The city deserted…

Dave Gregory, Baptist minister and missioner for science and environment, reflects on themes of destruction and hope in the last of our articles marking Creationtide 2025.

28 September 2025

For the palace will be forsaken,
the populous city deserted;
the hill and the watchtower
will become dens forever,
the joy of wild asses,
a pasture for flocks.
Isaiah 32:14 (NRSV)

Ruins in the mountains

On either side of the border between the Italian regions of Umbria and Marche, you’ll find lots of ruined and forsaken villages. Running along the majestic Apennine mountains, the playground of St Francis and the early Franciscans, the region through long centuries has been prone to earthquakes.

The most recent one, in autumn 2016, brought disaster to many places. Campi, a medieval village nestling halfway up a mountain for safety, lies abandoned, its people living in temporary housing a decade later in the valley below. Castelluccio, on a high plain in the mountains overlooking fertile lentil fields, is no more. And on the road that winds up the mountainside above the beautiful town of Sarnano, where we stayed over the summer, the village of Piobbico lies deserted.

In past centuries many would have believed such devastation was God’s judgement on people who had left the path he offered to them and become prey to hubris and greed. That included the prophet Isaiah, for God had long warned of the devastation of the city and the land of which he speaks:

‘This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.’
Deuteronomy 30:19–20 (NIV)

A different understanding

Today, our scientific insights give us a different view of earthquakes. Devastating as they are to human lives, they are part of the dynamic life of Earth, which sees mountains raised and continents sink as the slow movements of rocks within the Earth drag the surface along at the rate at which our fingernails grow. This movement also plays a vital part in stabilising the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere through millions of years, burying it deep within the Earth.

You may not be familiar with the names of the Italian villages that I visited in Umbria and the Marche. Nor perhaps will you know the names of other villages and communities across the world that have been devastated over the summer, by floods in Pakistan and by landslides in war-ravaged Sudan. Like earthquakes, floods are natural occurrences; yet unlike earthquakes, floods are growing in severity as we, in seeking life, choose death. The continued growth of greenhouse gases is leading to an increasingly warmer world and extremes of weather that many communities are unable to cope with.

This can seem a world away from our own experiences this summer. Despite its record-breaking heat in the United Kingdom – a feature increasingly becoming the norm as the world warms under the burden of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere beyond the capacity for natural processes to mitigate – life has been relatively unaffected.

A growing anxiety

And yet, my summer holiday reading reveals a growing anxiety among us, expressed in imaginative ways through fiction, shaped by themes of climate disaster and a dystopian future. The Ministry of Time by first-time novelist Kaliane Bradley revolves around people from the 23rd century travelling back to our own near future, where the extremes of climate change are felt even more keenly than today. The time travellers are hoping to find ways to prevent the climate disaster they are facing. One of them is asked, ‘What’s London like in your era?’ ‘It’s gone,’ they reply.

It is hard to imagine a vibrant, populous city like London in ruins, forsaken, deserted, given over to wildlife and nature. Yet, for increasing numbers of people around the world this is not a future vision but one they already face. Not caused by their choosing the path of death rather than life, but by others living alongside them on the planet who choose to exploit the Earth for their own security, too often unaware of or indifferent to the injustice they bring to their neighbours and to creation.

And yet… there is hope

There is sadness visiting the ruined villages in the mountains of Italy: sadness over the loss of their magical beauty and atmosphere, as well as the loss of vibrant lives. And there is sadness too hearing of devastation across the world as weather changes.

And yet, there is hope. People are finding ways to bring life back into familiar places, and there is a long endurance that seeks to rebuild and restore, echoing what Isaiah sees in the work of God’s Spirit amid the devastation of his day:

The fortress will be abandoned, the noisy city deserted… till the Spirit is poured on us from on high, and the desert becomes a fertile field, and the fertile field seems like a forest.
Isaiah 32:14–15 (NIV)

Towards the end of our time in Italy this summer, we travelled to Assisi to visit the gleaming white Basilica of St Francis, standing high on a plateau at the edge of the town. Having visited before, I am never quite sure what Francis would have made of the cathedral that bears his name, nor the shops selling Francis-themed trinkets of various shades of tastefulness on the route through the town. But on our visit this time, we found a more Franciscan way of approaching the cathedral courts.

Behind the hill on which the Basilica sits is a restored wood, the ‘Bosco di San Francesco’ – The Woods of Saint Francis. Managed by the Italian equivalent of the National Trust, what was once a dumping ground for the town’s refuse and junk has been restored into a peaceful beech wood with a shady trail winding up the hill to enter the cathedral close through a hole in its wall. It feels like a sign of the value of creation that Francis celebrated, a sign of collaboration with the spirit of God who is ever at work within creation, sustaining its life-giving cycles, and at work within ourselves to help us choose a path that brings life to people and creation.

Looking at the ruined city in Isaiah’s day, people must have wondered if his hopeful vision was simply a flight of the imagination. And looking at the worsening climate devastation around the world, and increasingly in our own country, we too might wonder if there really is hope.

Sitting in the woods, looking up towards the cathedral gleaming bright in the sun, a small cooling breeze came, refreshing in the heat, causing the leaves on the beech tree next to me to shimmer a little. Like the woodland path to the cathedral, it felt like a sign of the Spirit that is ever bringing life. Small, fragile yet vibrant, filled still with hope. And as the Spirit shapes our life’s path, as we choose life for people and creation is small ways, so God’s hope and justice for the present and the future is to be found.