Month: April 2014

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Only One God

“And dispute ye not with the People of the Book except with means better (than mere disputation), unless it be with those of them who inflict wrong and injury: But say: ‘We believe in the revelation which has come down to us and in that which has come down to you; Our God and your God is one; and it is to Him We bow (in Islam).’”(Qur’an 29:46)

Last evening I had the pleasure of attending a program sponsored by the Muslim Christian Dialogue Center at the University of St. Thomas. It wasn’t my first nor will be it be my last! The Center does a splendid job of fostering mutual understanding and cooperation among Muslims and Christians through respectful dialogue grounded in the Qur’anic and Christian traditions. The dialogue flows from the belief that Muslims and Christians worship the same God (cf. Vatican II: Nostra Aetate, The Qur’an, 29:46; 42:15), who is at work in both faiths and share much in common.

All three presenters were warm and inviting representatives of their faith. I was especially intrigued by the woman who grew up Catholic on a farm in Central Minnesota who converted to Islam. Why would anyone do that? Weren’t there good Christian role models to mentor her in the richness of her faith of origin? Yes, I felt challenged, apologetic and defensive. However, her radiant demeanor, spiritual wisdom and obvious respect for both Judaism and Christianity assured me of her personal integrity and the beauty of Islam as a spiritual path.

I welcomed numerous points of resonance between the two faiths if we step beyond dogmatism and rote ritual. How do we come to know the Holy One? How do we awaken to the manifold presence and providence of God? How do we best honor and remain aware of the Holy? Of course, this finds expression in efficacious gratitude. I was returned to my own Ignatian (cf., St. Ignatius of Loyola; Jesuit) heritage: Ad Majoren Dei Glorium – not just “all for the glory of God” but “all for the greater glory of God’!

The panelists’ joyful insistence that literally everything is a creation of God sounded a great deal like the desirable habit of “Finding God in all things!” This lived appreciation that holiness resides in each of us and in all creation reminded me of Gerard Manly Hopkins’ poetry (e.g. Pied Beauty and Kingfishers). Islam’s resolute desire to live in conscious awareness of God and orienting one’s living according to God’s will found easy parallel in the Examen (find numerous versions of this practice [here]).

Rather than remaining within our Christian comfort zone, you may wish to prayerfully reflect upon a poem shared by 13th century Persian Sufi mystic, Rumi.  May it awaken us to God’s intimate presence throughout creation. Remaining aware of such providence, may we show gratitude for all we have been given:

who is this existence
who puts sadness
in your heart
 
who is this soul
who sweetens your grief
as soon as you crawl
 
the one who first frightens you
with deadly snakes
before opening the treasure vault
 
who changes a monster
to an angel
a sorrow to happiness
 
who gives the blind
wisdom and
inner sight
 
who changes darkness
to light
thistles to flowers
 
who sheds the sins
of the sinful like
autumn leaves
 
and puts guilt
in the heart of
its own enemies
 
who makes them
repent and in silence
says amen and
whose amen brings
inner happiness
and soulful delight
 
who changes bitter thoughts
to lightness and
joyous zeal
 
bestows fire
and makes you leap
with unknown joy
 
the fire that can
make a hero
from a desperate heart
 
who is this existence
who is this
tell me who

(ghazal number 528, translated by Nader Khalili)

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How Are the Children?

As a development officer at the University of Minnesota I was well aware that two-thirds of students enrolled in four-year colleges and universities nationwide take on student loans to help pay for their education. Each year I would soberly inform prospective donors the debt a typical student carries upon graduation, today nearly $30,000. The burden of such an obligation – especially for our grads in the College of Education and Human Development who generally enter careers at the low end of the salary range – was a good motivator for me to get up and go to work every day. I naively assumed that money I raised would really make a difference.

