Care for Creation

A Franciscan Spirituality of the Earth

Ilia Delio, Keith Douglass Warner, Pamela Wood

• Publisher: Franciscan Media
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781616363581
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Denominazioni cristiane

If we are blowing our Franciscan horn here, it should have been blown much earlier and much louder! This is the wisdom that our world so desires and needs today. We can no longer see ourselves as separate from the 'great chain of being, ' and we can no longer see this as a non-religious issue. Francis intuited all of this 800 years ago. —Father Richard Rohr, O.F.M., Center for Action and Contemplation, Albuquerque, New Mexico Three of the greatest minds in Franciscan theology, Ilia Delio, O.S.F., Franciscan Keith Douglass Warner, O.F.M., and Pamela Wood, come together to discuss one of the greatest crises of our time—the destruction of the Earth. This book takes both a theological and practical approach to developing a Franciscan spirituality of the earth. Four sections highlight the distinct relationships creation has with the world: incarnation, community, contemplation and conversion. In this meticulously researched book, the authors propose ways in which we can all understand our own roles in relationship to the Earth and ways in which we can make it better. Each section offers reflective action opportunities designed to bring the book's ecological and theological insights into the reader's daily life and nurture a Franciscan spirituality of the earth. Prayers, meditations, spiritual practices and group activities are offered which provide a practical hands-on approach to reconnecting with the earth and acting in right relationship. "Earth, with all its creatures, is in crisis. And responding to this crisis will require every possible resource of our human community. One of the most precious of these resources is the Franciscan tradition. It is a joy to welcome this book as a wise, thoughtful, inspiring and practical contribution to ecological theology, grounded in ancient Christian tradition that sees Earth as our sister and mother. Care for Creation is part of a wider retrieval of Franciscan theology for our new time, but is unique in this blend of three interrelated disciplines, scientifically informed ecology, theology and the practice of reflective action." —From the Foreword by Denis Edwards

[ part one ]

CREATION AND INCARNATION

[ chapter one ]

ECOLOGY AND CREATION

Life is amazing. All life is utterly dependent upon our planet for everything it needs. God provides everything through creation. Water falls from the sky and runs through creeks and rivers. Plants and animals grow and are all part of the circle of life. Air circulates around the globe, refreshing and renewing all of life’s creatures. The sun, trees, plants, oil, coal and gas provide energy. The beauty of creation grabs our attention, inspiring us and providing for our needs. God truly cares for us like a mother cares for her children and expresses this care through the goodness of creation. Our planetary home is not ours alone, however, for we live in community with an abundance of creatures upon which we depend daily, even though we rarely think about them. This chapter introduces the basic principles of the life sciences—ecology and biology—to lay the groundwork for a contemporary Franciscan care for creation. It begins by describing some of the special traits of our home planet that make it a suitable place for us (and for the Incarnation) to dwell. It then traces the role that the science of ecology can play in helping us to understand creation.

LIFE DEPENDS UPON THE PLANET EARTH

In our solar system, only Earth provides the conditions necessary for life. Our home planet is just close enough to the sun to allow its energy to heat our planet, but far enough away that it does not burn us. If its orbit were farther from the sun, we would live on a planet covered with snow and ice, but if it orbited closer, Earth would be too hot and survival would not be possible. All life depends on energy, and most life on Earth as we know it depends on the sun as the ultimate source of energy.¹ Solar energy reaching Earth’s surface is captured by plants and converted to sugars, which in turn become the basic building blocks for life. These compounds serve as food for the other creatures. Life is only possible with food and energy, and these have their ultimate origin in the sun.²

OUR BLUE PLANET

We live on a blue planet, rich in water. Although it is but a simple two-element chemical compound, water is absolutely essential for life. Over seventy percent of our human bodies are composed of water and over seventy percent of our planet is covered with oceans. Healthy human bodies can live for many days without food, but can survive less than three days without water. According to biologists, ocean waters offer just the right conditions for the evolution of life. Ocean water with the simple molecules dissolved in it provided most of the raw material for the first bacteria, the cellular building blocks from which more complex life forms evolved. The components of the water we carry in our bodies and our tissues, the water that is the basis of our blood, once swirled in the ocean, was evaporated up into the atmosphere, and fell as precipitation. Every living creature depends on water to live, yet water hardly ever stays put. It falls from the sky, runs down to rivers and groundwater and returns to the sea.³

Our home planet is refreshed by life-giving air. The original chemical compounds of Earth’s atmosphere were released when the planet was forming, and then the atmosphere stabilized as a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen, plus small amounts of other gases. This atmosphere nourishes and protects us. It allows the passage of solar energy, but filters out deadly rays and buffers the temperature extremes that occur on other planets. The sun heats different parts of our planet at different rates, generating wind and weather. As water evaporates from oceans and lakes, many impurities dissolved within the water are left behind, and the purified water is redistributed around the globe. No other planet offers such hospitality for life as we know it. Other planets have atmospheres of deadly gases or simply do not have a sufficiently formed atmosphere to host life.

