Category Archives: Environment

St. Martin of Tours, November 11

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If saints are antidotes to the poison of their times, as Chesterton said, Martin of Tours is a saint worth reflecting upon.  So, what poison did Martin confront?

One was the poison of militarism. Martin was born into a military family in 316,  his father a Roman officer who arose through the ranks and  commanded the legions on the Roman frontier along the Rhine and Danube rivers. When his son was born his father saw him as a soldier like himself and named him Martin, after Mars, the god of war.

Rome was mobilizing then to stop invading barbarian tribes, and soldiers, like the emperors Constantine and Diocletian, were its heroes.  But Martin wanted nothing to do with war. As a young boy he heard a message of peace and non-violence from Christians he knew. Instead of a soldier, he became a Christian catechumen, over his father’s strong objections.

Martin was a lifelong peacemaker. He died on his way as a bishop to settle a dispute among his priests.

Another poison Martin confronted was the poison of careerism. Elected bishop of Tours by the people, Martin adopted a lifestyle unlike that of other bishops of Gaul, who were increasingly involved in imperial  administration and adopted the privileged style that came with an imperial administrator.

Bishops set themselves up in the cities;  Martin preferred to minister in the country, to the “pagani”, the uneducated poor. He established monasteries and the simple Christian life they promoted. The great monastic settlements that contributed to the evangelization of Gaul were largely his legacy.

Are the poisons of militarism and careerism around today? We remember our war veterans today.So many died in terrible wars these 100 years and many bear the scars of war. Militarism, the glamorizing of war, is still around.  So is careerism .

Finally, martyrdom was the great sign of holiness in Martin’s day, but Martin witnessed to another kind of martyrdom, the martyrdom of everyday. That could happen in embracing monasticism or religious life. It also could take place in embracing fully one’s own state in life. Martin was a martyr of another kind. For all these reasons, he is an important saint on our church calendar.

The story that epitomizes Martin, of course, is his meeting with a beggar in a cold winter as he was coming through the gate in the town of Amiens. Still a soldier but also a Christian catechumen, he stopped and cut his military cloak in two and gave one to the poor man. That night, the story goes, Christ appeared to him in a dream, wearing the beggar’s cloak. “Martin gave me this,” he said.

Pope Benedict XVI commented on this event.

“ Martin’s gesture flows from the same logic that drove Jesus to multiply the loaves for the hungry crowd, but most of all to leave himself to humanity as food in the Eucharist… It’s the logic of sharing.

May St Martin help us to understand that only by a common commitment to sharing is it possible to respond to the great challenge of our times: to build a world of peace and justice where each person can live with dignity. This can be achieved if an authentic solidarity prevails which assures to all inhabitants of the planet food, water, necessary medical treatment, and also work and energy resources as well as cultural benefits, scientific and technological knowledge.”

Well said.

In medieval Europe farmers, getting ready for winter at this time, put aside food and meat for the cold days ahead. Martin’s feast day was their reminder to put aside something for the poor. The poor are always with us; are we remembering them?

Today  Veterans’ Day in the USA honors those who fought in our country’s wars. It was originally called Armistice Day celebrating the end of fighting between the Allies and Germany on November 11, 1918. The United States lost 116,516 troops in the 1st World War; other countries lost millions more. The wars that followed added to that count.

Are We Caring for Our Common Home?

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Pooe Leo began an important conference in Rome October1 on the environment with that question posed by Pope Francis ten years ago in his letter Laudao si’.Looks like many of the countries of the world, especially the USA, are turning away from that question. We are absorbed in our wars and political fights.

“ Our Sister Earth cries out, pleading that we take another course. Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years. Yet we are called to be instruments of God our Father, so that our planet might be what he desired when he created it and correspond with his plan for peace, beauty and fullness.

The problem is that we still lack the culture needed to confront this crisis. We lack leadership capable of striking out on new paths and meeting the needs of the present with concern for all and without prejudice towards coming generations. The establishment of a legal framework which can set clear boundaries and ensure the protection of ecosystems has become indispensable; otherwise, the new power structures based on the techno-economic paradigm may overwhelm not only our politics but also freedom and justice.

It is remarkable how weak international political responses have been. The failure of global summits on the environment make it plain that our politics are subject to technology and finance. There are too many special interests, and economic interests easily end up trumping the common good and manipulating information so that their own plans will not be affected. Any genuine attempt by groups within society to introduce change is viewed as a nuisance based on romantic illusions or an obstacle to be circumvented.”

Pope Francis, Laudato SI 54-55

Today at the Vatican Gardens outside Rome evironmental leaders of the world gathered to answer that question: Are we caring for our common home?

