Those who work in the field of addiction and recovery or who have personal or family experience with it, are familiar with the terms “low bottom” and “high bottom.” How much do we have to lose before we are ready to admit that we am powerless over our addiction? In other words, when do we hit bottom? Do we have to lose our job? Our marriage? Our family? Our health? Our self-respect? Our standing in the community? Our life? Or, are we able to recognize the road signs of where our life is going and accept help? Can we stop before we hit rock bottom? Quitting is never easy, because it means quitting one of the most important or THE most important relationship in our life. That is why most of us fail the first time we get into recovery. Denial is incredibly strong and persistent, and the comfort of the familiar is always beckoning..

How bad does it have to get before we quit?  How much do we have to lose before we change? That applies to a lot of things other than addictions to alcohol, drugs, food, shopping, gambling, and pornography.  It is embedded deeply into our culture, our way of life, and our assumptions about the future. I was thinking about that this past week as I followed the heart-breaking story of the floods in Texas, the hundreds of lives lost (especially children) when the overflowing Guadalupe River barreled through campgrounds along its banks, taking sleeping children, campers, property, homes, everything in its path. Along with the grief, there is plenty of blame to go around. The children’s camp was located was in a flood zone, and it should have been relocated years ago. Much of the blame has been placed on the local community’s failure to update its warning system. But if we think that upgrading the warning system is going to fix the problem, we are fooling ourselves. It is not unlike the alcoholic who moves to another city to get away from his drinking problem, or the porn addict who throws away his cell phone, or the shopping addict who closes her Amazon account. It might help for a while, but it is no solution.

The weather extremes we are now experiencing are the result of climate change. There is no question that our little planet is getting warmer. A minority of scientists still believe that what we are experiencing is a natural cycle that will reverse itself over time and that human beings have little or no influence over it; but most believe that our continued reliance on fossil fuels is affecting the climate. Warmer temperatures allow for the atmosphere to hold more water vapor, and that produces heavier rainfalls. It is not that floods and fires never happened in the past; it is that they are happening more often and with greater intensity. While most of the attention has been focused on Texas, both North Carolina and New Mexico experienced flooding downpours . Meanwhile, insurance companies are not renewing policies in a growing number of counties that are highly exposed to floods, hurricanes, and fires. When will the cost of climate change produce a financial crisis? How bad does it have to get? When are we going to bottom out?

Ten years ago in Laudato Si, Pope Francis declared care for our common home to be a moral responsibility for Catholics, and challenged individuals as well as governments to take aggressive message to halt the process that is making more of our planet uninhabitable. It is always the poor who suffer the most from change, because they are least able to adapt to change. If some Catholics were hoping that Pope Leo would back off on this issue, they must already be disappointed. This past Wednesday, while inaugurating a special Votive Mass for the Care of Creation, marking the tenth anniversary of Laudat Si, he said, “Climate change is provoked by human activity.”

It reminds me of an old story about a town whose main road made a sharp and unexpected turn on the edge of town, causing lots of accidents. An ambulance would have to come from a larger city twenty miles away to pick up the injured and take them to the city hospital. That meant that it took a minimum of forty minutes before the victim got to the hospital. A town meeting was called and a proposal was made to purchase an ambulance and to hire a couple of first responders. If we had our own ambulance, it would cut the transportation time in half. While that helped greatly, sometimes a second accident would occur at that location while the ambulance was busy; so a proposal was made to buy a second ambulance and hire more first responders. When the proposal was presented for a vote, a small voice could be heard from the back of he room, “Why don’t you just fix the curve in the road?’

                                               Fr. Joe