When younger, I was an ardent lover of movies, of cinema. From Cocteau to Kurosawa, Keaton to Kubrick, watching a great film was a near religious experience. Images and words — of all the marvelous lines to be found in films, the one that still touches me as most true, summarizing best our existential condition, occurs when William Mundy sights down the barrel of his Springfield and tells Little Bill, “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”

Others might hear this pronouncement as cynical or despairing, but I hear it as an echo of Ecclesiastes.

We have passed already the threshold toward a future in which much of the planet’s environment is hostile to humankind. No otherworldly power is coming to save our species from its reckoning of desiccated earth, rising seas, cyclones and extinctions. I believe it will be ugly for many forms of life for a good long while. The great challenge for us, sapiens, will be to preserve and nurture a sense of the sacred, faced with the drawback that an authentic sense of the sacred can be maintained only through a healthy relationship with the natural world.

If life has meaning, it is known by a feeling of connectedness, of merger with something beyond individuation — friendship, family, a cause, the cosmos. In its most saturating and sustaining forms this sense of connectedness engenders the sacred. Strangely then, when it comes to love, “deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”

Be kind. Nurture the natural world.