Tag Archives: Pope Francis on the environment

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..

Creation Redeemed

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creation
Pope Francis is soon to issue an important encyclical on the environment. Some say that’s none of the church’s business, but creation is the church’s business, In his great treatise “On the Incarnation of the Word ” St. Athanasius says Jesus Christ came to save it.

“The Word of God, incorporeal, incorruptible and immaterial, entered our world. Yet it was not as if he had been remote from it up to that time. For there is no part of the world that was ever without his presence; together with his Father, he continually filled all things and places.

“ Out of his loving-kindness for us he came to us, and we see this in the way he revealed himself openly to us. Taking pity on our weakness, and moved by our corruption, he could not stand aside and see death have the mastery over us; he did not want creation to perish and his Father’s work in fashioning humanity to be in vain. He therefore took to himself a body, no different from our own, for he did not wish simply to be in a body or only to be seen.

“ If he had wanted simply to be seen, he could indeed have taken another, and nobler, body. Instead, he took our body in its reality.”

Jesus Christ, the Word of God, entered into the world of real time and place, Athanasius says.  The world was not a stage he used, to be dismantled and thrown away.  it was a reality he embraced and redeemed. “He is the Word through whom you made the universe; the Savior you sent to  redeem us.” “He became flesh and dwelt among us.”

God’s plan of salvation, then, was not restricted to human beings: “he did not want creation to perish and his Father’s work of fashioning humanity to be in vain.”