RUTHFULLY YOURS

Gertrude Stein mused, “a rose is a rose is a rose . . . ” Unless, of course, it is your Grand Inquisitor.

In the latest evidence the Left is regressing into a permanent vegetative state, the Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York City hosted “a beautiful ritual” to help combat climate change: “Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor. What do you confess to the plants in your life?”

The UTS unraveled the rationale behind their beautiful ritual in a sacred Twitter thread. In sum, religions that believed God gave humanity dominion over the earth have advanced the climate change crisis by encouraging generations to . . . exercise dominion over the earth. The seminary’s solution is to “birth new theology, new liturgy to heal and sow, replacing ones that reap and destroy.” Ergo, the root of their “new theology” is to place humanity on the level of plants as both peers and penitents. “What’s different (and the source of so much derision) is that we’re treating plants as fully created beings, divine Creation in its own right—not just something to be consumed.”

(As an aside: the Left’s menu of approved items we can consume is getting rather limited, since the climate cult claims the “crisis” is aided and abetted by eating meat—human meat excepted, of course. And now, if plants are my peers—or superior beings—can I have rice as a side dish with my porpoise free tuna? Can I even have a tuna salad sandwich? Perhaps, this is the Malthusian climate cult’s plan all along, because they hold people to be the reason for climate change? Less food; fewer people; less climate change—and with less than 12 years to accomplish all this!)

Here, we see the UTS realizes the beautiful ritual where people confessin’ the blues, sins, or anything else to a plant may, like broccoli, have its detractors. Yet, they remain undeterred: “And here’s the thing: At first, this work will seem weird. It won’t feel normal. It won’t look like how we’re used to worship looking and sounding.”

True enough. I’m not, nor have I ever been, an earth worshipping pagan (despite having listened to Led Zeppelin). Further, I don’t consider making what’s old (an earth-worshipping cult) new again (the climate-change cult) remotely miraculous, except maybe as a matter of marketing and as an indictment of the postmodernist mind. 

Still, in bad news for Ted Turner, the UTS potential to finally turn the term “humanist” into an exclusionary epithet for those who hold people superior to plants and animals in the natural order could constitute a minor miracle within the Left’s abominable cancel culture. Regardless, just because something is new and different doesn’t mean it can’t be stupid and pointless; and sometimes weird is just weird; and some “extractivism” deserves derision and—

Uh, oh! The cagey New Agers knew snarky critics such as I would be lurking and laid their trap! 

“So, if you’re poking fun, we’d ask only that you also spend a couple moments asking yourself” three questions. 

Consternated, I approached a patch of weeds growing unfettered in my backyard and sought input and, of course, forgiveness from my garden variety Grand Inquisitor. 

I repeated the UTS’s three queries to the weeds: “Do I treat plants and animals as divinely created beings?” After a fearless introspection, I replied, “Whenever I anoint my Caesar salad with grilled chicken.” 

The relief of long repressed emotions and hunger pangs welled within me. The weeds were sagely mum, as I continued the soul searching quiz: “What harm do I cause without thinking?” I closed my eyes and opened my mouth: “When I unthinkingly use any dressing but ranch on my grilled chicken Caesar salad.” 

I opened my eyes to a new reality—the neighbor staring at me as if I were nuts, which only served to prove the UTS interrogatories were making me one with legumes (or at least I’d gone to seed). I bent toward the inquisitorial weeds and braced for the final test: “How can I enter into a new relationship with the natural world?” Yes, let’s be natural, but how best to do it? 

I thought being, breathing, and talking to the weeds too obvious, so I delved deeper into the recesses of my formerly speciesist soul, and found the only acceptable answer for a newly christened climate change cultist: “I could die and let my corpse feed the natural world—including that cannibal in Sweden.” Gratified, I bolted upright and, like Chris Matthews, “I felt this thrill going up my leg” as my epiphany gripped me.

But as UTS warns, “Change isn’t so easy. It’s no simple business to break free from comfortable habits and thoughts. But if we do not change, we will perish. And so will plants and animals God created and called ‘good.’ We must lean into this discomfort; God waits for us there.”

If God was waiting for me in the weeds, then He, too, got poison ivy. Having scratched my itch to understand Union Theological Seminary’s new theology and beautiful ritual, I proceeded to scratch my leg and everywhere else, all the while wondering if their new liturgy deemed my naturally occurring discomfort as atonement for the sin of not being green—literally.

Whatever. It was time to get up and go exercise my domination and despoliation of the natural works of our peers the plants by grabbing some calamine lotion.