy in that he wants to kill many many humans. But unlike the Joker, who is criminally insane, or Penguin, who is the embodiment of greed and the con, Ra’s al Ghul has a motivation with which we might have some sympathy, for he seeks environmental balance. He’s a villain, so they dance around this a bit, but yeah. Ra’s al Ghul, super villain, wants to reduce the human population in order to save the planet. He is opposed by Batman aka Bruce Wayne, a “one-percenter,” a corporate titan at the head of Wayne Enterprises. Who’s the good guy?
Yikes.
And here we are, in a time of pandemic that would fill Ra’s al Ghul with glee. The human population is dropping. And the massive reduction in human activity has resulted in a reduction of human destruction. The air and water are just that little bit cleaner. Sure, cows are still farting, but we’re not driving our cars much of anywhere. Few airplanes are in the sky. A virus has done what Greta, for all of her passion and persuasion, could not, offering us a glimpse of a world where we are not pouring poison gas into the atmosphere. We are in a sort of collective “time out,” facing the wall and thinking about what we have done.
We can’t continue like we are right now, for about a billion reasons. We need to fix supply chains. We need to get people back to work, though there doesn’t seem to be the leadership in place to implement the steps necessary, including widespread testing and contact tracing. We need to avoid the sort of mob chaos that was organized in Michigan and North Carolina this week.
But, again, we now have a little glimpse of life with less carbon.
The traditional season of Lent is all about introspection, about taking stock. And yes, as the meme says, this was the Lentiest Lent we have ever Lented. The season of Eastertide is about new life, but it is worth remembering that it was different. The disciples did not go back to following Jesus around Galilee while he healed and taught, assistants to a great leader. Jesus would be back around sporadically and in a visible form for forty days. But they were now the leaders. It was up to them to carry the church forward. Which aligns pretty well with our United Church of Christ tradition that understands ourselves as “the priesthood of all believers.”
We don’t have time to re-tool the entire economy so that it is carbon neutral in the coming weeks, especially not as we are facing a catastrophic pandemic and economic collapse. But we have had a chance to re-examine our priorities, that “Lenty” Lent that is officially ended, but yeah, not so much…
We can aspire to do better. That has always been the Christian way. We are not a faith of perfection, a gathering of the pure. We are a faith of the broken, the sinful, the imperfect. We are a faith of humans, in all of our glory, all of our beauty, all of our imperfection, amazing transcendent sprits in fearful primate bodies, hairy, some of us getting hairier by the day.
Even the most committed atheist understands that human-caused climate change is killing us in realtime. In fact, the committed atheist probably understands it better than most Christians, for Christians have for too long had the hubris to believe that creation is all about humans, meant for our exploitation and domination, and that simply isn’t true. That theology has no basis in reality, no utility for us today. Creation is a complex system, beautiful and filled with mystery, but also governed by rules and processes, many that we now understand. Creation is not about us. We are just one part of that system, one little spot of beauty, ephemeral, then gone. The powerful play goes on, earthworm and elephant, Joshua Trees and jellyfish, humans and little bits of genetic code that reproduce and act like a can-opener, tearing apart human bodies.
As we approach Earth Day, let us be mindful that in committing to creation-care, we are part of a larger movement within the United Church of Christ, the first American denomination to divest from fossil fuels. We are in solidarity with other congregations in the UCC that have committed to practice creation care in their personal lives, in their lives together as a gathered people, to advocate for creation and sustainability in the public spaces we inhabit, from our place of work to the voting booth. We are in solidarity with the Pope, at least on this issue, with rabbis and imams and babas, who come together across traditions to make common cause. We are, after all, really all on the exact same boat, a shiny blue bauble whirling around in a vast and mysterious universe.
We can do better. We will do better.
But about that haircut… I’m no Samson, and I really don’t want a Tiger King mullet.
May God send us wisdom, fill us with hope and wonder, and help us laugh, this day and always. Amen.