Good Friday Mountains

Friday, April 10, 2009

This is Holy Week in the Christian tradition.

This is a week where the faithful make some attempts to follow Jesus through the dark and difficult events leading up to his crucifixion and burial. It is the main time, I believe, for the church to focus on the shadows of life.

I spent the first part of this week in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, with a group of people trying to raise their own consciousness about the horrors of mountaintop removal coal mining.

Mountaintop removal coal mining is a radical form of strip mining where entire tops of mountains are blasted away, the material dumped into the valley (and streams) below, and the coal extracted.

It is far less expensive (to the coal companies that is) to extract coal this way than deep mining and other less extreme methods.

But it has all sorts of associated costs related to it - flooding, poisoned water supplies, coal dust and cracked foundations from blasting. (the same will happen with Open Pit Uranium Mining)

Oh, yes. And the fact that the mountains are no longer there.

So, we came to do flyovers and hear the stories of land owners and miners in the area.

The stories were horrible.

Not just for the land, but for the people.

It was surprising to me, though, that my most visceral reaction was not so much for damage to the land itself, but for the stories of damage to the people of the land.

The stolen land, the broken health and the continued poverty is outrageous.

The impunity of the coal companies and the collusion of the civic authorities is shocking.

It seemed like we were in some third-world country without the rule of law, where the dictator and his cronies could do whatever they wished without consequence. (It is happening now with Uranium Core Drillling, has poison wells but no one in our County are helping the locals!)

There were moments this week where I felt embarrassed to be human.

There were moments when I wished that fire would come down and consume the enemies of God.

There were times when I just wanted to turn away from the sorrow and loss of a helpless people.

And then there is that dull ache and paralysis of grief and my own complicity in the problems.

What do we do with all that? How do we continue to be willing to feel all that without turning away? How do we keep our eyes and hearts open in it?

That is where Holy Week comes in.

This week I felt it open my heart. It opened my heart because I recognized that the faith is not unaware of the depth of our brokenness and the darkness of our shadows. It gave me strength because I knew I was not the first or the last to see and endure such darkness.

It empowered me to not turn my face away from the mountains because the faith does not turn its face away either.

Without Holy Week, we could not have an Easter service on a mountain top removal site.