Now I recognize that our students are enmeshed in a system that is much more complex and resistant to meaningful reform. Here’s the harsh bind in which young people find themselves: Many wouldn’t be able to attend college at all without easy access to loans. Over the past thirty years the real cost of attending a four-year institution has at least tripled, far outpacing inflation. I saw this at the U of M and how available grants and scholarships just didn’t go as far as they used to. Besides, we fought an erroneous perception that as a “state school” costs at the U are relatively cheap and well subsidized by tax-payers. Not true! Combine all this with the fact that family income levels have been stagnant since the 1970s.

The squeeze placed on our young people ain’t pretty! An incisive article in the current issue of  Commonweal [link] by Hollis Phelps reports that 38 million individuals now hold a combined total of more than $1 trillion in student loan debt. That’s four times what it was ten years ago, and it surpasses total U.S. credit card debt. In fact, when it comes to what Americans owe, student loan debt is second only to mortgage debt. And generally, these obligations are virtually impossible to discharge in a bankruptcy proceeding. While many are struggling to keep their heads above water, at least 10 percent of recent borrowers are currently in default, the highest rate in almost twenty years.

Hollis describes a typical situation: Students, especially those with the greatest need who sometimes graduate with double the average debt, aren’t necessarily poor planners or irresponsible borrowers, misinformed about the debt they are taking on to finance their college education. They just come from homes that couldn’t afford to put money into a college savings account. They already have part-time jobs, but a typical minimum wage doesn’t make much of a dent in current tuition rates. They know what it means to tighten their belts, since they’ve done so all their lives.

Most of us are well aware of these challenging realities. But Hollis article opened my eyes to a shocking truth: moralistically shifting all responsibility onto the individual borrower conceals the fact that student loan debt is, in one way or another, a highly profitable business. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the federal government stands to make $175 billion in profit from student loans over the next decade, and profits for loan servicers and lenders have continued to rise. Investors and speculators are also in on the action, as student loan debts, like risky mortgages, are bundled and sold as securities in financial markets. The Wall Street Journal has reported that investors want more, with demand as much as fifteen times greater than supply.

Then there are the schools themselves. There are campuses to maintain, faculty and staff to pay and fierce competition out there for bodies, especially among the huge number of schools that are dependent on student tuition for operating revenue. The simple fact is that many institutions would likely cease to exist, at least in their current forms, without the reality of student debt. As with too much in our Free Market economy, we have “commodified” our students.

Hollis correctly observes that higher education functions similarly to our current healthcare system: it’s a complicated market composed of numerous actors that operate at various levels to sell a product that individuals in some sense have to consume. Opting out of either system isn’t really much of an option, and individuals will go to great lengths, including taking on exorbitant debt, to use the services both provide, because both have direct impacts on livelihood. All the while, those who run the systems profit from our needs and desires.

It’s a big mess! I suspect we will not muster the energy to resolve the economic, social, academic and political challenges until we recognize our moral responsibilites imbedded in the current state of affairs and accept, in justice, the obligation we have to more than our own biological children.

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Redeeming Pain

There is more than enough tragedy and suffering to go around. Instant global communication has compounded the impact. For example, outrage at the killing of Jesuit Father Frans van der Lugt in Syria yesterday ricocheted around the world within 24 hours. Such moral outrage is necessary and important – but it can be numbing. All the more reason to celebrate healing, success and grounds for hope!

Thanks to a friend from the Minnesota International Center who shared a [link] to a really powerful piece about forgiveness and reconciliation in Rwanda. Stunning photos accompany disarming profiles of human anguish and triumph – a testimony to healing and hope for what is possible within a generation of the horrific genocide in which 1 million Rwandans were killed.

We have witnessed such reconciliation and reason for hope before. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu provided a mechanism for people to confess their participation in human rights abuses during apartheid and receive amnesty. Some argue that those responsible for the policies of apartheid should have been held criminally liable. But that is not the route chosen by the Nobel Peace laureate archbishop or President Nelson Mandela.

