You Can Find Me in My Church

Laila, an eighteen-year-old high school student, stands on the end of a pier reaching into a lake called Sognsvann, an oval of clean, cold water about a kilometer long, wrapped by a forest of spruce and birch in the northwest corner of Oslo.

She feels so close to nature here that she calls the lake “my church”.  Looking out on a summer day at sunlight sparkling on the black water, she writes in her notebook,

“Sunlight glitters on the water.

The breeze sweeping across the lake plays with sparks of energy

That have just spent eight minutes and twenty seconds traveling from the sun.

Dip your cup and drink from the mystery

That gave you life.”

“Yes, here I was, in my church, reaching back eons of time to that extraordinary moment when light touched water on a tiny planet circling a star in the vast expanse of the universe . . . and somehow, somehow, light touching water created life.  Little green cells which were able to feed from the light, from the energy of a star, began to fill the seas of that tiny planet.”

But, like every teenager around the world, Laila knows that planet Earth, and her future, are severely threatened by the blanket of carbon pollution that grows thicker every year.  As a Norwegian girl who does her own research, she knows that the Arctic—one-third of Norway lies north of the Arctic Circle—is warming four times as fast as the rest of the planet.

She does not escape into fantasy or science fiction.  Her classes in high school are superficial and boring compared to what she can learn online about her dying planet, her blighted future.  Feeling helpless, her teenage emotions churn between deep sadness and growing anger.  A doctor tells her that she is suffering from depression, and prescribes medication.  She tells him that she is not the one who is sick, and refuses to take a single pill.

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