Happy Earth Day! As those who attended church yesterday know, the Earth and Jesus as shepherd were the themes of Sunday’s service. If you missed it, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Viw01jHotfI
On Earth Day we appreciate our world and all its benefits and also reflect on how we care for it. In Genesis “the book of beginnings” chapter two God placed people in the garden to work it and take care of it. We are literally commissioned by God to steward the earth like a gardener or farmer would their garden or field of crops. It is never ours, it is only entrusted to us to appreciate and use wisely. How are you doing with God’s commission to steward our world? It is full of bounty and blessing to enjoy, but we should be good stewards of our Creator.
The earth is the LORD’S, and everything in it; for the Lord founded it and established it upon the waters. (Psalm 24:1,2)
In his book The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the 21st Century, the late Fr. Thomas Berry reflects on Christians living in an age of climate catastrophe. Drawing from Scripture and tradition, Berry wrote “what is needed is a new spiritual, even mystical, communion with Earth, sensitivity to Earth’s needs, a valid economy of Earth. We need a way of designating the Earth-human world in its continuity and identity rather than exclusively by its discontinuity and difference. We especially need to recognize the numinous qualities of Earth.”
A poem for Earth Day from Mary Oliver: What Was Once the Largest Shopping Center in Northern Ohio Was Built Where There Had Been A Pond I Used To Visit Every Summer Afternoon - Loving the earth, seeing what has been done to it, I grow sharp, I grow cold. Where will the trilliums go, and the coltsfoot? Where will the pond lilies go to continue living their simple, penniless lives, lifting their faces of gold? Impossible to believe we need so much as the world wants us to buy. I have more clothes, lamps, dishes, paper clips than I could possibly use before I die. Oh, I would like to live in an empty house, with vines for walls, and a carpet of grass. No planks, no plastic, no fiberglass. And I suppose sometime I will. Old and cold I will lie apart from all this buying and selling, with only the beautiful earth in my heart.