The psalm in the Sunday service was 148:
7 Praise the Lord from the earth, *
you sea-monsters and all deeps;
8 Fire and hail, snow and fog, *
tempestuous wind, doing his will;
9 Mountains and all hills, *
fruit trees and all cedars;
10 Wild beasts and all cattle, *
creeping things and winged birds;
It was supposed to be about praise and abundance but it was hard not to notice how many of these things are dying. The leviathans, in the deeps, for instance, are starving; emaciated gray whales are washing up dead around San Francisco Bay. The theory is they were supposed to have fattened up by straining through the mud at the bottom of Arctic waters for crustaceans, which feed on fallen algae, which would have grown on the bottom of Arctic ice if there’d been ice in the Arctic for it to grow on. Instead the whales are trying to scrape up whatever might live in the polluted mud in lower latitudes, and it’s not working. There’s a hole in the food system in the deeps. Things are missing, the way the creeping things are missing, and the winged birds that eat the creeping things are in decline. Except for the creeping things that are killing the cedars. Those creeping things are flourishing. And the earthworms creeping north into the ever-warming boreal forest, breaking carbon loose from the dirt there. The fruit trees are being sprayed with antibiotics, over the protests of everyone who cares about infectious disease. The National Weather Service is warning that tempestuous winds are due over the southern and central Plains today, with “very large hail,” flooding, and tornadoes.
