Yes, the Church is tremendously concerned with itself and is often populated by the privileged classes who have a limited concept of creation from their ivory towers. BUT not everyone inside its walls has fallen into this trap. There are an increasing number of ecological initiatives within various denominations of Christianity and the tide is slowly turning – but perhaps too slowly. I admit that I, for all my good intentions, have spent years in this trap; years of being concerned with my own life and my own relationship with God and the church and thinking very little about what I am doing to the very thing that sustains all life. Mea maxima culpa.

I have also learnt that, when someone or something is struggling and in need of help, that help very often comes from those who have very little (case in point: when I found myself homeless, my belongings were moved in knackered old cars by people who understood where I was; those who were physically infirm were often the ones who were most willing to come and help me dismantle furniture and the occasional tenner that was slipped into my hand usually came from those who could ill afford it. My comfortably-off relatives looked the other way and did nothing).

Just as Jesus was poor and had little material worth in this life, and just as He chose those on the margins to do His work, I suspect that the help that our planet needs may come from the poor, the infirm, the outsiders and the marginalised. For decades, we have been told about climate change yet one autistic teenager has brought it to the forefront of the global mind, not billionaires or people in power. The ‘mainstream’ majority of this world are too busy with their own concerns to be bothered with the plight of the planet – they simply turn away; yet those who exist outside their world are best able to undermine those ivory towers because they are more aware of the impact of that world. You have touched on resurrection – and resurrection requires death to precede it. I pray that that death will be of the ivory towers and the perceived ability to remain unaffected by the planet’s demise simply by paying for some kind of exemption to it.

The current war in Ukraine seems to be attracting support from global superpowers in the form of arms – perhaps this is because those powers are dependent on Russian fossil fuels. I say that, instead of supplying arms, we bring about real political, cultural and environmental change not by supplying weapons but by building wind turbines, hydroelectric power stations and solar panels to devalue the fossil fuels and end our dependency upon them.