The moral genius of the TRC was the public airing of the painful truth which prevented the violence of apartheid from being buried in the past.  Rev. Marie Fortune warns on her [blog], the Shakespearian advice to “forgive and forget” is too often directed at victims and survivors of violence. “Forgiveness does not come from a position of powerlessness but from a place of empowerment and a degree of safety; forgiveness is never about forgetting the past, but in remembering the past in order to strengthen our efforts not to repeat it.” Justice requires truth-telling and remembering before forgiveness.  We see this in Rwanda.  And, as numbing as it can be, instant worldwide news reporting has the potential to serve this essential purpose.

Coincidentally, David Brooks has a marvelous piece in today’s NYTimes entitled “What Suffering Does” [link]. He is quick to point out, “there is nothing intrinsically ennobling about suffering. Just as failure is sometimes just failure (and not your path to becoming the next Steve Jobs) suffering is sometimes just destructive, to be exited as quickly as possible.” Yet, Brooks celebrates those transcendent survivors who have the capacity to understand their suffering in some larger providence:

It’s at this point that people in the midst of difficulty begin to feel a call. They are not masters of the situation, but neither are they helpless. They can’t determine the course of their pain, but they can participate in responding to it. They often feel an overwhelming moral responsibility to respond well to it. …  

The right response to this sort of pain is not pleasure. It’s holiness. I don’t even mean that in a purely religious sense. It means seeing life as a moral drama, placing the hard experiences in a moral context and trying to redeem something bad by turning it into something sacred.

Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different. 

Martyrdom in Syria, the hard work of reconciliation in Rwanda, requisite remembering with truth-telling of Marie Fortune, suffering’s ennobling potential cited by David Brooks… wherever we look a world in anguish invites us – desperately needs us – to embrace the paschal drama of Holy Week.

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Enough Words!

“There is nothing to eat. There is nothing worse than to see people in the streets looking for something to eat for their children. … There are so many people here that need operations and or specialist medical treatment but have to wait a long time, and are forced to go through immense suffering.” 

“As long as there is one person from our community left here, I will stay with them.” 

Fr Frans van der Lugt, a Dutch Jesuit priest, who had spoken these words in January was shot dead this morning, April 7. A masked gunman opened fire on Fr van der Lugt, killing him instantly.

Having lived in Syria for almost 50 years, Fr van der Lugt had championed the plight of the ordinary people he had served. In February UN and Red Crescent workers evacuated more than 1,300 civilians from the Old City during a temporary truce. Fr. van der Lugt, along with Syrian Jesuit Fr Ziad Hilal, 40, had chosen not to escape to safety but to stay living alongside the 74 Christians and a few hundred Muslim civilians caught between government and opposition forces fighting for control of the area.

This is not the time for more words!

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Your Epitaph

When asked in September of 1941 about how he would like to be memorialized, President Roosevelt told his friend, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, “If any memorial is erected to me, I know exactly what I should like it to be. I should like it to consist of a block about the size of this (putting his hand on his desk) and placed in the center of that green plot in front of the Archives Building. I don’t care what it is made of, whether limestone or granite or whatnot, but I want it plain without any ornamentation, with the simple carving, ‘In Memory of ____’.” So, friends fulfilled his wishes on the 25th anniversary of the 32nd president’s death when a simple granite marker was unveiled on the Pennsylvania Avenue side of the Archives lawn in 1960. [photo] 

We know that FDR eventually got something very different! The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial that is spread out over seven and a half acres on the southern side of The Tidal Basin is huge. It was opened in the late 1990s when I was living in Washington DC and quickly became my favorite site in the Capitol City. Today would be an especially gorgeous day to be there because it would be awash in cherry blossoms. No matter the season, be sure to visit the next time you are in DC.  Then, be sure to go to go to the Archives lawn on Pennsylvania Avenue to keep things in perspective!

Did you know that today, Sunday, April 6 is National Epitaph Day? Well, it is! Time to consider what you’d want said about you after it’s all said and done. FDR proves a couple things – what you get may be something very different that what you want, and “memorials” typically say a whole lot more about the people erecting them than about the person being remembered. So, all the more reason to give some thought to those few simple words that would capture your essence for all eternity!

