Change Islands, Elihu, and Creation Time

Autumn Peltier 

While we were staying on Change Islands, Newfoundland, for several weeks earlier this month I read some excellent novels as well as books of Creation theology in honour of Creation Time in the liturgical calendar. The setting of solitude and beauty was ideal for both. 

I reread Pope Francis' encyclical, Laudato Si, which I first read on Change Islands four years ago, shortly after it was published. It is a remarkable document in many respects, although Francis' vision is clouded by Roman Catholic dogma regarding reproduction.



I also worked my way through a couple of books on Job and the Creation themes in that challenging Older Testament story. Wisdom's Wonder by William Brown offered many insights, including a section on Elihu, the young man who offers a different perspective that the three older friends of the beleaguered Job who serve up unhelpful responses to his misery. Elihu is not impressed by the other three and suggests that age does not always offer wisdom:

“I am young in years,
    and you are aged;
therefore I was timid and afraid
    to declare my opinion to you.
7 I said, ‘Let days speak,
    and many years teach wisdom.’
8 But truly it is the spirit in a mortal,
    the breath of the Almighty,[b] that makes for understanding.
9 It is not the old[c] that are wise,
    nor the aged that understand what is right.
10 Therefore I say, ‘Listen to me;
    let me also declare my opinion.’

Job 32: 6-10

Elihu dispenses with platitudes and shares a cosmic vision of Job's place within the universe, the solar system, and the natural order of planet Earth. As with the Divine Speeches beginning in chapter 38 Elihu tells Job to zoom out rather than zoom in as he attempts to make sense of his dilemma. The message of this "renegade sage," as Brown describes him is unsettling and intended to "clear the cobwebs of age."

This made me think of the Climate Strike movement which has gained momentum around the world, under the prophetic leadership of Swedish teen Greta Thunberg, and other young people including Autumn Peltier, a First Nations teen from Manitoulin Island. They have spoken in the past week at the United Nations, an attempt by elders to gain wisdom and insight through different eyes. 

Thunberg has been blunt as she's spoken before various bodies in Europe and now in North America and some people, often older privileged men, hate her for it. Maxime Bernier of the so-called Peoples Party of Canada tweeted:

@GretaThunberg is clearly mentally unstable. Not only autistic, but obsessive-compulsive, eating disorder, depression and lethargy, and she lives in a constant state of fear. She wants us to feel the same: “I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I fear every day.”

This defamation of Thunberg was incredibly offensive, factually inaccurate, and, ironically, rife with fear. What would possess a grown man to make this sort of public statement? Of course she was also mocked by the president of the United States, an infantile man without a scrap of wisdom about anything, let alone care for the Earth.

I pray that the young sages of our precious planetary home will awaken us to the climate crisis and that Christians and other people of faith will listen and respond. I pray that God, the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer will give us an expansive and hopeful vision which clears away our cobwebs.


Michael de Adder