One thing to notice about this conference, which involved artists,scientists, politicians, business people, ordinary people. Pope Leo sat among them, not before them, as if to signify their equal task in the care of the environment. They bring an equal wisdom to the challenge of caring for the earth. It’s not just the task of religious people, or a pope. It’s a common task for a common good.

The Song of Birds

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Before 7 : AM  I sit for a few minutes on the porch as the weather gets warmer, watching the birds. There are almost 40 different birds in our garden, just up from the E train.   The sparrows and the doves are usual visitors,  singing away, but the other day they couldn’t be seen or heard.  I soon saw why: a big hawk flew by overhead.

After awhile the birds were back,  chirping and moaning  as usual. Someone told me our ears are wired to hear the song of birds. Why? They tell us no dangerous enemies nearby, all is well.

Birds singing tell us the world’s in good hands. Is that why Noah sent a dove from the ark? The dove not only brought back olive branches signifying all was well, but sang the good news to those in the closed boat.

The Holy Spirit descends in the form of a dove. The ancients saw birds as mysterious visitors from heaven. I notice something fearless in the doves at our feeder. The sparrows scatter quickly at the least sign of danger; the doves stay and hold their ground. Like the dove, the Holy Spirit is a giver of life to our land and won’t abandon us.

By baptism we’re wired to hear God’s voice. We listen for God’s good news, despite the dangers. We listen for a world redeemed, a higher plan at play. Good reason to begin the day, listening to birds singing..

Mary’s Visits: Fatima

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When Mary visited her cousin Elizabeth she said “all generations shall call me blessed, the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name.” All generations know her; at times over the years Mary visits some in apparitions. 

Three prominent apparitions of Mary in the last 500 years are commemorated in major Marian shrines –in Mexico City, Lourdes and Fatima. In 1531, she appeared to the Mexican peasant Juan Diego on a hillside outside of Mexico City. In 1858 Mary appeared to 14 year old Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes in France as she was gathering firewood. In 1917 Mary appeared to three shepherd children in Fatima in Portugal. These are major pilgrimage sites today. Three liturgical feasts in our church calendar honor these apparitions.

The depictions of Mary in art follow closely, if not perfectly, the accounts the visionaries gave of the apparitions. Mary, arms folded in prayer, prays for her children on earth and encourages them to pray with her in the Fatima appearance.  

The statue of Our Lady of Lourdes made by Fabisch in 1864 and placed in the grotto at Lourdes in France is a model for the many statues of Our Lady of Lourdes in churches and shrines throughout the world. We have one in our Lourdes Grotto in Jamaica, NY. (below)

Various images of Our Lady of Fatima exist; we have one in our monastery chapel.(above) Her bright white garments witness to the glory the visionaries saw surrounding her. She brings the glory of heaven to brighten the earth, as Jesus did at his transfiguration. “And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no fuller on earth could bleach them.” (Mark 9:2-3)

Images of Our Lady of Guadalupe show her in the native dress of the time; she identifies with the native peoples then under colonial subjugation.

Contemporaries of Bernadette and the children of Fatima faced trials of another kind than the native peoples of Mexico. Secularizing governments promoted unbelief in society and wars were increasing in number and intensity. Mary’s appearances were not only the occasion of physical cures and healing. To ordinary people then and afterwards Mary’s appearances brought reassurance and renewed faith in the promise of God’s glorious power and presence. Their faith was real.

In his letter Laudato si’ Pope Francis calls upon Mary to visit us today as we struggle to care for the earth we have neglected. I like this image of Mary, holding her Son, which we have in our Mary Garden. Creation seems to raise its voice in praise. Her Son, Jesus Christ, offers us life-giving Wisdom. “We can ask her to enable us to look at this world with eyes of wisdom,” the pope says. May she hold in her hand our wounded world.

The Days Since Genesis

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It’ s a long way from the creation of the world to sitting on the porch in the morning. How many years before did God, the Creator of all things, bring light and water paving the way for a host of new things, non-living and living. Then, we humans enter the picture. A complex, changing world I belong to, sitting on the porch in the morning, looking eastward at the world before me.

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Jessica Powers, a Carmelite nun and poet, wrote about our experience of that world– “Song At Daybreak”

This morning on the way,

that yawns with light across the eastern sky

and lifts its bright arms high –

It may bring hours disconsolate or gay,

I do not know, but this much I can say:

It will be unlike any other day.

God lives in his surprise and variation.

No leaf is matched, no star is shaped to star.

No soul is like my soul in all creation

though I may search afar.

There is something -anquish or elation-

that is peculiar to this day alone.

I rise from sleep and say: Hail to the morning!

Come down to me, my beautiful unknown.

