Focus: Creation, Theology and Ecology
Witnessing through the TV screen the burning wildfires in Australia at the start of the new decade in 2020, destroying people and their homes along with billions of other creatures, brought one thought into my mind: apocalypse. The traumatic suffering of those creatures unable to escape those ferocious fires in a living holocaust was almost indescribable. This is not simply a natural calamity; scientists have been saying for years that climate change will elevate and exaggerate natural disasters on a scale never experienced before. That time has now come. In the UK, we are most likely to suffer f loods and erratic weather patterns, but not wildfires which are only really feasible in large continents. Climate change is not simply about the earth heating up. Different forms of devastation will happen in other parts of the world as weather patterns become more and more unpredictable. It is difficult to absorb the scale of what is going on and still retain a sense of purpose.
In such a context, where giving up in despair would be a natural response, the message of Pope Francis’ papal encyclical Laudato Si’, published in 2015, is more relevant than ever. Just as the evil genocide of the innocents by King Herod at the time of Christ’s birth could not overcome divine purpose in the incarnation, so destructive events on a mass scale need not have the final word. Laudato Si’ begins defiantly with praise for the created world around us, and indeed invites other creatures into that praise. Creation is still to be celebrated, even while we need to be closely attentive to what is happening the world over. His message is one of inclusion rather than exclusion. The earth, our common home ‘is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us’.1
Pope Francis’ papal encyclical Laudato Si’, published in 2015, is more relevant than ever
Globally, those who are most impacted by climate change are the poorest in the world who do not have the means either to escape from or to adapt to such changes. Ignoring their fate is committing the sin of indifference. Given the interconnectedness of everything with everything else, gradually climate change is impacting not just the poorest and most vulnerable, but also those who are better off. We, as humans, are also caught up in the lives of other creatures whose destruction is so intense that it leads to a complete loss of species. Myriad mammals, birds and other creatures are disappearing. Globally people are dying on a mass scale from climate related causes. Sea levels are rising. Ice caps are melting. Is it only now, when the threats of death are also faced by those with more power, that we are waking up and considering serious change? Destruction of the earth and its creatures is not just happenchance or, as secular ethicists sometimes suggest, an amoral wicked problem, but rather a serious sin. The solution is not, as some might argue, simply solvable through a change in technology, because our addiction to technologies is part of the problem in the first place. That does not mean technologies are evil, but that our attachment to them takes us away from the life of grace. Pope Francis addresses, therefore, the situation that we find ourselves in as a moral and spiritual problem as much as a practical, economic and technological one.
Those in practical Christian ministry will know that facing up to our sins need not be a negative experience, but the first step on the road to forgiveness, recovery and healing. Witnessing the trauma of those who have suffered can leave us feeling numb. At the Amazonian Synod held in October 2019, many of those indigenous peoples who were suffering the most were asking not so much for justice and revenge, but for mercy. Can we allow God to heal our guilt of indifference and complicity and become sensitive to that cry for mercy? What might it mean to show mercy to those who have lost everything? We cannot bring back the dead, but we can hope for the protection of those who are still living.
Ecological conversion, a phrase used not just by Pope Francis, but also by Pope St John Paul II and the Orthodox ecumenical patriarch, His Holiness Bartholomew I, means what it suggests, a turning around, metanoia, and beginning again on a different tack. Pope Francis’ most recent message for the 53rd World Day of Peace claims:
The ecological conversion for which we are appealing will lead us to a new way of
April/May/June 2020 | Pastoral Review Vol 16 Issue 2 | 7
