When I dropped my kids off for school recently, they got out of the car and said, “It smells like a campfire.” They were right. Then looking up at the sky, it was eerie when I realized my eyes could look directly at the sun, hazy and orange as it was. Looking away, I remembered the air quality alert issued the day before. I didn’t pay close attention at the time — as someone who suffers from seasonal allergies, I assumed the alert was due to the high level of pollen in the air. It wasn’t until after I dropped my kids off that I learned about the wildfires in Canada. As the day progressed, my lungs began to hurt. I thought maybe it was in my head – a psychosomatic reaction to realizing there was smoke in the air. But then I started asking other people and realized I wasn’t the only one experiencing it.
Since March, massive wildfires have been burning throughout Canada. “Massive” may even be an understatement. The fires have burned more than 9.39 million acres, which is more than 19 times their 20-year average. I have never experienced anything like this during my years living in Pennsylvania or New York, both states now under air quality alerts and experiencing smoky skies and smells. I have friends who live in California and regularly post on social media about the air quality and haze from the wildfires out West, an increasingly normal part of life for them. This was a new experience for me, and – honestly – it was hard not to be a little concerned about it.
With Pentecost so recently behind us, I couldn’t help but think of Joel 2 — the Scripture passage that the apostle Peter uses in Acts 2 to explain the miracle experienced. You probably remember the familiar words about sons and daughters prophesying, young men seeing visions, and old men dreaming dreams. But do you remember the next verses that Peter quotes? He says, “I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Acts 2:19-21, quoting Joel 2:30-32).
Am I suggesting that the Canadian wildfires are a sign that the “end is near”? No — at least not specifically. Peter quoted this passage over 2,000 years ago to say “the end” had already arrived. In other words, we’ve been living in “the end times” for over 2,000 years.
I’m connecting the smoky skies and smells here in New York to the words from Acts 2 because it happens to be what I’m experiencing. As I mentioned before, people in California have been experiencing this for a long time. In other words, what may feel like “doomsday” to us has long been part of Californians’ lives. It’s not that I never cared about what was happening in the lives of the people out West with wildfire season becoming seemingly worse every year. It’s that I just now have a better understanding of what they may have been experiencing. And, honestly, now I care a little more.
To take the point further, what about the poor air quality in many developing countries in the world, some of which is caused by much of the plastic that I presumably “recycle” but ends up on the beaches of developing countries where it is sometimes illegally burned? Shouldn’t I care about that, too?
Do we have to wait until something happens to us before we care more deeply about those same things happening in other people’s lives? No. This is the power of empathy. Psychologists generally define empathy as the capacity to imagine and sense what another person may be thinking or feeling. We don’t have to experience something ourselves to imagine what someone else may be feeling while going through it. I think Jesus teaches us that it is the higher good to not wait until we experience something before we empathize with someone going through it. This is the basic assumption in what Jesus says: “Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Luke 6:31).
Whether it’s regarding an experience of wildfires or of grief or depression or poverty or any kind of suffering, don’t ignore or dismiss someone else’s experience. Talk with and listen to them. Imagine what it might be like to be them. Consider how your actions may contribute to or alleviate their suffering. And then do to them as you would want them to do to you.
