Red Skies and Gnawing Questions

Was it just me, or did anyone else notice that the tongue-in-cheek references to ‘Armageddon’ and ‘The End of the World’ in Sydney on 23rd of September didn’t quite have their tongues completely in their cheeks?

As the dust storm swept through our city, a bunch of my friends, and a bunch of stuff I read and heard that day through the press, jokingly referred to Christian ideas of a final judgment, and then less jokingly remarked that climate change is rather serious, and we need to do better for our country and our children.

To my ears, this sounded like a secularization of the Christian idea of judgment. People are aware that their actions can have terrible consequences, people are aware that indulgent, selfish and reckless living can have terrible consequences on our world and our future, and people seem to believe that there may be a day when this becomes overwhelmingly obvious and perhaps even terrible – the sky will turn red, the seas will rise.

I’m not trying to make any kind of remark on climate change or environmental issues, but just pointing out how hard it is for people to really shake off the idea that there will be a day when their actions will have consequences and when they will be asked to give an account for what they did. Even a primarily secular community like the City of Sydney still has, from time to time, a moment when this thought in allowed to creep in.

Even if we ‘throw off’ ideas about a God and universal ethics, about a quaint Jew who supposedly rose from the dead and spoke a message of warning, it seems to be hard to avoid the gnawing question – ‘Will things one day fall apart for us because of the kind of lives we led?’, ‘Will it one day turn out that we were the cause of the centre not holding?‘