Theological Perspectives on Excess Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Theological Perspectives on Excess Greenhouse Gas Emissions 

Rev. Douglas Olds
(all rights reserved)

5 October 2018

Isaiah 44.9 All who make idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit; their witnesses neither see nor know. And so they will be put to shame. 10 Who would fashion a god or cast an image that can do no good? 11 Look, all its devotees shall be put to shame; the artisans too are merely human. Let them all assemble, let them stand up; they shall be terrified, they shall all be put to shame.
12 The ironsmith fashions it and works it over the coals, shaping it with hammers, and forging it with his strong arm; he becomes hungry and his strength fails, he drinks no water and is faint. 13 The carpenter stretches a line, marks it out with a stylus, fashions it with planes, and marks it with a compass; he makes it in human form, with human beauty, to be set up in a shrine. 14 He cuts down cedars or chooses a holm tree or an oak and lets it grow strong among the trees of the forest. He plants a cedar and the rain nourishes it. 15 Then it can be used as fuel. Part of it he takes and warms himself; he kindles a fire and bakes bread. Then he makes a god and worships it, makes it a carved image and bows down before it. 16 Half of it he burns in the fire; over this half he roasts meat, eats it and is satisfied. He also warms himself and says, “Ah, I am warm, I can feel the fire!” 17 The rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, bows down to it and worships it; he prays to it and says, “Save me, for you are my god!”
18 They do not know, nor do they comprehend; for their eyes are shut, so that they cannot see, and their minds as well, so that they cannot understand. 19 No one considers, nor is there knowledge or discernment to say, “Half of it I burned in the fire; I also baked bread on its coals, I roasted meat and have eaten. Now shall I make the rest of it an abomination? Shall I fall down before a block of wood?” 20 He feeds on ashes; a deluded mind has led him astray, and he cannot save himself or say, “Is not this thing in my right hand a fraud?”

--The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. (1989). (Is 44:9–20). Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.

Alienation is humankind’s greatest existential problem--alienation from God, from nature, from society, of the human soul from the human body.  Because of alienation, humankind struggles with feelings of insecurity and insufficiency.  In their idolatrous desire to become like gods, Adam and Eve as the mythological representatives of fallen human nature misapply their freedom in what they misconstrue as capricious and chaotic nature—nature perceived at times graciously fecund or punitively hostile.  This psychological dualism leads humanity through history to fantasize looming, recurrent scarcities and consequently to build stores of hoarded goods and commodities to serve as material security. Alienation stimulates Adam and Eve’s modern human heirs to pursue a destructive environmental ethic of hoarding and extractive exploitation of resources unbounded by concerns of future generations, marginalized groups, indigenous peoples with historical land tenure, and other species.

The atmosphere is a fundamental creation of God for the flourishing of human and non-human life. Carbon loading of the atmosphere from human activity threatens to cause (additional) catastrophic environmental degradation, social upheaval, extinctions, and unjust distribution of costs and privation from climate and ecological change.  In terms of God’s justice and humanity’s mission for global creation care (Gen 2.9-15), Christians have a special call to reduce the carbon emissions from their economic and householding activities. 

Yet attempts to ground an environmental ethic in God’s directive to Adam in Genesis are notoriously hampered by conflicting or non-reconciled witnesses: for humanity to have dominion over (Gen. 1.28) or to maintain care of Creation as trustees (Gen 2.15).  This conflict between humanity’s prerogatives over and within nature suggests the anthropological split of body and soul (Waetjen 2018[1]) narrated in the primeval history of Genesis. From his Native American perspective, Tinker (2009) grounds environmental ethics in a recovery of the primacy of the doctrine of the Creator that redirects humanity’s focus onto nature’s balance. Tinker criticizes the Church’s primary emphasis on the Fall of humanity and consequent need for redemption because it subordinates nature to the psycho-historical narrative of humanity’s search for security. This subordination suggests that humankind is primarily alienated from self and only derivatively, at most, from natural Creation and its balances and harmonies.

