Come together, right now

Ah one, two, three, fah...

Thank God my son has now recovered (more on that later).

While whiling away the time at the hospital room, I picked up an old copy of Readers Digest lying around. There was this interesting article that featured 13 tips on how to cut greenhouse gases. One curious item says that what we choose to eat has the biggest impact on the environment. Rebecca Blackburn, author of "Green is good", says that farming uses more resources than any other industry. Farming also produces one-fifth of our greenhouse gas emissions, and that one-third of an average person's carbon footprint is due to the intake of animal meat. Carbon footprint is defined in wiki as "the total set of GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions caused directly and indirectly by an individual, organization, event or product"

Now I recall Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono were in the news lately for advocating "Meatless Mondays" precisely to help stop global warming. Strange bedfellows, these two coming together, but a laudable cause. Looks like a fashionable cause too.

I wonder if it occurred to today's current crop of meatless campaigners that abstaining from meat is old, old hat as far as Church history goes. Cultivating spiritual discipline in the journey to holiness does not appear to be as trendy a cause as stopping global warming, but I guess two birds are hit as far as religious abstinence goes. Apparenty, there's more wisdom in periodic meat abstinence than meets the eye. When St. Paul said in 1:Cor 9:25 that "everyone striving for the mastery must abstain from all things", greenhouse gases must be farthest from his mind.

While environmentalists are at it, I hope that eliminating food wastage ranks high up there in today's trendy causes. For instance, the magazine reports that the UN Food Programme declares that just 5% of food leftovers in the U.S. alone can feed 4 million people in Africa. Once while travelling in North America, I personally witnessed with some shock that all good leftover food after meals in households are immediately flushed down the food compactor. Now if we can only save all our excess food and somehow channel it to the starving people, then world hunger will be eradicated. Oh, and greenhouse gases will be greatly reduced too. It is of no minor importance that after the multiplication of the loaves of bread, Jesus directed that all leftover food are gathered and saved. Again, there's more there than meets the eye.

Now I hope all people will sing: "Come together, right now". This time, with feeling.