Beginnings

A beginning starts with awareness.  It is an itch, a pebble in the shoe.  A good beginning is like a seed which when taken care of will grow.  The seed which is the awareness, hope and action for our common home - the earth - began for us in the Illinois River Valley with the Season of Creation 2024 - to Hope and Act for Creation. This Fall of 2024 it is truly a seed of an idea and not even a group, just a few gatherings.

In Laudato Si, Our Care for our Common Home, Pope Francis states, "The urgent challenge to protect our common home includes a concern to bring the whole human family together to seek a sustainable and integral development, for we know that things can change. The Creator does not abandon us; he never forsakes his loving plan or repents of having created us. Humanity still has the ability to work together in building our common home."  LS13

Patriarch Bartholomew states, "For human beings… to destroy the biological diversity of God’s creation; for human beings to degrade the integrity of the earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the earth of its natural forests or destroying its wetlands; for human beings to contaminate the earth’s waters, its land, its air, and its life – these are sins”.  At the same time, Bartholomew has drawn attention to the ethical and spiritual roots of environmental problems, which require that we look for solutions not only in technology but in a change of humanity; otherwise, we would be dealing merely with symptoms. He asks us to replace consumption with sacrifice, greed with generosity, wastefulness with a spirit of sharing, an asceticism which “entails learning to give, and not simply to give up. It is a way of loving, of moving gradually away from what I want to what God’s world needs. It is liberation from fear, greed and compulsion”. As Christians, we are also called “to accept the world as a sacrament of communion, as a way of sharing with God and our neighbors on a global scale."  LS8 and 9

Laying in the grass at night looking up to the stars we can began to see some more of God's creation and then come back to our part of creation, the Illinois River Valley.  Where we are at is where we can act with God and participate in healing our common home, stretching from the Illinois River to the ends of the universe.  Looking about the Laudato Si Movement, active in every part of the world we see that we need only commit to each other and participate in that world as a sacrament of communion.

Caring for seeds and the changes needed for our future.

(Note, citations are to the encyclical, Laudato Si, On Care for Our Common Home.)


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