Whereas nature is endowed with resources and environmental capacities that could deliver material sufficiency to all, post-reformation Western Civilization has grounded its political economy on satisfying unmediated appetites on those most willing and able to pay--appetites that neither limit themselves to the Creator’s intent for nature nor for the needs for sharing by marginalized peoples and future generations. The result is rampant injustices: gender injustice, racial injustice, class injustice, and intergenerational injustice in the contemporary distribution of benefits and costs of the carbon-intensive economy.  The Western economy of promoting combustion-fueled material growth to satisfy the private preference of wealth weighted by ability to pay has created a society in conflict with Jesus’s gospel of the kingdom of God.  From the perspective of the Global South, the Accra Confession (2004)[2] asserts that the “whole Creation is groaning” (Ro. 8.22) under the weight of colonial injustices and environmental imbalances derived from an economy that meets insatiable desires by Western wealthy for the satisfaction of their unjustified, private, and autonomous preferences.

Specifically, Western political economies based on rising levels of carbon combustion are idolatrous as illustrated in the parodic account of Deutero-Isaiah (Watts 2005[3], Holter 1995[4]). It is often alleged that there is no Biblical analogy to apply to the issue of Global Warming and Climate Injustice, so that secular ethical foundations must be developed.  However, to my knowledge and research, Isaiah 44.9-20 has yet to be applied to context of combustible resources, the unbounded  and unsustainable scale of which is the root of the Greenhouse Effect.  In that account, the idol maker diverts combustible resources away from their Biblical function-- utilitarian sufficiency for personal warming and cooking--toward the creation of idols.  Following the strand of the Biblical witness condemning idolatry from the Pentateuch through the Prophets to the visions of luxurious consumption in Rev. 17-19, the charge of idolatry in the scale and mis-allocation of carbon fuel stocks can be applied to contemporary Western society.

Idolatry  God’s violates God's primary commandment (Ex 20.3) and invokes God's protological curse (Dt 27.15).   Humanity that pursues a society heedless of the misuse of combustible fuels engages in the most foundational sin against the Creator, and assaults God’s atmospheric mover (Gen 1.2), the Holy ruach (Boff 2015;[5] Wallace 1996[6]).  In idolatry, the alienated human agent considers himself the solipsistic center of his environment. To the extent they are both willing to pay and able to pay, agents such as these have collectivized to design an economic system of unhindered material growth to deliver luxuries to themselves rather than delivering capabilities for universal human flourishings (Nussbaum 2008[7]) or sufficient primary goods to the least advantaged (Rawls 1971[8]). Increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere is a result of this idolatrous system.

Despite its idolatrous turn toward a Kingdom of Oil (Robb 2010)[9], humanity is not the sole arbiter of its appreciation or use.  Psalm 104 portrays the creation of the natural world absent human intervention and management as it valorizes distinct elements of the natural, non-human world as complete wholeness and beauty--apart from human beings.  David both in his wilderness exile and in the psalms attributed to him demonstrates an awareness of the sacredness of nature—not only hierarchical but reciprocal and horizontal. In Psalm 148, the created animals of the world praise God.

In addition to the grave transgression against God in its idolatry, the modern society of the Global Northwest incurs a carbon debt to future generations and to unjustly burdened populations and groups when it puts out greenhouse gases above the capacity of the atmosphere to act as an absorptive sink.  The Old Testament debt code that an insurrectionist, liberationist Jesus advances (Robb 2010) gives additional warrant for an atmospheric care ethic that distributes costs and benefits fairly and allocates equal weight to future generations’ need for nature’s balances and harmony. The Debt Code’s Jubilee provides a Biblical vision for a grand, global reckoning of debts—climate and financial—if humanity can rise above its private alienations to reconcile with others, with God, and with its natural milieu--and become aware of its responsibility to build the Kingdom of God.

---

[1] Herman Waetjen, “American Identity Politics as a Challenge to the Flawed Religions of the Book,” 2018.

[2] World Communion of Reformed Churches, “The Accra Confession” (2004), accessed October 5, 2018, http://wcrc.ch/accra/the-accra-confession.

[3] John D. W. Watts, Isaiah 34–66, 2nd ed., Word Biblical Commentary 25 (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2005).

