Earth Day Reflection on May 3, 2009
a witness talk by Marc Boucher- Colbert
Mary Magdalene mistook Christ for a gardener, so perhaps there is some small biblical legitimacy to inviting a gardener to give a post-Easter, slightly post-Earth Day reflection. The fact that we are Catholics and that we are interested in reflecting on our faith and its intersection with environmental consciousness is a good sign, probably not something that would have been considered appropriate for a church service when Earth Day began some 30 years ago, but now seen as something of a moral imperative. There are good things afoot in the church, both our local community and in the institution at large. Our parish concepts of justice and compassion now include strong ecological elements, as Sarah Patterson is showing us with her leadership in creating a women’s garden program at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, as Jim Bronec has demonstrated with his commitment to do right by the land and by his workers, and as Bev Logan, Deb Martinez and others have actualized with our naturalized, water-wise church landscape. The U.S. bishops, as part of the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change have articulated how Catholic social teaching necessarily leads us to reflect upon and act to change our individual and collective lives to heal the planet and protect its most vulnerable people. You will find a flyer in today’s bulletin about how we can all take action on this cause. Someone jokingly said the other day that sustainability was the word that “launched a thousand conferences”, and the same seems true as our spiritual life expands to embrace earth. We now have an amazing number of options and opportunities to find God in our activism on behalf of the planet.
But we must be careful lest we assume that yet another campaign, no matter how well founded or intentioned, will bring about the change we desire. I think our attitude toward right relationship with the earth and right relationship with its Creator must be one of utter humility. We mustn’t forget that we are approaching the issue with an extreme disability, a staggering loss of imaginative powers. After decades and in some cases centuries of earth abuse, we cannot just pull ourselves out of the morass and start living like eco-saints. Having nearly exterminated native peoples wherever it has grabbed for land, our Western civilization now finds itself without the very guides it would need to live well, and spiritually, in those places. We need to cry out to God in individual and collective prayer and admit that we are utterly lost. Our hearts may yearn for reconnection but in many cases we really just don’t have a clue as to where to begin.
The Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan, in his St. Francis song, puts these words on Francis’s lips: “Brother Sun and Sister Moon, I seldom see you, seldom hear your tune, preoccupied with selfish misery.” In our self-absorbtion, made worse now by Bluetooths and iPods, we often don’t even have the capacity to hear or be with nature. But in the same song, Francis begins to see the way: “Brother Wind and Sister Air, open my eyes to visions pure and clear, that I may see the glory around me.” The very creation around us, once acknowledged, can lead us toward God. Walking or riding a bike versus driving a car is a commendable and moral thing to do, but if we miss the air and rain around us or the plants emerging through the cracks of the pavement or our neighbors on their porches, we have missed our chance to relate more deeply to what is there. Merton once said, and I paraphrase, that if we could truly see into the hearts of our brothers and sisters then we would fall down in worship. I think the same is true for all creation; animals, plants, rocks, clouds, streams are vastly interesting, entertaining, instructive, awe-inspiring. Perhaps if we tuned in more to the progress of that unfolding violet on our front lawn, or came to understand what the crow down the street is saying, we’d find ourselves needing and wanting less stimulation, adding less fuel to our collective Machine that devours nature.
All this is not to say that we don’t belong on the streets protesting toxic waste dumps or advocating for severe CO2 restrictions, or in meetings to make our buildings greener and our lives less wasteful. We do. Our Catholic faith and social teaching absolutely calls us to it. But all this advocacy is empty without wonder. The great eco-theologian Thomas Berry reminds us in so many ways that the evolutionary job of the human is to look at the universe and wonder at it, to be its conscious self-reflection. We may be fulfilled by God alone, but God is manifested through the universe, so we need the universe in all its complexity and diversity to lead us to God. Catholics should get this. We are sacramental. That’s why we don’t baptize people in sewage and that’s why we’ve switched to real, chewy bread for communion. We know our symbols lead us to the real world and that leads us to God. Mess with the symbols and you mess with your ability to know and therefore to imitate God. Mess with the world and the same is true. The world, the earth, the creation is the Great Sacrament – a muti-faceted window into the mind of God. Take down a mountain for the coal underneath, and all of a sudden our ability to be noble and grand diminishes. Disrupt the gentle, soothing creek, and our ability to be calm is lessened. The world and indeed the whole universe is the still-forming jewel of God’s imagination. If we shatter the jewel, how will we understand the mind and heart of the Creator? How will we be able to imitate God if our great models: trees, mountains, oceans, meadows, deserts are gone or severely degraded?
JBS Haldane, the 20 th century evolutionary biologist, is reputed to have said the following: The Creator must have a special fondness for beetles, because we are more likely to meet them than any other type of animal. Our spiritual challenge is to find out why God likes beetles so much. What insights into God does beetle nature give us? How are beetles, and all the other myriad creatures we overlook, sacramental? How can we help beetles, the apples of God’s eye, to thrive?
Catholic sacraments offer powerful ways to approach God. God is light; God is word; God is healing oil; God is an unbroken ring of union. Creation, if we open ourselves to it, offers the same: God is furry and soft; God is sandy and smooth; God is torrential; God is rampant growth; God is crawling around right under our feet. My hope is that our Catholic faith will lead us to want to be with all these aspects of God and to preserve the sacramental manifestations of God in tundra, mangrove swamp, and forest as dearly as we have preserved our liturgy, the gospels, and the other sacred sacraments that make us Catholic.
