Lent I – Laudato Si’

The First Sunday of Lent

_{The first in a Lenten series on the encyclical, Laudato Si’ of Pope Francis.}

“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

Words that remind us of our mortality and encourage us to remember that our very bodies are fashioned from the earth’s elements. We breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters. Human beings and Mother Earth are inseparably connected. We depend on each other. This dependency must not only include our concern for nature and the plants and animals with which we share this planet, but must also look to a justice for the poor who bear the greatest of burdens as our climate and environment rapidly change. Recognizing our common bond calls us to be committed to society and the planet, which will birth an interior peace.

This Lent, I will be exploring the Encyclical Letter of Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ – On Care for Our Common Home _{[24 May 2015]}. Our care for the environment is the most critical existential issue that humanity has ever confronted. The issue challenges us to a conversion of heart, which means it is more than just an existential issue but also a moral and spiritual matter.

On Ash Wednesday, we heard God’s plea, “Return to me with your whole heart”. Our sister, Mother Earth also cries out to us. We hear her in the roar of wildfires, the crashing of tsunami waves and the silent scream of expanding deserts. These cries speak to the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of creation. In Eucharistic Prayer IV we pray, “You formed [humanity] in your own image and entrusted the whole world to [our] care”. We were entrusted – we are entrusted – with the gift of this ongoing creation.

The Pope’s letter echoes the warnings of previous popes and our brother, Bartholomew, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and head of the Orthodox Church. Bartholomew is called the “Green Patriarch” for his clarion calls to acknowledging our ecological sin against the Creator and the Earth. He has argued, “[t]he root cause of our environmental sin lies in our self-centeredness and in the mistaken order of values, which we inherit and accept without any critical evaluation. Self-centeredness, mistaken order of values, and lack of critical evaluation. Isn’t that a definition of sin?

The patriarch has also stated, “For human beings…to destroy the biological diversity of God’s creation…to degrade the integrity of the earth…by stripping the earth of its natural forests…its wetlands…to contaminate the earth’s waters, its land, its air and its life – these are sins.” To destroy life, degrade integrity, and strip naked. Do these not describe the passion and suffering of Jesus who was stripped naked to degrade his humanity to make it easier to destroy his life?

The patriarch and pope draw our attention to the ethical and spiritual roots of the environmental crisis. In the spiritual life, conversion means acknowledging that we have sinned, taking responsibility for our choices and be willing with God’s grace to change our behaviour.

Bartholomew asks us – and listen to how this so reflects the call of Lent – to replace consumption with sacrifice, greed with generosity, wastefulness with a spirit of sharing and an asceticism of life. Sacrifice, generosity, sharing and asceticism. Are not the pope and patriarch inviting us into a universal epoch of Lenten observance? An invitation “to accept the world as a sacrament of communion” where the divine and human meet “in the seamless garment of God’s creation.”

A Sacrament is an outward sign instituted by Christ, and entrusted to the Church, to give grace. Have we considered the earth in its wonder and beauty, its majesty, elegance and fragility, as a Sacrament in which we encounter Jesus Christ? Would we desecrate a Sacrament of the Church? Why then have we been desecrating the Earth?

We can learn how to approach this seamless garment of creation through the Canticle of the Sun by Saint Francis of Assisi. Francis calls creatures by the name of ‘Sister’ and ‘Brother’. If we began recognizing creation as family, how can it not affect our choices and determine our behaviour toward creation? Without this relationship, our attitude moves from caretaker to consumer to exploiter. Whenever we are unable to set limits, we turn objects and people into something to be controlled, used, and discarded. A form of pornography.

Pope Francis begins his letter with an assessment of what is happening to our common home.

He serves up a litany of pollutants to the air we breathe and the industrial and chemical waste that mar the land upon which we walk and the waters which provide food.

He raises the issue of the primary importance of water. All life began in the seas. Sixty present of our bodies are water. Fresh drinking water is indispensable to human life and supporting aquatic ecosystems. Therefore, access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival.

We have witnessed the devastation of the rising of sea levels and extreme weather events, the loss of biodiversity from great aquifers and glaciers to the planet’s lungs in the Amazon and Congo basins.

These situations under-gird our throwaway culture of paper, plastic, electronics, garbage and just about everything. When ‘throwaway’ becomes a way of life, can we be surprised that eventually humans beings are thrown away as well through war, abortion, genocide, euthanasia, and our inability, if not unwillingness, to address the needs of people experiencing food insecurity, homelessness, systemic poverty, lack of health care and violence?

A delicate balance has been disturbed. An imbalance that includes us. The care for our common home must include a caring for each other, a care that begins with an awareness.

Did you know that Saint Francis instructed that part of every friary garden be left untouched so that wild flowers and herbs could grow there, and that those who saw them could raise their minds to God, the Creator of such beauty?

Might those of us who have gardens or manicured lawns do the same?  Leave a part untouched and wild. Then “rather than a problem to be solved, the world could become a joyful mystery to be contemplated with gladness and praise”.