[4] Knut Holter, Second Isaiah’s Idol-Fabricaton Passages, Beiträge zur biblischen Exegese und Theologie Bd. 28 (Frankfurt am Main; New York: P. Lang, 1995).

[5] Leonardo Boff, Come, Holy Spirit: Inner Fire, Giver of Life, and Comforter of the Poor (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2015).

[6] Mark I. Wallace, Fragments of the Spirit: Nature, Violence, and the Renewal of Creation (New York: Continuum, 1996).

[7] Martha Craven Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, The John Robert Seeley Lectures 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008).

[8] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971).

[9] Carol Wind Robb, Sun, Soil, Spirit: Biblical Ethics and Climate Change (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010).

6 December 2017

(Public) Editor

The New York Times

620 Eighth Avenue

New York, NY, 10018

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

The New York Times recently published an op-ed from John Yoo, the author of the George W. Bush administration’s interrogation memos while an official in Bush’s Justice Department. Yoo -- who should have stood trial for war crimes -- was given a platform on October 31, 2017 NYT op-ed page (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/opinion/trump-pardon-manafort.html?_r=0) to opine whether or not to fire Robert Mueller.

We believe that the NYT's endorsement of Yoo as an opinion leader was politically and ethically inappropriate, identifying him in the bio at the end of the column not as the author of the repugnant Justice Department memos that justified waterboarding and other illegal methods of interrogation, but benignly as a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and an authority on power.  This biased and amnesiac identification is a misapplication of the public trust and is why your paper still needs a Public Editor.

We further believe that the NYT displays a moral blindness about corrupted functionaries like Yoo. David Talbot notes, “War criminals like Yoo, along with other warmongers from the Bush and Obama eras, dominate newspaper op-ed pages and TV news channels and even public radio stations. They are held up as the sane alternative” to Trump and his people.

We attest that it is critically important for healthy democracy to remind its media gatekeepers like the NYT: there is nothing "distinguished" or “civilized” about John Yoo. His opinions about politics and ethics -- even when given a place in the New York Times – disguise a history that is corrupted and coarsening.  The taint of corruption adheres to the Times when its editorial forum suggests not only respectability of Yoo, but also commits to an ongoing publicity of depraved gravitas. Our nation's use of torture has degraded victims, perpetrators, and policy makers, and has damaged the integrity of our nation.  Men like Yoo do not merit a place in the pages of the New York Times so long as their operations inside our republic continue bearing rotten fruit.

Respectfully yours,

Rev. Douglas Olds,  et al

Anti-Torture Team

First Presbyterian Church

72 Kensington Road

San Anselmo, CA 94960

FESTIVE LOVE

FESTIVE LOVE

Rev. Douglas Olds

Summer of Love Sermon Series

First Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo (CA)

16 July 2017

Song of Songs 2.^8-17

The voice of my beloved! Look, he comes,

leaping upon the mountains,

bounding over the hills.

⁹My beloved is like a gazelle

or a young stag.

Look, there he stands

behind our wall,

gazing in at the windows,

looking through the lattice.

¹⁰My beloved speaks and says to me:

“Arise, my love, my fair one,

and come away;

¹¹for now the winter is past,

the rain is over and gone.

¹²The flowers appear on the earth;

the time of singing has come,

and the voice of the turtledove

is heard in our land.

¹³The fig tree puts forth its figs,

and the vines are in blossom;

they give forth fragrance.

Arise, my love, my fair one,

and come away.

¹⁴O my dove, in the clefts of the rock,

in the covert of the cliff,

let me see your face,

let me hear your voice;

for your voice is sweet,

and your face is lovely.

¹⁵Catch us the foxes,

the little foxes,

that ruin the vineyards—

for our vineyards are in blossom.”

¹⁶My beloved is mine and I am his;

he pastures his flock among the lilies.

¹⁷Until the day breathes

and the shadows flee,

turn, my beloved, be like a gazelle

or a young stag on the cleft mountains.

