By Father Casey
What a gift these last few days have been. To look outside is to enjoy the brilliant majesty of winter, snow glistening on roofs and branches and just enough on the ground to build a snowman, if one is so inclined. My family joyfully trudged our way to the local public library yesterday, basking in the snowfall, throwing snowballs, and experiencing the pleasure of a walk in white winter. Peace of mind, usually so elusive in the day-to-day grind of life, comes easier when you’re gazing at gently falling snow.
It’s been a strange juxtaposition to go outside and make snow angels, and then come inside to watch an inferno consuming the City of Angels. The fires burning in Los Angeles are as terrifying as they are tragic. Tens of thousands of buildings are already destroyed – homes, businesses, churches. Due to the strong winds and scarce water, firefighters are nearly powerless to stop the flames, which means the worst may still be to come. Thankfully, the number of lives lost so far has been few.
California is something of a punchline for many Americans, especially Texans – a place filled with another kind of “snowflakes.” Which may help to explain why we love imagining its destruction. In a 1998 book titled Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, Mike Davis writes that the city had, at that point, been fictionally demolished (in movies, books, and television) 138 times, and I have to imagine that the count has grown considerably in the last few decades. We seem to love seeing Los Angeles on the brink of disaster. But the fires raging today are not computer-generated, and the lives being devastated are not fictional. These are real people losing their homes, their churches, their livelihoods, their histories.
Nearly 10 million people live in Los Angeles County, and they are every bit as multicultural as here in the Metroplex. Angelenos are from everywhere: a third are foreign-born and more than half speak a language other than English at home. “In that sense,” James Keane wrote yesterday in a beautiful editorial for America Magazine, “Los Angeles is the land of second chances, but also the land of first chances. It is also a microcosm—or the canary in the coal mine—for the rest of the nation and the world. A people on the move, seeking a new home, making a go of it in precarious circumstances: That is all of us in the United States, that is hundreds of millions of people elsewhere around the globe. We need to see the people of Los Angeles not as the denizens of a Disneyland-turned-Gomorrah but of a home just like ours, no matter where we are.”[1]
The truth is that there are a lot of “canaries in the coal mine” these days – harbingers of a very different future owing to climate change, human greed, and our collective failures to make sufficient sacrifices. Just this week, scientists released preliminary data showing that 2024 was the hottest on record, continuing a string of record-breaking years…only we’ve now tipped over a dangerous climate threshold. According to the World Meteorological Organization, it was the first year in which global temperatures averaged more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above those the planet experienced at the start of the industrial age. For the past decade, the United Nations has sought to avoid crossing this dangerous threshold, but here we are.
The answer to this crisis is no mystery. We’ve known for decades what we should do to slow the transformation we’ve begun in our planet – burn a lot less and conserve a lot more. It’s all a matter of will, of resolve, of courage, and for us as Christians, it is very much a matter of faith. As we will once again promise this weekend when we renew our baptismal covenant, we are to seek and serve Christ in all persons, love our neighbors as ourselves, strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being. Oh, and we’ll also promise that whenever we fall into sin, we will repent, turn around, change our ways, and get back on the right path.
So as we gaze out at the beauty of winter today, let us pray for the people of Los Angeles, that they may have strength to meet the days ahead, also pray for ourselves, that we will not only notice all the dying canaries, but actually begin to do something about it.
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[1] James T. Keane, “A prayer for a city I love, the city of Angels,” America Magazine, January 9, 2025.
Fr. Casey +