Currently, I expect to be buried in a plot next to my parents in the small Nebraska town where I was conceived but from which we moved nearly 60 years ago. My paternal grandparents are buried nearby. All this is not far from the land homesteaded by my paternal great-grandparents in 1868. Therefore I have thought of engraving the following from the concluding stanzas of T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning.

But, that might be construed as ostentatious bordering on the pretentious!

Friends already know that I actually want my epitaph to be He made good soup!  Some think I’m kidding!  Besides costing much less to engrave many few words, I cannot think of a finer compliment for someone to say about another than that!

What are the finest words you will want future generations to say about you?

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Happy Birthday, Mom!

My aunt thought the Easter bunny had brought her a baby sister! Today, April 5 was Holy Saturday when my mother was born in 1909.  I wonder how long it took my aunt to come to other conclusions!

Mom has always been a contradiction for me. Her childhood always seemed idyllic compared with the chaos that seemed to reign in our house. She recalled parents strolling hand-in-hand on leisurely summer evenings along the creek that ran through their farm or amid their orchard that was the envy of Cedar County. In addition to being beautiful with her raven hair and green eyes, my Mom was also really smart. I never had reason to doubt her claim that she earned the very highest score in the entire country on her 8th grade standardized exam.

Life was really hard for Mom as well. Her only sister who had welcomed her Easter arrival with such delight died at 28 giving birth to her third child. Mom’s favorite sibling, Uncle Rudy, died of cancer the year I was born. My parents married in 1931 and somehow survived farming during the Depression plus the birth of eight children before “moving to town” immediately after WWII. Mom could not have been ecstatic with the news that she would give birth to her tenth child – me – at the age of 41! Like me, my Dad could not have been the easiest man to live with – she did it for 62 years.

The contradiction that has always haunted me the most, however, relates to education. Despite my mother’s clear intellectual aptitude and academic success she was denied the opportunity to go to high school. Not even the protestation and appeals from her eight grade teacher dissuaded my grandparents from their belief that Mom was already very well prepared for her intended destiny as farm wife and mother.  Yet, she never begrudged Uncle Rudy, dashingly handsome from photos my mother prized, for the opportunity to graduate from college and medical school!   How that disparity must have hurt!  But, was she even quipped to name this as an injustice?

Life brings such joy, beauty and delight. It is also confoundingly unfair, unjust and tragic. Cynics say, “Life is short, then we die.” During Lent Christians deliberately enter the passion, death, resurrection cycle. From this vantage I am beginning to appreciate that Mom enforced Lenten disciplines of fast and abstinence in our home and trucked us off to church long before we even knew the words “Triduum” or “Paschal Mystery” because she knew them to be the truth of our lives. 

Mom died just shy of her 98th birthday. We chose 1 Corinthians 13 and the Beatitudes as the perfect Scripture for her funeral liturgy. “Love is patient, love is kind, love is…” encapsulated her life! Proclaiming the Scripture from the lectern of Holy Trinity Church, the church where she had brought me to be baptized but from which the family had moved 52 years earlier, I was totally unprepared for the punch the Letter to the Corinthians delivered. It was as if I had never before heard the conclusion to the passage:

For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became [mature], I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. 

Yes! Amen! Thanks be to God! Because of a mother’s love I am alive. Because of her mature, time-tested and tempered faith I am able to get a glimpse of what genuine faith looks like.

None of this mitigates the fact that life remains confoundingly unfair, unjust and tragic – especially for the poor and those in any way dismissed as having little value by our culture. Yet amid this culture that worships individual autonomy, personal fulfillment and material acquisition my mother’s story proclaims a contradictory truth: self-realization comes from self-giving, perhaps even to the point of dying to self. Human freedom, our fulfillment, is not so much the power of autonomous choice as it is the ability to orient what choices we have toward love.

Happy Birthday, Mom! Aunt Dora was right… your life was the gift of Easter!