“My Beautiful unknown”. Our world is beautiful, but unknown, surprising, with variations that bring “anguish or elation.” People of faith know this, since they believe in God who lives “in his surprise and variation”, but unfortunately we can make God too small. We “think like humans do.”

The Genesis account, which we just finished reading recently and the rest of the Bible, deserve a search for their wisdom. I know there’s a new story that science tells, but the scriptures were there first. We should listen to their special wisdom..

Noah and the Ark: Genesis 6-7

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Where did the story come from?

A few years ago Nova on PBS featured a program called“The Secrets of Noah’s Ark.” In early times, floods were common in the “Fertile Crescent,” the area in Mesopotamia {modern Iraq} where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and the ancient city of Babylon were located. Floods, sometimes great floods, occurred, so the people had to be ready. You had to keep your boats handy, and a big boat also– you never knew..

But people then, as now, had short memories. “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. In those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day that Noah entered the ark. They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away.” (Matthew 24, 37-38)

I suspect some Babylonian priests then– meteorologists and story tellers of the age– came up with a flood story thousands of years before the Noah story in Genesis, to keep people on their toes – and maybe challenge some early climate change deniers too. It reinforced important advice: “ Keep your boats in shape and make sure a big boat’s around for ‘the big one.’”

Jewish priests and scribes in 6th century Babylon saw the story a perfect fit for the story of human origins they were telling their people. For them the take-away from the story was not to keep a big boat handy, but to be faithful to God like Noah and Abraham and their families. If they were faithful, God would save them from the flood and bring them  to the Promised Land.

The Nova program showed evidence from today of those big boats there “just in case.”

The story gave hope to the Jews driven from Jerusalem to exile in Babylon where, “By the rivers of Bablyon, we sat ad wept, remembering Zion.” (Psalm 137)  Christians– the pictures in the catacombs remind us (above)– saw Noah as a sign that the waters of baptism saved them from death and brought them the promise of paradise lost by Adam and Eve.

So the story of Noah and the ark is more than a myth.

We’re Not Alone: Genesis 2: 18-25

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The LORD God said:
“It is not good for the man to be alone.
I will make a suitable partner for him.”
(Genesis 2,18)

We usually rush on when we hear these words to the creation of Eve, who becomes “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh” for Adam, and the human story begins.

But the Genesis account  we read today and the medieval artist above remind us that God first “formed out the ground various wild animals and various birds of the air, and he brought them to the man… but none proved to be the suitable partner for the man.” (Genesis 2,19 ff)

Adam signals to God these new creatures are not enough, but does he dismiss them altogether for Eve?

Whether we realize it or not, we are not meant to be isolated individuals on this planet. We look for human companionship and friendship. But are human beings our only relationship. Besides caring for each other, we have destiny to care for all the creatures Adam names. They’re our partners too and we share this common home with them.

“A Vision Thing”

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Here’s a favorite picture of mine from the Staten Island Ferry. You say it’s a picture of the New York skyline? I say it’s a picture of water that gave birth to the city. True, isn’t it? The water was here first. The city came to be because water brought the world here, making the city a capitol of world trade and drawing millions of human beings to this place

Now look at it. The man who built the new World Trade Center claims it’s the tallest building in the country, challenging the heavens–like Babel.

Be careful, though, about challenging the heavens and forgetting about the earth. Be careful about the waters that brought you where you are. No fish or oysters here to eat now. Little space for the waters to go when they rise. And they will.

Don’t forget– the water was here first. It’s a “vision thing.” That’s what Pope Francis says in “Laudato si”.

This week’s readings from Genesis are good readings for improving our vision. In the weeks before we read from the Letter to the Hebrews, so you might say that from the heavens we’re now reflecting on the earth.  

It’s good to reflect on creation, Genesis reminds us. God looks on what has been made and finds it good. Our account from Genesis today describes the creation of man (“man” here is a term for man and woman). Man is not immediately placed on the bare earth. No, he is placed in a garden where “various trees grow that were delightful to look at and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. “

Human beings, created by God, are called like God to find creation good. iThe Genesis account singles our the various trees that are delightful to look at and good for food, but all creation, from the sun and the stars to the simplest organisms, is to be looked at with delight.  

We’ll read for two weeks in our lectionary from the Book of Genesis and then we’ll be reading from the Book of Sirach which continues the Genesis message. Learn the Lord’s wisdom from the sands on the seashore, from heaven’s heights and earth’s depths, Sirach teaches.  Like the Book of Genesis, it tells us to learn from the world we live in. 

The scriptures in our lectionary are not assigned arbitrarily. The compilers of our lectionary after Vatican II carefully planned the way our lectionary unfolds.

Learning from Genesis

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Pope Francis, in his encyclical Laudato Si, , invites Christians to turn to the Book of Genesis to understand how they’re related to the earth.

