Once again this year, the Church has set aside the month of September as a time of prayerful reflection on our relationship with God’s creation, challenging us to respond in practical ways to the pressing issues our world faces, such as climate change and the pollution of the environment.
The choice of the month of September is no doubt significant as it leads to the feast day of St Francis of Assisi (on October 4), whose spirituality of Creation has been the basis of much of recent Church teaching on our present ecological crisis, reflected in the important letter of our late Pope Francis, Laudato Si.
In this reflection I would like to focus on the key reasons why we should be intensely concerned about the state of our human relationship with the wider creation, with special focus on the theological or religious reasons for being more respectful towards what Pope Francis called our “Common Home,” with its rich connotations of family intimacy and caring.
In first place, we should note the difference between reasons for treating created things respectfully that centre primarily on the welfare of human beings and those which recognise the intrinsic dignity and value of the non-human creation as God’s gift, not simply a brute given to be used prudently according to human reason.
Of course, it does make sense to argue that in abusing the environment we are “cutting off our noses to spite our faces” as climate change is causing immense damage to human life through wildfires, floods, and storms. Sometimes, this reasoning is self-interested, reflecting concern for our present generation of humanity; while, at other times, the reasoning is more altruistic – showing concern for future generations, our grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. (There is also the issue of climate change impacting on the poorer nations of the world, victims of the greedy wealthier ones!)
However, a better ethical response is based on what I have referred to as the intrinsic value of each and every created thing precisely because it belongs to God, has its own distinct nature and purpose, and is given to humanity to look after rather than simply to use for our own welfare.
It seems to me that, while much of this thinking is accepted by Christians at an intellectual level, it is taking much longer to travel the road inward to our hearts, and then from there to our hands and feet. If it had, then as a priest hearing confessions I would have heard penitents confessing their sins against Creation – a very rare occurrence indeed! Various reasons account for this inner tension.
One obvious reason is our tendency to care mainly for sentient creatures, those that can feel pleasure, and especially pain. Thus, traditionally, much of our human focus was on the welfare of animals, even to the point of attributing rights to them, akin to human rights.
Because of our identification with domestic animals – our pets essentially – we find it difficult to “feel” for the earth, air, and water. After all, we don’t hurt the earth by walking on it or cause pain to the sea by splashing around in it. So, we need to develop a new imagination which allows us to relate to the wider, non-feeling creation, to recognise a different kind of harm, which we must try to avoid as much as possible.
Secondly, before we can learn new ways of promoting the wider welfare of God’s neglected Creation, we must unlearn some of the bad theology and distracting images sometimes associated with biblical approaches to God’s handiwork. The obvious example is the story of Creation which puts the creation of humans on the last day after everything else, as if God is leaving the best wine until last and putting everything else at our disposal.
Psalm 8 is a lovely hymn to humanity’s dominant place in Creation, referring to us as “little less than a god.” If a god has power, so it must be with humans, thus it follows in the words of the Psalm: “… with glory and honour you crowned him, gave him power over the works of your hand, put all things under his feet.”
Such an image of sheer domination appears to give humans carte blanche to do whatever they like with the rest of Creation.
Such imagery reflects the first account of Creation in Genesis, which differentiates humans from other aspects of Creation by emphasising their being made in the divine image and likeness. But this emphasis is corrected by the second version of Creation in Chapter 2, which makes out humans to be made from the earth and destined ultimately to return to that source. “Dust you are and to dust you shall return.”
The Latin for dust or earth is “humus” from which we derive the word humility. Therefore, we can deduce from the juxtaposition of these two accounts that human pride needs to be corrected in its attitude to Creation by developing a modicum of humility, seeing ourselves as stewards, not as gods lording it over the results of God’s first five days of “work.”
Clearly, the first account has dominated human thinking about its relationship to the rest of Creation and has been used to justify the use and abuse of creatures we ought to be protecting instead of manipulating and exploiting!
Ever since the Industrial Revolution in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it seems as though the human creation (or at least the Western part of it) has declared war on nature – and a “World War” at that! Contemporary wars as in the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s move to take over Gaza are mirrored in humanity’s “invasion” of Mother Nature’s home.
Our motorways invade the habitats of birds and other wildlife, the earth is invaded by mining, especially fracking, and the sea has become a human dump, polluted by tons of plastic, the detritus of what Pope Francis has called our “throw-away culture.”
No wonder the Church is asking us more and more to hear the “Cry of the Earth” as much as the “Cry of the Poor.”
One can go a step further in characterising this ongoing world-wide conflict as a type of “Civil War” – a war between brother and brother, sister, and sister. This is the implication of that hymn of St Francis mentioned earlier, Laudato Si, a hymn in praise of Creation and taken up by Pope Francis as the title of his letter encouraging everyone, but especially believers, to be “instruments of peace” in this ongoing conflict.
The imagery used in that hymn is telling as it stresses the familial character of Creation. We are well used to the metaphor of fraternity applied to humans. We are all brothers and sisters and therefore must recognise the ethical obligations stemming from that natural and social bond.
But St Francis leads us a step further in speaking of “Sir Brother Sun and Sister Moon,” “Sister, Mother Earth, and Sister Water.”
These are wonderful gifts from God to be enjoyed and appreciated, leading us to paise and glorify our Creator. Notice the respect Francis shows for the first gift to be acknowledged – “Sir” Brother Sun – and the saint continues his appreciative love by reminding us that the Sun is a “symbol of you, God most high.”
Yes, before God made humans in his image, he made the Sun in his image. Indeed, the genius of St Francis revealed in this hymn is in the way he integrates the traditional language of image of God with the language and imagery of family, extending this beyond the human creation to everything God has formed in his infinite love. Now, wind and fire and water are images of God, his children just as much as we are and therefore leading to strict ethical obligations.
It is high time God’s human creation with its gift of moral sense, recognises its moral culpability in declaring war on our Sister, Mother Earth and to call a truce, to stop the bombardment, to withdraw from the parts of nature that require preservation and even to make reparation for the damage done since this terrible, unrecognised war began!
“Praise be my Lord, by means of all your creatures, and most especially by Sir Brother Sun, who makes the day and illumines us by his light:
For he is beautiful and radiant with splendour and is a symbol of you, God most High.”
The sad truth remains, that we are so prone to suffer from a clouded conscience which obscures the light of God’s revelation of Himself in Creation and our role as stewards of those gifts, symbolised so poignantly by the frequent smog obscuring Sir Brother Sun’s life-giving, healing rays in so many of our human cities.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace in that wider sense of the Family of Creation, where everything is an image of God’s creative and sustaining love.
Kieran ofm