Reflection
We are living at a time when there is urgency for us to reawaken our spiritual connection with the natural world. The damaged Earth is calling humanity into a new relationship with it based not on technology and the economic advancement of some, but on a view that honors and respects the interconnection of all life and the earth systems that support it. We are being asked to change our ways and to adjust our lifestyles. The spiritual dimension of life offers the greatest untapped reservoir of the power, imagination, and courage that we need in order to change the present cultural view to another perspective: a view that honors and respects earth and works to preserve its harmony and balance. Earth is speaking with an increasingly strident voice. We will continue to deny it and ignore it to our peril.
Prayer
May we see and hear the message the earth is sending and learn to live in harmony with earth and one another.
Action
Educate yourself about climate change. There are videos and articles easily accessible online.
Watch When the World Gets Hotter
Suggested Reading
This sister earth now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail”.
Pope Francis, Laudato Si
We are witnessing the severe impacts of climate change throughout the world. Every credible scientific source is telling us that these impacts will only get worse if we do not address climate change and it also tells us that our window of time for addressing it is closing very soon…We need to dramatically increase our ambitions.
Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
When we fail to recognize the primary basis for survival in uncontaminated water, and soil, and the integral community of life systems of the planet; when we insist on altering the chemical constitution of the atmosphere; when we begin to affect the beneficent climate and life-giving sequence of the seasons that has brought about the luxuriance of the Cenozoic period into which we were born; then we must consider that we are into a deep cultural pathology. It is particularly pathetic when we bargain over these issues of life and survival for monetary gain or some commercial advantage for a few individuals or a corporative enterprise.
Thomas Berry
Human-induced climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe.
UN Climate Report 2021
This is the decade we must make decisions that will avoid the worst consequences of a climate crisis.
President Joe Biden
By polluting the oceans, not mitigating CO2 emissions and destroying our biodiversity, we are killing our planet. Let us face it, there is no planet B.
Emmanuel Macron
We don’t know the exact timing or the magnitude of the global warming threat. We know it’s a problem. We know it’s huge. We know we can’t stop it. We have to wake up Europe, and wake up America, and wake up the whole world to realize that we have a common destiny and what’s at stake. Let’s lead the whole world to realize this is not your normal political challenge. This is much bigger. This is life itself. It requires courage and imagination.
Jerry Brown
Climate-related extreme weather events are now so numerous and severe that it’s hard to dismiss what’s happening.
Al Gore
None of this will be easy. The hardest part of returning to a truly healthy environment may be changing the current totally unsustainable heavy-meat-eating culture of increasing numbers of people around the world. But we must try. We must make a start, one by one.
Jane Goodall