“A Caress of God”
This year for Lent I gave up desserts once again. I don’t know why I keep doing that. I also decided to add some extra reading into my Lenten journey. One book I chose to read is Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi by Richard Rohr. The other book is Pope Francis’ 2015 Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality: On Care for Our Common Home. I am enjoying Pope Francis’ optimistic outlook on things. I must confess I’ve been pretty discouraged in recent months. Perhaps that has something to do with living in America where environmental issues have largely been dismissed or ignored in recent years. So it was good to hear Francis say “The Creator does not abandon us; he never forsakes his loving plan or repents of having created us. Humanity still has the ability to work together in building our common home.”
In his book, Pope Francis offers a solid theological basis for Creation Care. I want to share with you a few gems I have found thus far. Francis writes, “Our insistence that each human being is an image of God should not make us overlook the fact that each creature has its own purpose. None is superfluous. The entire material universe speaks of God’s love, his boundless affection for us. Soil, water, mountains: everything is, as it were, a caress of God.” I love that phrase—“a caress of God.” If we could view the world around us as a caress of God perhaps we would value and honor it more.
In another section Francis writes: “The universe as a whole, in all its manifold relationships, shows forth the inexhaustible riches of God. Saint Thomas Aquinas wisely noted that multiplicity and variety ‘come from the intention of the first agent’ who willed that ‘what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another,’ inasmuch as God’s goodness ‘could not be represented fittingly by any one creature.’ Hence we need to grasp the variety of things in their multiple relationships. We understand better the importance and meaning of each creature if we contemplate it within the entirety of God’s plan. As the Catechism teaches: ‘God wills the interdependence of creatures. The sun and the moon, the cedar and the little flower, the eagle and the sparrow; the spectacle of their countless diversities and inequalities tells us that no creature is self-sufficient. Creatures exist only in dependence on each other, to complete each other, in the service of each other.’”
Surely we would take better care of the earth if we realized that each part of it is a manifestation of God’s goodness and love. Likewise, if we better understood the interdependence of life on earth it would lead us to be better stewards of Creation. I’m not sure things will get much better unless we come to grasp the sacredness of the earth and our divine calling to tend to it.
–Chuck