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Countering Lenten Lethagy

I admit it – I’ve gotten a little lax and lazy! We are two-thirds of the way into Lent and I need a mid-course correction. Today I took a pen to paper and tried to generate possible strategies for activating each of the traditional Lenten practices of fasting, alms-giving and prayer. Here’s what I came up with. No, I am not committing to put each into practice. I just need to get the energy flowing as a counter to Lenten lethargy. Maybe something here will give you a jump-start as well.

FASTING

City crews came through yesterday pruning trees on the boulevard. Pruning shapes, strengthens and beautifies trees. Pruning actually increases productivity in food and flower-bearing plants. What “pruning” would have a corresponding effect in me?

Fasting immediately conjures food and eating less. What if we ate the same amount but shared a meal with someone who is hungry for more than food right now? What would happen if we invited a grieving neighbor over for dinner or a struggling colleague out for lunch?

A dinner guest on Tuesday said he has a goal of taking the bus to work at least four days a week. He’s worked up to that number and has learned to enjoy his commute much more than if he were battling traffic. He saves a boatload of money but also takes pride in lessening his consumption of fossil fuels.  Consider eco-fasting!

ALMS-GIVING

I am very attached to my opinions and am disposed to judgmentalism. What if I were to consistently try – and this would be a challenge – to give everyone I meet the benefit of the doubt? What if I tried really hard to give the best interpretation to the other person’s words or behaviors for a full 24 hours?

What is our most precious resource? Of course, its time! What if I conscientiously gave my attention to someone who holds a different opinion, to the neighbor who asks to borrow a cup of sugar but actually wants to vent about an exasperating child, or recognized when someone needs us to take time to quietly listen and is not asking for answers or our opinion?

What would be the hardest thing for me to give away? Wow! As I compile my long list of possibilities I am inspired to wonder “why?” What is it about this item that would make it so hard? Simply getting in touch with this fact opens us to better understand our true values and can be quite illuminating!

PRAYER

I have Psalm 46:10 on a card on an easel in my prayer space: “Be still and know that I am God.” Truthfully, God must get pretty exasperated with my incessant babble, wish-lists and emergencies. What if I were to give myself over to simply resting in God’s embrace like a child in her mother’s arms?  What… let God be God?

My friend Susan Stabile quoted Fr. Robert Barron’s book Why Your Body Matters for Prayer on her blog Creo en Dios a few days ago [link]: “The body in a significant sense precedes the mind. If you’re having difficulty in prayer today try kneeling, or bowing, or making some sort of reverent gesture. The body often leads the mind into a deeper spiritual space.”

We mouth the Lord’s Prayer all the time but do we really mean it? What if we were the pray – really pray – YOUR kingdom come, YOUR will be done… here, now!  Mean it!  That would be nothing short of the deep, transforming conversion Lent is intended to inspire.

Finally, and most importantly, Lenten practices are not about our endurance or success. Rather, they are intended merely to dispose us to God’s enduring presence and ever-merciful love.

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Day by Day

Everyone of my generation will recognize the song “Day by Day” by Stephen Schwartz. It was made popular in the 1971 musical Godspell:

Day by day,
Dear Lord, of thee three things I pray:
To see thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly,
Day by day.

I was a junior in college and the lilting melody of the tune perfectly expressed the sentiment of the times. I probably hummed along to the melody a thousand times before learning that it came from a prayer attributed to my patron, Saint Richard of Chichester whose feast day is today, April 3.

Richard didn’t have the panache of more famous saints. He was an archbishop in Sussex, England. He broke no glass ceilings like Joan of Arc. Unlike Stephen the Martyr (the name I chose for Confirmation), Richard died of natural causes at age 56 in 1253. He never gained global notoriety as has Dominic who died in 1221 or Francis of Assisi who died in 1223. You will not even find reference to him in the Roman Missal for this date!

Today Richard is really only remembered for the popular prayer ascribed to him:

Thanks be to Thee, my Lord Jesus Christ
For all the benefits Thou hast given me,
For all the pains and insults Thou hast borne for me.
O most merciful Redeemer, friend and brother,
May I know Thee more clearly,
Love Thee more dearly,
Follow Thee more nearly.

