After feeling that “Laudato Si” is a
sustained reflection on recovering the consciousness of creation (and obviously
with it the recovery of the sense of God, the Creator and Father), one arrives at Chapter
Six and “Ecological Education and Spirituality.” In the first part of the
chapter, the pope remarks: “Here, I would echo that courageous challenge[1]:
“As never before in history, common destiny
beckons us to seek a new beginning… Let ours be a time remembered for the awakening
of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the
quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of
life.”
Pace
Vatican II and the kerygmatic call to holiness for the layman in the middle of
the world, and a developing praxis of seeking Christ in ordinary life, the
normal layman in the pew and the mother of the young boy still find their
religious imagination trumped by the canonical religious state of leaving the
world and taking vows of poverty,
chastity and obedience. I dare to say that even the Catechism of the Catholic
Church does not hold steady without ambiguity to this “development” that has been so
copiously and clearly stated in places such as Lumen Gentium #31, the Decree on
the Apostolate of the Laity and Christifideles Laici. [2]
What
Francis is doing is putting the vocation to sanctity in the world by daily,
ordinary normal engagement with it on center stage. His flex point is not the
usual religious starting point, but rather, if you don’t do it, you won’t have
a world left. He is proposing a spirituality.
He is taking the Christological anthropology of “self-gift” in doing whatever
one does, wherever one is, and proposing that it is precisely in the middle of
the world that it must be lived, and this precisely because there is a problem
in the middle of the world which is the devastation of what we are doing with
it and to it. The large context is the secular environment, and he is proposing
that everyone in the world has the responsibility to make the gift of self in
living out the small things of ordinary life there. This has always been Opus Dei: “You must understand now more clearly that God
is calling you to serve him in and from
the ordinary material and secular activities of human life. He waits for us everyday,
in the laboratory, in the operating theater, in the army barracks, in the
university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home and in all the immense panorama of
work. Understand this well; there is something holy, something divine hidden in
the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.”[3]
But
this is what we mean by “environment.” Francis writes: “Only by cultivating sound virtues will people be able to make a
selfless ecological commitment. A person who could afford to spend and consume
more but regularly uses less heating and wears warmer clothes, shows the kind
of convictions and attitudes which help to protect the environment. There is a
nobility in the duty to care for creation through little daily actions, and it
is wonderful how education can bring about real changes in lifestyle. Education
in environmental responsibility can encourage ways of acting which directly and
significantly affect the world around us, such as avoiding the use of plastic
and paper, reducing water consumption, separating refuse, cooking only what can
reasonably be consumed, showing care for other living beings, using public
transport or car-pooling, planting trees, turning off unnecessary lights, or
any number of other practices. All of these reflect a generous and worthy
creativity which brings out the best in human beings. Reusing something instead
of immediately discarding it, when done for the right reasons, can be an act of
love which expresses our own dignity” (Laudato Si, #211).
[1] “Earth Charter,
The Hague (June 29, 2000)”
[2] I am thinking of CCC ##915 and 916
that refers to the life of separation from the world with the vows of poverty
(having nothing), chastity (celibacy) and obedience where the language is “’more
intimate’ consecration, rooted in Baptism and dedicated totally to God… propose
to follow Christ more nearly….” Such language echoes the hegemony of the
canonically religious vocation and trumps the development that has taken place in the Church in the last 50
years.
[3] St.
Josemaria Escriva, “Passionately Loving the World,” Conversations… Scepter,
October 8, 1967,
No comments:
Post a Comment