A few days ago the BBC arranged and broadcast a Skype conversation between Sir David Attenborough, the patron saint of nature films, and Greta Thunberg, the upstart prophet of the global climate crisis. Attenborough is 93 years old, and Thunberg 16, so he is old enough to be her great-grandfather. He had the look of the wise old codger while she came across as the solemn waif. Yet it was an exchange of mutual respect, without a whiff of the condescension exhibited by so many of Thunberg's critics.
David lauded Greta for doing what he feels no one else has been able to do, which is to motivate millions of young people and countless more in other generations to wake up to the climate emergency and demand change. Greta graciously credited David's documentary series's with awakening her sense of wonder about the natural world and stirring her desire to address the destructive patterns of human behaviour.
Attenborough has been criticized in the past for showing us the wonders of Creation without much attention to the degradation he has witnessed during a 65-year career as a documentary maker. Recently he has been much more vocal and direct, and one wonders if he is following Thunberg's example.
One of the common images for the succession of years is of the aging anthropomorphized Father Time encountering the infant New Year. Attenborough and Thunberg represented this in their conversation, although he demonstrated a respective acknowledgment of the powerful witness young people, including Greta, have demonstrated.
I hope that those of us who are aging Christians will repent of our sins of self-centredness and consumption, and graciously listen to and welcome those whose words and actions may seem unsettling in both word and deed. This work has just begun, yet there is an urgency which we must heed.
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