Richard is believed to have recited the prayer on his deathbed with the words transcribed, in Latin, by his confessor Ralph Bocking, a Dominican friar.  If you care to know more, Wikipedia is as good of source as any [link]. 

My purpose is simply to share a great prayer in celebration of my feast day. Saints gave kids of my generation our own version of super-heroes! Only quite a while later did I make any association between such characters and the creedal formula about a “communion of saints” which we unreflectively mumble through at church on most Sundays.

I’m not looking for Richard to garner a great cult-following. Sarcastically I’d say, find your own saint! Who do you claim? When is your feast day? Next time you recite the Creed at church, be a bit more intentional when you profess faith in a “communion of saints.” There are so many good reasons to celebrate — day by day!

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Time Out of Time

Think of all the moments in your life when time stood still. How long did you hold your newborn when she first emerged? How long did that moonlit walk last on the night you realized you were in love? How long did you sit in the waiting room watching the door each time it opened, willing the surgeon to come out with good news?

With these supple and striking images Anna Keating conjures moments of “time out of time” when we feel profoundly alive, grounded in the depths of our humanity. We all know them – such time “does not obey the ordinary rhythms of minutes and hours” but rather “burst the bonds of time.” Keating reminds us of the ancient Greek understanding of chronos and kairos. Chronos is measured by a clock and has specific parameters like the time it takes to read this blog. Kairos is that supple “time out of time” — that “due season”, an irreplicable moment of opportunity, or irrefutable flash of clarity and purpose.

Christians are invited to enter such “time out of time” during the Triduum, the “three days” from sundown Holy Thursday through the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday. These three days carry a rhythm that breathes like a single day! Triduum is time to stop, be quiet, tend the silence, gather, prepare and pray. Keatings’ blog post is valuable reading [link]. I gratefully cite it nearly two weeks prior to Holy Thursday to reiterate Keating’s essential point: keeping Triduum warrants our anticipation and deliberate planning.

Yes, participation in the liturgies at our churches is to be highly recommended! It compounds our experience to share the dynamic flow of these liturgies with the same community of seekers. But this is not an endurance test nor is anyone keeping attendance – show up as you are able! Savor the magnificent rituals, but don’t depend on them exclusively! How do you wish to enter Triduum? How can you better dispose yourself to a kairos experience transcending the “chronology” posted in a schedule or texts printed in a missal? Of course, show up even if it all comes down to the last moment — grace happens! But, given the chance, be deliberate. Be choiceful. Be generous with yourself. Embrace the opportunity. Plan ahead.

The world was stunned by Pope Francis washing the feet of lay people on Holy Thursday last year, women as well as men and even a Muslim. We are two weeks out! We all would do well to stretch the rubrics and transcend tired rituals.  Whose feet deserve to be washed this year? Whose feet would you like to see washed? How might you “wash” these feet whether within a liturgy or with other gestures outside of the church’s time-honored ritual?  Maybe, especially for us control-freaks, we need to allow someone else to figuratively but profoundly “wash” our feet.

Good Friday invites us to walk with Jesus through his passion and death. Scripture for each of the fourteen traditional Stations of the Cross are available [here]. With which point along the Way do you especially identify this year? Why is that? Get up-close-and-personal with Jesus in that resonant kairos moment. Do you identify with a particular character in the passion narrative? Be that person for someone outside of church – carry someone’s cross for a while, wipe the sweat and blood of someone suffering. Maybe you know what it is like to fall multiple times.  Go with your heart – it knows where your kairos beckons.

Easter Vigil is the traditional time for Baptism. Do you know the date of your Baptism? Give your godparents a call and wish them Happy Easter. Take some time to consider what your Baptism has meant to you. They say faith is not so much taught as it is caught. When, why and where did you “catch” your faith? Jesus knew in the Garden that he had a “baptism” yet to undergo. What “agony” are you enduring?  What “baptism by fire” is awaiting you? How does Jesus’ dying and rising strengthen you for what lies ahead?

