麻豆约拍

A spiritual comment and prayer to start the day with writer and broadcaster Mark Dowd

Good Morning.

The walkers and country hikers among you, imagine you鈥檙e strolling through a picturesque village and on turning a corner you suddenly see billowing smoke ahead. The roof of a thatched cottage is on fire. You run as fast as you can and as you near the property, you spot the owners. They have their back to the house and are engaged in a furious argument about what colour to paint the gate post in front of them. You shout, and leap up and down, but they seem oblivious to the towering inferno just a few metres behind them. Their home, you imagine, is slowly going up in flames.

Just one year ago members of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told us that we had just twelve years to cap and radically reverse greenhouse gas emissions; every time I hear the items on the news with disputes about this and that, I feel like that individual jumping up and down, to no avail.

In recent days thousands from the climate protest movement Extinction Rebellion have been occupying the streets of London, demanding radical action. You may or may not approve of their tactics but one fact is undeniable: they too are sounding the alarm, albeit in a rather noisier way than those climate scientists have done traditionally for decades.

When faced with the threat of destruction, the Old Testament prophet Noah did the right thing, the virtuous thing: he probably risked huge ridicule by building an Ark that preserved not only human life, but the whole spectrum of natural existence.

Creator God: make us aware of the consequences of our collective actions and, like Noah, fill us with the strength and resolve to act with urgency and courage to protect not just ourselves, but the abundance and kaleidoscope of teeming life which is your unearned gift to us .

Amen