Live simply to protect ‘sacred earth’ as an Easter mission call
Apr 10, 2007
By living simply, Christians can help protect the “sacred earth” and meet the Easter call to service in the midst of dire environmental warnings, said a Scottish cardinal.
EDINBURGH, Scotland (Catholic Online, 4/10/2007) – In his April 8 Easter homily, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, said that the Easter story and liturgy reminds Christians of “the creation, the new creation, the light, the earth, abundance, life-giving water” and “tell us that care for the environment is an essential element of our Easter faith.”
“Jesus,” said the president of the Bishops’ Conference of Scotland, “taught us very clearly what it is to be a master. It is to be a servant. Far from understanding Genesis as permission to take what we like from the earth, we must consider ourselves to be at the service of the earth, every bit as much as we are at the service of our neighbor.”
Noting the urgency to “cooperate with God in the preservation and nurture of the earth,” Cardinal O’Brien said that Catholics are called to witness to the Resurrection by living fully and responsibly.
“We must learn to live simply,” he said. “By living simply we will do all that our Easter faith demands of us. We will serve our neighbor in the name of love and justice; we will serve our planet in the name of all generations to come.”
While beyond the doors of churches during the Easter season and “the blossoms, the spring flowers, the lambs, the first hint of leaves on the trees,” the cardinal said are “sings that are warnings, indeed, dire warnings” about the environment.
He pointed to the report released last week on Scotland’s global footprint, which examined the impact of the nation’s use of natural resources and reported that the rate of consumption there would require three earths to sustain it. “We take and use much more than our share, and we cannot maintain this any longer.”
The cardinal stressed that, with so much attention focused on global warming, climate change is not the only environmental crisis faced.
“We are mistaken if we consider climate change to be the only problem, imagining that if we fly less or burn less fuel or plant more trees somehow the environmental damage will be corrected,” he said, adding that Catholics “must take the whole picture into account when we consider the damage being done to our mother earth.”
Species are becoming extinct at “an alarming rate” and rain forests, “fast disappearing,” are half of what they used to be when he was ordained as a bishop, Cardinal O’Brien said.
“I cannot help but wonder as I go round schools what will happen to those remaining forests during the lifetime of the children I meet there. So full of vitality and wonder as they consistently are, so trusting of us to make the right choices on their behalf,” he said. “We fail those children in the way we destroy the land,” he added.
Noting the abundance of fresh water in Scotland and in other countries throughout the world, Cardinal O’Brien said that that is a resource, impacted more and more by pollution poisoning the earth, “we can no longer take for granted.”
Even in the vastness of the oceans, “dangers and warnings concerning a sustainable future are evident,” he said.
“Overfishing means we now pay a great environmental price. Stocks of many of the fish we have taken for granted and which have been plentiful are now critically low. The majestic whale is at risk as are many other species of ocean life,” he said.
Pointing to technology that is endangering deep-water, slow-to-replenish stocks, the cardinal was moved to ask “what Jesus would make of this.”
How would “his fisherman friends … react to the crisis we have brought on ourselves?” he asked.
“Learning to live simply will ask a great deal of us, and we will need help along the way,” the cardinal said.
He said that he has called upon the St. Andrews and Edinburgh Archdiocese justice and peace group to examine what needs to be done to help the church community to do a better job of meeting its environmental responsibilities.
In concluding his homily, the cardinal returned to the scene at the Resurrection.
“Where our gospel this morning ends is where we must begin, and that is in the Easter garden, encountering the risen Lord,” he said. “We must weep like Mary, who mourned the loss of her beloved Lord, and we must weep like Jesus who saw what had become of his beloved Jerusalem. We weep because we see what has become of this creation that so delighted God in the beginning.”
Yet, weeping, he stressed, must give way to action “to once more honor creation, and to serve the creator through that same creation.”
That mission to Catholics is “to live simply,” he stressed.
“This Easter, may we each hear our name, hear our call to be servants of the poor and servants of the earth, and may we all receive the grace to live simply,” he prayed.
Live simply to protect ‘sacred earth’ as an Easter mission call