Mary Rowell, CSJ on behalf of the Federation Ecology Committee
This is not the “Green Window” I had anticipated writing. The topic has changed! Indeed, we might say everything has changed in light of the Coronavirus pandemic. We struggle with the tragedy in the world, prayerfully accompany those directly impacted by the effects of the virus, try to keep ourselves and others safe and reflect on creative ways to be in mission and ministry in the heat of almost unimaginable crisis. In all of this, perhaps we are also experiencing an urgent call to change; essentially to change by re-imagining our relationship with nature. It is this relationship that now matters as never before. Why does it matter?
Scientists who study viruses are providing information to help us understand this. Viruses are ubiquitous in the natural world. Generally, they don’t spread across species. However, with major human disruption to the environment natural boundaries are crossed and transmission between species becomes possible. This is true of the Coronavirus. Science writer, David Quammen, in a recent Podcast explains the root causes of these evolutionary patterns [1]. They include our dissociation from the natural world, individualism, our patterns of consumption, production, eating, buying, travelling, over-exploitation of natural resources, disturbance to the especially diverse eco-regions, often through mining and what theologian, Leonardo Boff, describes as the “exaltation of Wall Street” [2]. It is within this context that we are witnessing massive environmental destruction, intrinsically linked to human poverty and suffering, exacerbated now by the transmission and evolution of highly dangerous and destructive disease patterns. Against this background, Boff, continues: “The current coronavirus pandemic represents a unique opportunity for us to rethink our way of inhabiting our common home”, the natural world. Here, Boff is echoing Pope Francis and his two immediate predecessors in calling for greater awareness of and care for God’s good Earth.
If the experience of this pandemic is teaching us anything at all it is to remind us of the interconnected-ness and interdependence of all things. It is calling us to attend as humans, as Christians, to the intrinsic “cry of the earth and the cry of the poor,” what Pope Francis calls “integral ecology,” the lens through which we are to live the Gospel in today’s world. In this is an invitation to listen to what this crisis is telling us.
Although essential and good, science, health care and economic strategies are insufficient. "We must dispose of, or transform, systems that fail to recognize the relationship of all things." The crisis is a cry to us to question and re-assess our philosophy of individualism and patterns of greed, convenience, indifference, consumerism, and to reconsider our human relationships and values. It demands of us as individuals and as communities substantive change toward sacred relationship with nature and a true grasp of the ONENESS in all of creation. In this is our hope. In nature is our healing.
The Peace of Wild Things
Verse 1: (Wendell Berry)
“When despair for the world grows in me; and I wake in the night at the least sound; in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.”
Copyright © 2012 by Wendell Berry, from New Collected Poems. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press
[1] For further detail see: emergencemagazine.net (podcast) David Quammen, “Shaking the Viral Tree”
[2] Leonardo Boff, “Coronavirus: The Perfect Mess for Disaster Capitalism”