Let's go back fifty years. 1967's mind-bending summer came after winters of discontent.  Discontent with the status quo, discontent with the national security state. Discontent with the church and economic establishment.  Nationally, groups were experimenting with social change. With its crowds of playful, skateboarding, face-painted hippies and slogan of “music, love and flowers", San Francisco drew crowds trying out peacemaking, play, and obliterated boundaries. The ongoing Vietnam War was a border war on a global scale, and the war's protesters presented themselves in the Summer of Love by an explicitly political context. Presenting themselves as patriotic “Volunteers,” they urged Americans to “tear down the walls” so that “we can be together.”[i]

On the other hand, I was an 8-year-old in Michigan where there was an opposed experiment toward social change: by violence—in what were called "race riots" in Detroit and in my hometown of Grand Rapids. Returning late one night from Expo '67 in Canada, my family's station wagon was stopped by shotgun wielding police. They demanded of my father why we were breaking curfew enacted to combat local rioting and arson. 

I was young so didn't participate immediately in either experiment with social change, yet unknowingly that summer was born in my soul.  From these small dreams in the summer of 1967, my older peers began to try out a civilization with love as its foundation.  Practitioners in personal liberation let their love live as if all were watching, and lived as if their love could create primeval nature anew, could bring down boundaries, lived out in a delirious festival of live and let live, personal liberation, and playful passion.

Ira Chernus writes that "The psychedelic rock shows, light shows, and posters were all meant to turn life into that single swirling stream, dissolving every imaginable boundary line, and so teaching that reality itself is just such a stream. To quote the nineteenth-century poet Walt Whitman (as so many did [that summer]), let yourself be “loos’d of limits and imaginary lines” and “you are henceforth secure, whatever comes or goes.”[ii] In this, the seekers accepted the "Be-In" with its traditional Christian emphasis of a divinely-ordained, benign order to the universe.

However by 1967, young "people had gotten tired of the austerities of Christian discipline and the misanthropy of the [church’s] Doctrine of Original Sin."[iii] Indeed, Original Sin found no place in the reunited Presbyterian Church’s Confession of 1967—a Confession that could warrant its own sermon regarding the heady days of that time.  The environmental crisis was a foremost theme in the Confession of 1967, like for the seekers in the Summer of Love.

By a dream of a civilization founded on love, the young in San Francisco "dramatized for themselves a world that never knew Original Sin, and so still existed in a state of original blessing. In that imagined world it was no sin to ‘dance, sing, feast, make music, and love.’”[iv]  They reconnoitered a new Renaissance hand in hand with Spirit and nature, to set up a counter to the puritanism that runs deep in American society which accepted environmental degradation as a consequence of the Fall of humankind from grace.

Yet the Summer of Love’s attempts at a new civilization of unbounded love "accepted the inevitability of insecurity, the truth that in the stream of life, the next moment is always as unpredictable as it is uncontrollable."[v]  It was an attempt to recapture both responsibility and innocence. Theologically the era had much to do with our churches recapturing the doctrine of humans universally being made in the image of God, and therefore primevally good.//

Our text this morning suggests the same desire for a liberating, festive love, and a pristine time before the fall of original sin. The Song of Song is scripture’s most delirious and at times psychedelic ode to sexual and playful love set in nature:

  

Song 6. 4 You are beautiful as Tirzah, my love…

    5Turn away your eyes from me,

    for they overwhelm me!

    Your hair is like a flock of goats,

[streaming] down the slopes of Gilead.

    6Your teeth are like a flock of ewes,

    that have come up from the washing;

    all of them bear twins,

    and not one among them is bereaved.

    7Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate…

…and so it goes, suggesting a surrealistic fascination with the loved one--a psychedelic blending of desire and nature. This is an exploration of what it means to be made in the image of God.

The Song of Songs (also known as the Song of Solomon) has been a curiosity to Biblical readers for millennia.  There is no direct mention of God (save 8.6), and its unabashed sexuality and forward female voice were elided by ancient ascetics and later churchmen.  In order to downplay the physicality and bring forward theology, premodern commentators primarily read the Song as allegory.  That is, the Song of Songs is read as a love poem between Israel’s God and the people, or later, Christ’s love for his church. 

