Love and Melancholy at 10km in the SKY

COP28 Travelogue

That’s me in seat 29L

This installment of my COP28 travelogue comes to you from 10,000 meters high, seat 29L, in an Air France jumbo jet between Paris and Dubai. According to the moving map display on the back of the headrest of seat 28L which is about 12 inches from my nose, we’re over the Black Sea right now. I chose a window seat for this leg because I thought it would be interesting to see this part of the world out the window. But alas, there hasn’t been much to see.

We were delayed in Paris. Evidently the captain didn’t like something about our plane, so he ordered a new one. That took an hour to find, clean, and prepare. Then they had to put us on a bus us to a place that looked like a parking lot for out-of-service airplanes. I don’t think it is a part of the airport that many people go to very often.

The bus dropped us off on the side of the road and we walked down a sidewalk, and then into what looked like an old warehouse. Up some stairs, and through a door that had an electronic sign over it that said “Sao Paulo”. It led onto a bridgeway connected to a plane, and I practiced my French pronunciation for the phrase, “Nous allons à Dubai, pas à Sao Paulo, n’est-ce pas?” a few times. Then walking onto the plane, I chickened out and said to the smiling stewardess, “Dubai, right?” She smiled even bigger and said “Oui monsieur” like that was a stupid question.

Our departure ended up a couple of hours late, which means that the sun has set and all I see out my window is blackness. Maybe that’s all I would have seen anyway if the sea lives up to its name.

This is quite the part of the world I’m passing through right now. Out the left wing at the north end of the sea is the Crimean peninsula and the nastiness happening between Russia and Ukraine. Out the right wing is the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, where Israelites and Palestinians are back at it again in Gaza. Straight ahead of us is Iraq and Iran. We’ll veer slightly to the right along the Persian Gulf, but if we kept going straight we’d hit Afghanistan. All of these places are broken.

That makes me think about my own country. Maybe we’re not broken to the level that we’re literally trying to kill each other. But we’re cracked. The cultural wars expose systems of thinking that pit us against each other. Yesterday I put some pictures on Instagram and Facebook about going to COP28, and that brought out one of my “friends” who took it upon himself to explain why this is a giant waste of time and money. There was a lot of virtue signaling to make sure everyone knew which team he is on… I suppose I was doing the same by posting the pics in the first place. Where does this end? Can we ever reconcile with each other? Can we even understand each other and these different allegences?

There’s a passage from the book of Revelation I’ve seen several times in the lead-up to COP28. I won’t pretend to understand the book as a whole, but some parts of it certainly resonate:

“We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty,
the One who is and who was,
because you have taken your great power
and have begun to reign.
The nations were angry,
and your wrath has come.
The time has come for judging the dead,
and for rewarding your servants the prophets
and your people who revere your name,
both great and small—
and for destroying those who destroy the earth” (Rev 11:17-18).

Is God going to destroy those who are destroying the earth? Maybe even those who are destroying each other? I think I once felt glee at that prospect — a kind of righteous indignation that came from the certainty that I was on the right side and others were getting what was coming to them. Now I feel something more like sadness at that prospect. I’m not going to try to tell God how to run the world, but wrath and destruction doesn’t sound as fun as love and forgiveness.

Maybe Revelation is mostly metaphor about the triumph of good over evil. I’m all for the good guys winning in the end, but I wonder if the bad guys need to lose? There are evil systems that need to be defeated, but I hope the people who are trapped in them (maybe I’m one of them?) can be redeemed instead of destroyed.

We’re set to land in Dubai at about 1am local time. Tomorrow the group I’m with, the Christian Climate Observers Program, is taking us to Abu Dhabi for the day to meet with a group of Muslims who are concerned about the climate too. I don’t think I’m going to try to convert them to Christianity, and I’d be surprised if they try to convert us to Islam. We’re there to talk as people of faith who are concerned that climate change is going to exacerbate the divisions among us. Maybe we should start by finding the common ground.

I won’t say that the differences between Christians and Muslims don’t matter, just like I won’t say that the differences between me and that Facebook friend don’t matter, or the differences between Republicans and Democrats. There is truth, and the truth matters. But maybe we shouldn’t jump right from that conviction to thinking we are God’s agents commissioned to dole out wrath to the people who are on opposing teams to our own.

One of the leaders of CCOP wrote a long essay about loving our enemies in the context of the climate crisis. That’s one of the places I saw the passage from Revelation recently, but he’s not advocating for wrath. He invokes Martin Luther King Jr. (who was invoking Jesus) about loving our enemies. King said:

When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.

The teams we’re on in various aspects of the world today can become consuming identity markers, and the need to fix broken systems is real. But I want to remember that I will not fix people by destroying them (or even by winning an argument). Maybe God will fix them (and me) if I do my best to love them.

My plane has crossed the Black Sea, and we’ve angled south. There are lights of cities visible below me now, and if I’m reading the map correctly, one of the big ones off in the distance is Baghdad. It’s weird thinking that I am in the very airspace that US bombers were two decades ago, pummeling that city for their supposed weapons of mass destruction. Talk about righteous wrath gone awry.

God forgive us for what we have done to those people down there, and forgive them for what they’ve done to others. Give us all a little more humility and a lot more love for each other, no matter which teams we’re on.