OUR GREEN PLANET

We live on a green planet, rich with life. It is covered with plants and animals, and other forms of life we rarely think of. Much of Earth’s land surface is blanketed by a living mantle of vegetation, which hosts animal creatures of every kind. The planet’s hospitality becomes even clearer when we recognize that the entire animal kingdom depends totally on plants, whether directly or indirectly. The plant kingdom converts solar energy into a form of energy directly usable by living organisms, as water and carbon dioxide are combined to form simple sugars through photosynthesis.⁴ The sugars from photosynthesis provide the energy source for plants as they assemble the materials needed to build up their roots, stems and leaves. Life would not be possible without plants and their role in converting solar energy into food through photosynthesis. Life continues so long as an unbroken flow of energy and food flows through our ecological communities.

OUR VIBRANT PLANET

We live on a vibrant planet, diverse in life. Insects are the most populous animal group and most of them eat the complex sugars generated by the plants. A small fraction of animals are carnivores and eat other animals (most of which have eaten plants that have converted sunlight). Because these creatures are related through their feeding habits, scientists refer to this network as a food web. Indeed, the food and the energy that plants provide feed the entire system of life. But a whole other, less visible, food web connects the “waste” from these creatures, whether animal excrement or dead plants and animals. Microscopic creatures, such as bacteria and fungi, spring into action to break these raw materials down into the raw materials that plants use to make their roots, stems and leaves. Life on Earth is an endless, rhythmic cycle of building up and breaking down. The plant kingdom converts solar energy and very simple molecules into stored energy, which is consumed by successive levels of animals. After all of these die, yet another group of creatures consumes them, and then this food cascades down through another food web, and the rhythm of life pulses on. This description is highly simplified, but it helps us to recognize that life is dynamic, relational and interdependent.

OUR HOME PLANET

Our home planet has been reshaped by human ingenuity, science and technology. Science and technology provide benefits, but frequently they are put into practice by people who fail to recognize the impact they will have on the natural world. Many of these changes have benefited us humans at the expense of other creatures. Over the past 150 years the life (biological) sciences, especially ecology, have investigated the origins of life and relationships that sustain it. Life scientists help us understand how humans depend upon the Earth’s life but also how we are harming it. Many of us perceive scientists to be unusual people conducting mysterious experiments to determine abstract truths, but at a fundamental level most scientific work is a process of observing the world, asking good questions about these observations and then checking and measuring the observations in order to answer the questions and then make some conclusions about our world. Today more than ever, we need to listen to what scientists are telling us about the human impact on nature.

THE STUDY OF ECOLOGY

Biologists investigate life on Earth. The studies of Charles Darwin sparked a biological revolution in the 1860s. His theory of natural selection provided an overarching explanation for how the diversity of life has developed over time. Ecology is the study of how organisms interact with one another and their environment. Rather than look for tensions and disagreements between science and religion, the Franciscan way asserts that all of us can benefit from understanding what biology tells us about life, regardless of how much or how little we understand of science. The dynamism of the whole created world is like a biological dance in which every living creature participates in interactions with other organisms and with their environment.

The root eco- comes from the Greek word oikos and is an element of the words ecology, economy and ecumenical. Oikos means “house” so these three words mean, respectively, “study of the house” “management of the house” and “universal house.” Ecology became a popular term during the 1960s, as society began to recognize that we live on a planet of finite resources. Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring about the environmental impact of pesticides and the fundamental interrelatedness of life. As astronauts snapped awesome pictures of our planet from space, newspaper headlines described a litany of environmental problems and the finite character of the Earth and its inhabitants. These events began to provoke new consciousness among many North Americans, most of whom had assumed that natural resources would always be abundant. Many believed that even if local resources were exhausted, more could be found just over the horizon. Popular awareness of ecology inspired some to realize that American society had split apart ecological and economic well-being, despite their overlapping meanings. The myth of infinite resources slowly began to give way to a new realization:We live in a finite system.

The science of ecology has contributed a most important concept: the ecosystem. Although few people have resisted this idea (at least relative to the resistance over the concept of evolution), the ecosystem concept is no less revolutionary. An ecosystem is an association of organisms and their physical environment, interconnected by the circulation of energy and nutrients. An ecosystem may be any size, from a drop of water to our entire planet. All creatures live within some kind of ecosystem and relate or influence each other—and their environment—by their behavior. The idea of an ecosystem is critical to understanding the patterns of life on Earth. The ecosystems’ living and nonliving interactions take place on our home—Earth—and thus the connection between the idea of ecology and house (oikos). Different kinds of organisms meet their needs in their own unique ways, but they all need a community of other living organisms in order to live. Within an ecosystem there are three general categories of living creatures: producers, consumers and decomposers. Let us now turn to how these main components of ecosystems relate to each other in our home—the home that God created.

Producers

In Earth’s ecosystem plants are the primary producers. As mentioned earlier, they convert solar energy to carbohydrates and thus make useable forms of energy for other components of ...