In contrast with an allegorical reading, modern interpreters have tended to recover the Song’s historical sense.  It is read now as a literal poem of sexual expression and longing for the garden.  Our friend Annette Schellenberg formerly at San Francisco Theological Seminary proposed that the Song of Songs was a performed drama at ancient Jewish festivals.  If this is the appropriate reading, we may note the Garden metaphors and images, so that God, even if unnamed, might be approving of this mutuality and physical desire for egalitarian closeness that harkens back to the creation of Eden and the male and female Adam and Eve.  Unlike in the rest of the Old Testament where sexuality is linked with the need for posterity and procreation, in both the pre-fall Eden and in the Song of Songs, physical closeness and mutuality between the sexes is idealized in and for itself.

The woman’s love is not something to be taken nor even earned—it is given freely, mutually.  It is a message for our current age of taking advantage or commercializing love for sex.

The Song of Songs dramatizes physical flourishing and mutuality of an idealized community—a lush primeval Garden outfitted by the Creator for the freely chosen enjoyment of its denizens. The Song of Songs reenacts this innocent and childlike delight in the Creation where sex is unencumbered by violence, commerce, coercion, manipulation or one-sidedness. 

The Song of Songs’ desire is not a modern eroticism.  It is mutual, other-directed, and not narcissistic. The Song's desire is the desire for the God-given qualities of the lover.  The metaphors of creation and of peaceful and harmonious communal life in the Garden thus locate the desire in God’s peace and wholeness.  Reading the Song of Songs has us meditate on the lovers’ desire for noble qualities in the other—what is God-given--and not on some base qualities or shallow characteristics.

There is no sense of that modern affliction, narcissism, in view of the Song of Songs. Narcissism is concerned with fulfilling the self's objectives.  At one point, the lover notes the object of her affection likewise desires her.  But she shows no inordinate thrill at this prospect, other than idealizing the mutuality of desire, clearly God’s intention for love.

So much of modern erotic desire fulfills the narcissist’s craving.  The movie Jerry Maguire had the line, “you complete me.”  The narcissist’s desire is on personal fulfillment, the “You complete me” which is not in view in the Song of Songs. Seeing myself in the lover's eyes is not in view of the Song of Songs. Concerned with commerce and market relationships of supply and demand, the modern Don Juan narcissist commercializes sex and derives self-worth from a bevy of lovers admiring his sexual "fitness."

The Song of Songs does not have such commercial or market aspects to sexuality.  The woman is not given in marriage by her parents, but freely chooses her beloved. We indeed encounter an ancient’s understanding of what erotic love is inside a Garden of beauty and sufficiency (which is not to say glut or hoard).  And in that ideal Garden space, love is other directed, playful, and mutual.  This is a world in which marriage's highest values are loyalty and care taking, not personal fulfillment or the self's private happiness.  Such a love mirrors the divine love, the ideal desire for what is beautiful, elegant, and good.

The Love desire in the Song of Songs might therefore be seen as an invitation by God to Israel to be created anew by love and then take part in further new creation through it. It is the love shown by the woman who poured pure nard on Jesus’ feet, unconcerned with its scarcity, unconcerned with its interpretation by onlookers.  It is lavish and sensual, a Garden-pruning act readied by virtuous servant-love. It brings harmony and solidarity to the family, neighborhood, and nation.

In the Song of Songs, we hear the invitation to come into such a garden of new creation: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come.”

Come, dear ones, into a world of grace! This world has transformative power in relationships, in nature, and in creation. However grim things may have been in seasons past, winter will yield to spring, [degradation to flourishing, suffering to joy]. The rain will go, flowers will appear, and the season of glad songs will arrive at last.

Who does not know the joy of the end of winter? People shed their heavy coats and scarves, trading them in on shorts and flip-flops. Gratefully they gather on college campuses or in public parks to enjoy a picnic…in the sun, listening to music from the park stage, pretending not to notice as lovers kiss, turning to catch a glimpse of a game of Frisbee from the corner of their eyes. In such a [summer], love delights and explodes in [a boundless stream of] playfulness.

Indian theologian K. P. Aleaz [suggests], “God starts the play, with God as the starting point and then proceeds to [the Garden] creation. Humans, on the other hand, start the play in creation and then proceed to God. Both meet by play[ing in the Garden]. The connecting [movement between God and human] is play.”