Regardless of the season of the year or the liturgical calendar, when have you experienced “Easter”? What would Easter look-like for you this year? Mary of Magdala thought Jesus was the gardener – how might the Risen One choose to appear to you in kairos time this year?

What would make time stand still?  You know what you need – make it happen. We’ve got time!

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A Future Not Our Own

My parents moved the family off the farm five years before I was born. They sold the farm when I was a junior in high school. Once I said to my Dad, “You know, if things had been different I think I might have liked being a farmer.” He looked over his glasses with that distinctly paternal glance and replied, “Son, you have never wanted to work that hard.” As with most things, I have finally come to admit that he was right.

Yet, my roots are still deeply planted in Nebraska soil and there is nowhere I feel more at home. This heritage now finds limited expression in gardening – some call it yard work, for me it’s a spiritual practice and psychological necessity. Just today I was inspecting seed packets at the store in anticipation of planting my garden.  I even gave our compost bin the first turn of the season and looked at a CSA website considering a summer membership.

Whether we are farmers at heart or not, we all must admit that “being human” defines us — creatures formed from the dust, from rich humus!  By nature our DNA orients us to value the earth as our home and our fulfillment is found by growing in deep respect and appreciation for the integral relationship we humans share with the natural world.  The United Church of Canada says it perfectly: “Creation is not just a handsome backdrop for human history!”

Nostalgia easily provides a wistful diversion from the reality that ice caps are melting, Arctic sea ice is collapsing, water supplies are stressed, heat waves and heavy rains are intensifying, coral reefs are dying, and fish and many other creatures are going extinct. The oceans are rising at a pace that threatens coastal communities and are becoming more acidic as they absorb carbon dioxide given off by cars and power plants. A report released this weekend by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that the worst is yet to come!  We have heard this litany before.  But have we heard?

Two decades of international efforts to limit emissions have yielded little result. While greenhouse gas emissions have begun to decline slightly in many wealthy countries, including the United States, those gains are being swamped by emissions from rising economic powers like China and India. The report emphasized that the world’s food supply is at considerable risk — a threat that could have especially dire consequences for the poorest nations. Several times in recent years, climatic disruptions have already reversed decades of gains against global hunger.  Don’t the poor always bear the brunt of social dysfunction?

We face scientific challenges with economic consequences that require political will we have not yet mustered. Yet, these are not merely – perhaps not even primarily – scientific, economic or political issues. Ours is a moral crisis that cries out for a quality of leadership in desperately short supply. All the more reason to be encouraged by news that Pope Francis’ first encyclical will deal with the environment. Let’s hope Francis’ moral gravitas will augment the urgent appeals of scientists, warnings from UN commissions and focus a tidal wave of moral determination among all peoples of faith.

Outrage easily provides a diversion from my personal obligations.  I too easily blame spineless politicians or demonize corporate greed for immediate profit. I discover myself shockingly “hierarchical” with my expectations of the pope and other faith leaders! I even self-righteously rehearse our grandchildren’s exasperation: “Why didn’t they do something? … How could they let this happen? … What were they thinking? … Were they thinking!?! … Were they only thinking of themselves?” Then, I look in the mirror. What am I going to do? How am I part of the solution? What is my moral duty?

Perhaps the most counter-cultural change I need requires an even deeper personal conversion – to finally admit the world does not exist to serve me, my lifestyle, my comfort, my stuff!  Taking a page from my parents, it’s about a self-less love for others.  Yes it will take hard work, the kind none of us have wanted to do. But, it must be about the lives we give to our children!  Dad, I’m beginning to understand your sacrifice.

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Those wanting to read the many statements of Francis on the environment, can look to “Pope Francis on Care for Creation,” found on the website of Catholic Climate Covenant [link].

I rely on an article in the New York Times [link] for information about the United Nations report on climate change.

I am dependent on notes taken at a Wisdom Ways program in October 2013 on Hildegard of Bingen for the quote from the United Church of Canada,