Joke

And It Was Good, 1983, Harold Shaw Publishers: (pp. 21-22)

We do not love each other without changing each other. We do not observe the world around us without in some way changing it, and being changed ourselves. To listen to the news on radio or television is to be part of what is going on, and to be modified by it. But how on earth--or heaven--can that be reciprocal? We are changed by war and rumor of war, but how can we in turn change what changes us?

There are some obvious, small ways. We can join, if we are female, the League of Women voters. We can do volunteer work (despite a nine-to-five job) in the hospice movement. We can write our senators and congressmen. In the Greek play Lysistrata the women were so outraged by war that they banded together against the men to stop it. We are not as helpless as we may seem.

Those are a few of the obviously active ways. But there are less obvious ones that are equally important. I was asked how we could pray for our planet, with the devastating wars which are tearing it apart, with greed fouling the air we breathe and the water we drink. And I replied that the only way I know how to pray for the body of our planet is to see it as God meant it to be, to see the sky as we sometimes see it in the country in wintertime, crisp with stars, or to see the land with spring moving across it, the fruit trees flowering and the grass greening, and at night hearing he peers calling back an forth, and the high, sweet singing of the bats.