In today’s passage from the Song of [Songs], [festive] love and playfulness are profoundly integrated with all of life’s realities. Even when love is frozen, hurricanes devastate…,or [withering climate change is in on the horizon], God’s love for creation and creation’s interplay with God explodes and blossoms anew. God’s grace transforms the world, even as the grace of the world transforms God. Playful grace causes all kinds of metamorphoses to take place.[vi]

These metamorphoses proceed when we alter our landscapes of violence and apathy with festive love of neighbor. The Bible, like our seekers from 1967, has the deep ethical trajectory to make love and not war. Violence and playfulness are opposed. //

As a postscript to Detroit’s 1967 “racial unrest:” by the Summer of 1968 it avoided a recrudescence of violence by being brought together in the World Series run of its baseball team Tigers. The Detroit Tigers’ success brought neighbors together in a way that avoided other city and police riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. This was festive love on a city level.  People could sense the garden in the play of the ballpark.  Detroiters broke down the borders between neighborhoods and took up the spirit of the Summer of Love.

The Song of Songs is telling us that when lovers are happy, the community flourishes in the guidance of its God. God, who created the Garden, invites us to complete the Garden by our love and not by our oppression. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sang at the time: “We got to get ourselves back to the Garden.”  God has put it in our hands to restore the garden. We finish God’s Good Garden by combating coercion, climate change, injustice, and apathetic destruction of life.  This coheres with what the seekers of 1967 were experimenting.

Don’t look for someone or something to complete you—to take away your hard-wiring for suffering.  Look instead for someone you can love completely and can help you build God's world! This is the kind of love in view in the Song of Songs and for the adored in Psalm 45. May we all be privileged to glimpse this festive, selfless love from our lover and in our neighborhoods. Imagine a world that could be, even though those in power insist such a world is both impossible and undesirable. Instead, we all have the grace to reach toward a festive love, garden world. Let us take up anew the vanguard of the Summer of Love with playfulness and without narcissism's self-regard. 

Let it be so for you and me. 

---

[i] Ira Chernus, The Summer of Love Had the Right Idea: Tear Down Those Walls So We Can Be Together, Alternet June 19, 2017. http://www.alternet.org/human-rights/psychedelic-spin-national-security accessed 27 June 2017.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Henry-Crowe, S. T. (2009). Pastoral Perspective on Song of Solomon 2:8–13. In D. L. Bartlett & B. B. Taylor (Eds.), Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year B (Vol. 4, p. 4). Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

Memories of The East Grand Rapids Tornado 50 Years Ago

Memories of The East Grand Rapids Tornado 50 Years Ago

Douglas B. Olds (photos and text, all rights reserved)

April 2017

           Date      Magnitude          Start Lat/Log           End Lat/Log               Length       Width    

   1967-04-21          3              42°54'N / 85°46'W    42°57'N / 85°30'W    13.60 mi      400yds 

Fatalities              Injuries                Property Damage            Crop Damage     Affected County

            0              32                             25.0M                                     0                      Kent

--http://www.usa.com/east-grand-rapids-mi-natural-disasters-extremes.htm

Friday, April 21, 1967.  It had been an unusually hot and humid day, and I had stripped down to my t-shirt on the walk home from 2nd grade at Breton Downs Elementary. I stopped and played in the 2x4 and plywood skeletons of houses under construction on the newly cut Whitfield Road--blond architectural bones under a hazy blue sky. One was upon construction moved into by Brian McNamara's family. By dinner time it was stormy, and at 7pm my two younger brothers and I were in our pajamas, sitting on our parents’ bed in an upstairs bedroom (where the only TV was) waiting for the black and white serial “Marshal Dillon” to come on channel 13.  Despite the storm outside, the TV picture was unusually clear for channel 13.

We were eating bowls of ice cream for dessert as the show started. Five minutes in, the storm intensified and I looked out the window to see a wildly bouncing set of branches on the trees outside.  The surroundings had a hue of backlit pea green emanating from the sky. I went back to the show, then the house shuddered by a wall of wind, concussed by the tornado.  I’ll never forget that concussion of air.  Windows started breaking around us, and I hustled my younger brothers to the top of the stairs.  Mike, the four year old, sat down on the upper step and began to cry, so I took his ice cream bowl he had been clutching and set it aside.  

