“Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.”
With this phrase, the Episcopal Church ushers us into the season of Lent. It’s a visceral gut punch of reality: You will die. And every Ash Wednesday of my adult life, I’ve taken this message personally, but this year…
This year I’m wondering if these words are not also directed to life on a larger scale. Before 2026, I didn’t worry too much about whether democracy in the USA would fail. I do now. The weather in Arizona has trended hotter and I’ve contemplated what might happen if the Earth’s weather becomes more intense, but only recently noticed the decline of birds in our yard. I certainly didn’t foresee the possibility of another catastrophic world war in my lifetime, but every news cycle seems to bring it closer. Until my son instructed me on the power of artificial intelligence, not only to take jobs but also to empower autocrats and military strikes, I hadn’t worried too much about AI. But now…
None of these threats to my country, the planet, or the human species are new. Of course, I know that nothing which lives, including the organized communities making up larger interconnected forms of life, will last forever. But now, the scale of death looms over me. The dust I will become traces a pattern of what will happen to everything… and that is not comforting. If it were just me that died and the earth went spinning around as always, mortality would be easier to accept. This year, though, I’ve given up hope that I will escape taking part in the death throes of my beloved world.
But Lent doesn’t end on a note of doom. It points ahead to Easter and the Resurrection. That’s where I want to connect with science fiction today: Sci Fi stories are often about a future no one today can imagine. They face down inevitable despair with a glimpse of life– social, environmental, cultural, and religious–that arises after death, in a future time, sometimes on another planet altogether. It’s true that the tale can be one of pain and despair, or the story may be so far away only a very thin filament connects it to our present situation. Still, Sci Fi gives me hope—if I and others can envision life rising out of death on these larger scales, certainly God can conceive it too. I also hope, in some form, I’m around to see what happens!
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