Laudato Si Sunday Reflection: Sharing in God's goodness

Today's reflection is brought to you by
Psalm 68.

In your goodness,
O God,
you have provided for your needy ones,
namely,
all your creatures.

You have given us everything we need
and more.

We should be singing and dancing
in joy and gratitude,
exulting in your goodness to us.

You have given us a home filled with abundance,
a prosperity we can scarcely take in.

Love in abundance is your name
since you're always
showering us
with blessings,
restoring us
when we languish,
and sheltering us
in your goodness.

In your goodness,
O God,
you have provided for your needy ones,
namely,
all your creatures.

Help us humans to forget our egos
and remember that all you give us
is meant to be shared
with all of your creatures.

+Amen.

* * * * * * * 

God's provision for us needy human beings is pretty incredible when you really think about it. It's just too bad that our wisdom hasn't kept up, that we've forgotten how interconnected we are with everything God has made. In this week's 5 paragraphs of Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis names some of the amazing technological advances of the past two centuries, and notes our need to rediscover wisdom for our planet's sake. See for yourself by clicking here and reading paragraphs 101-105.

We've completed the second chapter of Laudato Si, The Gospel of Creation, and now we are moving into Chapter three, The Human Roots of the Ecological Crisis, which will look at how "human life and activity have gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us." Our encyclical writers "focus on the dominant technocratic paradigm and the place of human beings and of human action in the world" (paragraph 101).

"We are the beneficiaries of two centuries of enormous waves of change" begins paragraph 102, and here's a long list of some of the changes mentioned:

steam engines
railways
the telegraph
electricity
automobiles
airplanes
chemical industries
modern medicine
information technology
digital devices
robotics
biotechnologies
nanotechnologies
domestic appliances
transportation systems
bridges, buildings and public spaces
nuclear energy
information technology
knowledge of our DNA (all in paragraphs 102-104)

And I'm sure there are many more that our writers didn't name. God-given human creativity has brought about all these wonders, many of which have vastly improved the survival and fulfillment of many human beings on earth. The problem is that these things have also given human beings "tremendous power" and dominance over one another and all God's other creatures.

The problem is that our technological advances keep occurring faster than our understanding of what they mean for all of creation in terms of "human responsibility, values and conscience" (paragraph 105). Our awareness of our limitations is clouded by human ego -- "look what we did! Isn't it incredible?!" -- preventing us from remembering -- "every choice we make matters, and we must be careful because some of our choices can affect other creatures in ways we may not be aware of." If we really think about it, there hasn't been a bridge built or a medical procedure invented that hasn't altered the lives of countless creatures, human and non-human, in one way or another. As has already been mentioned four times already, everything is interconnected. But we have the freedom to create, and unfortunately we don't always use wisdom to remember those connections, or use our creativity the way God intended.

The last three sentences of paragraph 105 sum it up pretty bluntly:

Our freedom fades when it is handed over to the blind forces of the unconscious, of immediate needs, of self-interest, and of violence. In this sense, we stand naked and exposed in the face of our ever-increasing power, lacking the wherewithal to control it. We have certain superficial mechanisms, but we cannot claim to have a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint.

I'd like to underline two key words in this last bit: spirituality and self-restraint. It strikes me that, had human beings created that long list of wonders above while in spiritual, meditative relationship with God, one another, and all of creation, self-restraint would have come naturally, and wisdom would have played a much larger role in our creation of a world with fewer problems. But we humans are often in too much of a hurry to wait for Wisdom, she who calls to us so beautifully in Chapter 8 of the book of Proverbs (click here to read it).

As this Sunday's Psalm reminds us, God has provided us with everything out of God's goodness, and we need to remember God's goodness, earth's limits and some wise self-restraint in the way that we use our knowledge and power in our world.