The writer Robert Macfarlane says that we are living in an age of ‘untimely surfacings' - of ‘unburials’, as he calls them. In this globally overheated era of ours the long-hidden dead are literally rising again from the earth.
Across the Arctic, ancient methane deposits are leaking through “windows” in the Earth opened by thawing permafrost. In the so-called “cursed fields” of northern Russia, permafrost melt is exposing 19th-century animal burial grounds containing naturally occurring anthrax spores; a 2016 outbreak infected 23 people and killed a child. Retreating glaciers are yielding the bodies of those engulfed by their ice many years before – the dead of the ongoing conflict in Kashmir, or the “White war” of 1915–18 in the Italian mountains. Near the peak of San Matteo, three Habsburg soldiers melted out of a serac at an altitude of 12,000ft, hanging upside down. At Camp One on Everest in 2017, after a period of unseasonal warmth, a mountaineer’s hand appeared, reaching out of the ice into which he had been frozen. Gold miners in the Yukon recently unearthed a 50,000-year-old wolf pup from the permafrost, eerily preserved right down to the curl of its upper lip.
At the same time and for the same reason as these silent, strange resurrections a new spirit is emerging in our world - a spirit of yearning to reverse the destruction that humankind has wreaked on the earth, and to start over, begin again. This spirit is expressing itself through the mouths of children - like Greta Thunberg, the 15-year-old who told a UN climate conference that in the absence of global leadership on climate change, “the young people would have to take the responsibility [our leaders] should have taken long ago.”
In this spirit the old and young gather together to advocate change: last weekend a former Archbishop of Canterbury sat on a pavement outside St Pauls Cathedral in a prayer vigil with dozens of others and At Marble Arch, Sheila Collins, from Cardiff, an 80-year-old member of Christian Climate Action, locked herself to the underside of a lorry. She said, “It’s very uncomfortable being locked under this lorry, but it’s nothing compared with the suffering that climate change is causing, and it’s a small price to pay if we can get the Government to act,” and she continued, “I do this for my grandchildren, as I worry what kind of a world they are going to be left with. If it means I get arrested, then so be it. When Jesus saw injustice, and the poor being exploited in the Temple, he wasn’t passive: he took action and drove out the money lenders.”
This spirit at work in the world, I call it a resurrection spirit because it’s new life springing out of old, it’s humans breaking out of a place of decay to reach towards a new way of flourishing. ....
[This is the beginning of my Easter Day talk today, Easter 2019: This is the time for Resurrection People.]
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