Posted Tuesday, January 13 2009 @ 05:20 PM PST
"At the tipping point of this
kairos," writes Catherine Keller, Professor of Constructive Theology, to President Obama, "we know that the Green Shift is possible." Will Obama use the moment and the momentum to make the deep change the planet needs?
Catherine Keller on the Green Shift
What an unbearable, inhuman weight—the weight of a planet in peril—has fallen upon your shoulders. Please keep working out! Also please know that we know you are not the messiah. You are neither the first nor the second coming. We get this; we are managing our expectations. I hear your favorite theologian is Niebuhr, the great realist, who will help steer you away from the messianic pretensions, the imperial self-righteousness, to which our nation, born in revolt against empire, is ironically prone.
However, here is the mystery, the wonder: you have actually stimulated a messianic force field. The wave of joy that spread across the world on November 4 has the character of messianic hope: not for (another) savior but for a world of just and peaceable relations in harmony with the earth. “And all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” The sort of people who read Tikkun had never given up on that hope but had pretty much divorced it from the United States government! The messianic moment is what another theologian, Tillich, called the kairos time—different from mere chronos time. New possibilities break into history, not to end history but to change it.
That world-wave of hope has not dissipated but is deepening. It has the power that secularism alone does not—to shift the messianic imperialism, like an electric field. Not because the religious Right will convert, but because at its fringes the youth are already shifting to creation care. Because the religious majorities of the world desire what you desire for the planet. And especially because a new, complex network of alliances—a multitude of multitudes spilling across all the traditional boundaries of class, race, gender, sex, religion, and species—has in you come to power. You are yourself a multitude, a manifold; as Walt Whitman, wild for democracy, wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Even as we watch you reach out toward politicians wary of those multitudes, we trust you—is it the “team of rivals” or “turn the other cheek”? We trust that the pragmatic satisfaction of these synergies will not exhaust but rather energize your cosmopolitan vision. Kennedy took us to the moon—which has above all given us a new and cosmic perspective on the earth. The kairos of your presidency is that of the earth: we stand at the moment when it is not yet too late to save ourselves from its radical degradation.
The moment will pass. Either you will have yielded (all too humanly, tragically, not intending) to the economic pressure to defer, deny, and downplay. Short-term realism will have triumphed over the reality of the shared future. For most people the International Panel on Climate Change science remains too abstract, too distant. Every other emergency feels more urgent. Against the current momentum of destruction, a wimpy effort will be as good as none. Or you will have grasped the opportunity in this crisis. Your staff will memorize Gore’s gem, “The Climate for Change,” an op-ed published on November 9 in the New York Times. You will lead this nation in leading the world to replace fossil fuels with carbon-free energy sources within this crucial decade. You will unleash entrepreneurial American know-how to bring on the Green New Deal. Corporations will get no more bailouts or tax breaks without committing to rigorous standards of worker rights and environmental protection. Little centers committed to building a green United States will appear in every neighborhood, largely staffed by volunteers, sharing concrete guidelines, tax breaks, and tips for conservation and tikkun. Fair trade coffee will be served; collaborations economic, social, and festive will be hatched. Paint those centers red, white, blue—and green. Fire, air, water, earth—the four elements!
At the tipping point of this kairos, we know that the Green Shift is possible. After all, your election had seemed to be the Impossible. You, sir, truck in the improbable! Indeed the change you will bring is possible only because we face the abyss. Perhaps every moment of new creation comes shadowed by apocalypse. Strangely, like the urge to jump off the cliff, Armageddon becomes a temptation. For instance, President Johnson’s great civil rights legacy is tragically tainted by his escalation of the war in Vietnam. Having to demonstrate your “tough-mindedness,” your “realism,” you face a similar temptation with Afghanistan. We believe (“help thou my unbelief”) that you can pull back from this brink. Yes, you can. Otherwise there will be no Green Shift. As Niebuhr knew too well, “love of the enemy” does not move straightforwardly into politics. We have to do with “the insights of a religion which knows that the law of love is an impossible possibility.”
The biblical language of the new creation, the renewal of the heaven (which by the way meant “atmosphere”) and the earth, of Shalom, or the common/wealth of God, justice for the vulnerable, love of the alien, is fraught with hope for a messianic age. Such ancient ideals are possibilities seeking partial—and realistic—realization. In process theology, we know that God will not realize them for us. She “lures” us to actualize the unprecedented. Yes, we can. Having been elected without exploiting Judeo-Christian symbols, you surely have earned the right to summon their mobilizing force. Of course, as Jefferson put it, “It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.”
Forgive me, dear president, if I have preached. I mean only to clap with the trees.
Catherine Keller is Professor of Constructive Theology at Drew University. Her books include Apocalypse Now & Then, Face of the Deep, God and Power, and On the Mystery.
