Laudato Si Sunday Reflection: What the Ruler of the Universe wants for Christmas

Today's reflection is brought to you by

Colossians 1:15-17.

You, 

O Christ,

are God,

and you reveal God to us

in all that you have created.

In you,

all was, 

is, 

and will be created,

beyond our telescopes and microscopes.

Nothing exists apart from you;

we all come from you

and depend upon you

for our very substance

and our every breath.

The powerful have no power before you

and the weak have all their strength because of you.

You hold everything together,

yet we behave as though everything depends on us.

Help us to remember

You are in charge,

and to withhold our judgments

in favour of yours.

May your reign, 

your justice 

come to us all

and save us.

Help us to see and do

your will,

and to give you

what you really want

for Christmas this year.

+Amen.

* * * * * * *

Consider yourself warned -- in this week's paragraphs of Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis and his encyclical writing team bring out a dog's breakfast (British slang meaning a confused mess or mixture) of issues that our world isn't handling particularly well due to the fact that many of us give priority to personal interest rather than the common good.

I'm focusing on paragraphs 120-123 of Laudato Si, which can be found by clicking here and scrolling down. Only four paragraphs today because a fifth would take us into a different topic which we'll cover next week.

As the seventh chorus of Laudato Si reminds us in paragraph 120, everything is interrelated and all of God's creation -- from the human embryo to his mother to the oilsands worker to the wildlife that lives near the tailings pond -- all are important and really, how can we assign them particular value, especially when we are not God and we can't see the Big Picture?

When human beings try to play God and make decisions about who should thrive and who should die; when practical relativism says, "it is inconvenient, therefore it must go"; when we devalue life in any form, we end up with a dog's breakfast "whereby different attitudes can feed on one another, leading to environmental degradation and social decay" (paragraph 122).

Let's backtrack a moment to practical relativism. Basically, it has to do with seeing everything in life in terms of how it serves my personal interest. It's interesting to me that practical relativism really took hold during the age of the 'me generation' which is comprised of people my age and older.

The world's present leadership came of age in a time when there was mostly peace and prosperity in the Western World, and many of us developed a sense that we had worked hard for our wealth and security, forgetting that there were others like us in poorer and more dangerous parts of the world who were working just as hard or even harder, but were unable to reach our standards of living because of many factors beyond their control (some of those factors created by our high standard of living). Some of us have lost sight of the fact that everything we have is blessing and gift from God, and now think that because we can afford it, we are entitled to a life of luxury and convenience, and that the world revolves around us and our desires.

But it doesn't, and it shouldn't. All God's creatures should be as fortunate as we are, and we shouldn't rest on our prosperity until they are.

In paragraph 123 we read that "The culture of relativism is the same disorder which drives one person to take advantage of another, to treat others as mere objects, imposing forced labour on them or enslaving them to pay their debts." And it leads to the dog's breakfast which we see in our newspapers almost daily (some of which is named by Pope Francis and friends in the continuation of paragraph 123):

abortion
sexual exploitation of children
abandonment of the elderly
human trafficking
organized crime
the drug trade
commerce in blood diamonds and endangered species
buying of organs of the poor for resale or experimentation
elimination of unwanted children
(and this list hardly begins to account for the hardships faced by other species... like loss of habitat, pollution of soil, water, and air, climate change, etc.)

And all of it, all of it, springs from our inability to really appreciate the value of life in its many forms. If I have a bone to pick with Pope Francis and those who helped to write Laudato Si, it is that is that they fail to acknowledge that we humans might need to employ some form of reliable birth control to limit our numbers for the sake of all earth's species, all God's creatures.

Be that as it may, I completely agree when they note that

[relativism's] "use and throw away" logic generates so much waste, because of the disordered desire to consume more than what is really necessary. We should not think that political efforts of the force of law will be sufficient to prevent actions which affect the environment because, when the culture itself is corrupt and objective truth and universally valid principles are no longer upheld, then laws can only be seen as arbitrary impositions or obstacles to be avoided (paragraph 123).

A quick word about our "use and throw away" logic as we come toward Christmas -- could this year be the year to do what Christ suggests we do for the poor and marginalized among us? To offer a different sort of gift?

How shall we celebrate your upcoming birthday,

Ruler of the Universe?

You give no directives

about spending so much on gifts

or cooking massive meals.

Instead you remind us:

“I was hungry and you gave me food,

thirsty and you gave me a drink,

a stranger and you welcomed me,

naked and you clothed me,

sick and you cared for me,

in prison and you visited me.” (Matt 25: 35-36)

You can’t get more direct than that.

Help us to be your compassion this Christmas.

+Amen.