Genesis makes clear in its first chapter that the earth, “our common home,” is God’s work. God works for 5 days to create the world; only on the 6th day does God create man, whom he gives dominion over creation– but not absolute dominion. God made this world, not us, and every created thing enjoys a distinct relationship to its creator.

The dominion we have from God is a gift and is not absolute. We’re to help, respect, understand, tend, care for creation: creation isn’t ours to do what we want with it.

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The 2nd chapter of Genesis describes the creation of man. The earth is dry dust, but water wells up making a soft wet clay from the dust. God, like a potter, fashions man from the clay, breathing the breath of life into him and making him a living being.

We’re creatures of the earth, the story says.  As we’re reminded on Ash Wednesday, “You are dust and to dust you shall return.”

After creating man, God places him in a garden filled with all kinds of plants and trees. Two trees are singled out, the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Man is forbidden to eat from that tree.

What’s the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Why is it forbidden to eat its fruit?  There are different interpretations. Some interpret eating from the tree as a decision of moral autonomy. By eating its fruit, I claim a knowledge of good and evil; I say what’s right or wrong.

Not unusual to hear that today, is it? Some believe they’re in absolute control of their lives. They choose what’s right or wrong, good and evil, rejecting the limits of the human condition and the finite freedom God gives human beings.

Another interpretation sees eating from the tree as a decision to trust only in human experience and human knowledge that we gain as we grow and progress individually and as a people. Like children distancing themselves from their parents, we must be self sufficient, gaining a wisdom on our own. The danger is that human experience and human wisdom become absolute.  We distance ourselves from God.

Can we see both these approaches harmful to our environment? The first leads to a possessiveness of created things;  they belong to us alone and we can do anything we want with them.

The second way also leads to harming our environment. Pope Francis speaks of the danger of “anthropocentrism,” putting human beings at the center of everything, a trend he traces back to the beginnings of the Enlightenment in the 16th century. Trusting human knowledge and human creativity, some are convinced that science and technology alone can bring about a perfect world.

Technology isn’t enough to meet our present environmental crisis, the pope says, we humans need to change. We need to humbly accept our place in creation, as God meant it to be.

What about the tree of life in the Genesis narrative? In the garden the tree was a promise of continuing life. Once banished from the garden,  human beings face death.

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When Christ came in the fullness of time, he brought life to the world, Christians believe. In his death on the cross, the sign of death was replaced by a sign of life. His cross is a tree of life.

Here’s Pope Francis from Laudato si:

“The creation accounts in the book of Genesis contain, in their own symbolic and narrative language, profound teachings about human existence and its historical reality. They suggest that human life is grounded in three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships: with God, with our neighbour and with the earth itself. According to the Bible, these three vital relationships have been broken, both outwardly and within us. This rupture is sin. The harmony between the Creator, humanity and creation as a whole was disrupted by our presuming to take the place of God and refusing to acknowledge our creaturely limitations. This in turn distorted our mandate to “have dominion” over the earth (cf. Gen 1:28), to “till it and keep it” (Gen 2:15). As a result, the originally harmonious relationship between human beings and nature became conflictual (cf. Gen 3:17-19).

It is significant that the harmony which Saint Francis of Assisi experienced with all creatures was seen as a healing of that rupture. Saint Bonaventure held that, through universal reconciliation with every creature, Saint Francis in some way returned to the state of original innocence.[40] This is a far cry from our situation today, where sin is manifest in all its destructive power in wars, the various forms of violence and abuse, the abandonment of the most vulnerable, and attacks on nature.”

Pope Francis, Laudato SI  66

Ordinary Time and Daily Prayer

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The Christmas Season closes after the Baptism of Jesus, which we celebrate this Sunday. The Christmas celebrations are over. Ordinary time begins. Does that mean there’s nothing to do till Lent and the Easter season?

Sure there is. Ordinary Time is a time for daily prayer, and daily prayer is never over. The Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Liturgy says that daily prayer is at the heart of the Christian life and created a daily lectionary of scripture readings so “ the treasures of the bible be opened more lavishly for the faithful at the table of God’s word.” (SC 51)

The daily lectionary is a treasure for praying with the scriptures, but don’t take it for granted. Treasures, Jesus said, are usually hidden and you have to dig for them. That’s what we do in daily prayer. The liturgy is always a “work”, our daily work, an important work, a daily prayer. It’s the “summit” of the Christian life. We’re always at the beginning, not at the end.

We begin Monday to read the Letter to the Hebrews and the Gospel of Mark from our lectionary. There are feasts of the Lord and his saints to celebrate in the days ahead. It’s a lifelong learning we’re into, a school God provides,  and we learn day by day.