At the bottom of the steps, my 71 year old grandmother from Philadelphia was trying to close the heavy front door that had flown open. She guided us into front hall closet, but I said, “No, Nana, we have to go to the basement.”  I looked through the now flung open door and saw the rage and phosphorescent green hue and now the sound was a high whine like a freight train. 

[Picture: our garage after tornado struck:]

In the basement, our ears popped because of the change in air pressure which made the evening grow silent.  It was dark now, no more the green electric dusk.  We sat in the dark silence for some time until our parents called down to us from above. They had been out at Kent Country Club and rushed home after the police on the phone told them that our street, Tenway Drive, was one of the worst hit streets in East Grand Rapids.

After a bit, my dad and I went outside.  He told me we had to be careful of “looters.” What those people were and what activity they might engage was unknown to me, but I remember that word added to my feeling of being under siege by the environment.

Our half of the street was dark and quiet—no electricity—but we were drawn to bright lights at the bottom of the street where huge fire trucks had set up bright reflectors and shone them onto the damaged houses at the foot of Tenway, on Oxford.  At that corner, I found wrapped in a fireman’s blanket Mrs. Hyla Jacobsen, a kindly older woman--the wife of Arnold who was not in sight.  Her house was unrecognizable, almost completely destroyed. She had survived the collapse of her ceiling by hiding under a heavy dining table.  I went up to her with an 8-year old's directness: “Hi, Mrs. Jacobsen! Did you see it?”


[Hyla and Arnold Jacobsen's house after tornado struck:]

“I did. It was the most beautiful thing you ever seen. Silver and black flakes and all the colors blending in and out…gold, and the sound like music”  Just then, a fireman hustled her away by telling me she was in shock.

“What’s ‘in shock’, Dad?” I asked. He shrugged his shoulders.

Kitty-corner to Mrs. Jacobsen’s house was Mara Matthews.’ Her house had no roof.  Her mother had been giving her and her sister a bath when the tornado hit, and the mother had been hit with a flying bathroom door. She was one of the 32 injuries of this magnitude 3 tornado, which theoretically packed a windspeed of 158-206 mph. Thankfully no one was killed.

My family’s detached garage was obliterated by the tornado and my house's siding was partially ripped off so that it appeared like a molted reptile. All this part of the $25 million (equivalent to current $185M) of damage from the tornado. Other sections of East Grand Rapids were also hit.  The tornado had hopped to our street from the southwest and took out our garage, then hopped a bit more to the end of the street, where it knocked a half-dozen houses about. On its hop, it sucked a couple of intervening houses off their foundations, so that you could look into their basements from the front yard. After doing its work at the end of Tenway Drive, it touched down about 8 blocks east to just east of Breton Downs Elementary and did more damage in that portion of town.

Overall, the tornado was one of a warm front that spawned tornadoes beginning at lunch time in Missouri, passing through Illinois and Indiana.  The F3 EGR tornado was part of of a very deep shortwave trough, and it traveled from southwest of Grandville 13-1/2 miles to Ada before giving out. As it "struck the south side of Grand Rapids, 65 buildings were destroyed, and 60 others were badly damaged. 375 buildings sustained minor damage. A church and a K-Mart store were completely destroyed." (Ibid).

The legacy of that day for me was a gradually-abating fear of thunderstorms, as they been the harbinger to the tornado.  By the time I was in college at the University of Michigan, I was chasing my fears by chasing tornado sightings and going up to the top of parking garages to scan the skyline.

I was close to another tornado once, in 1980, when one flew over the pier head in Holland, Michigan, just 300 yards from where I was staying in a cottage in Macatawa Park. It gave that same green hue to the air.

The other take away of that date for me is this: when Channel 13 announces a tornado warning, don’t just dumbly sit there eating ice cream as the windows shatter about you. Take cover in your basement!


[Picture:  our garage]

[Picture 5: Oxford Drive damage]