This year we celebrate Earth Day, April 22nd, in a world turned upside down by COVID 19. Now more than ever we know we are a global earth community who live in a common home.
Earth Day reminds us that the earth and its eco systems, provide its inhabitants, i.e. the total community of life, not just humans, with life and sustenance. We are part of the earth, just as the earth is part of us, or as Pope Francis describes it in Laudato Si, (LS) ‘a splendid universal communion’.
The theme for Earth Day 2021 is RESTORE OUR EARTH
Please visit Earth Day 2021 website.It has lots of interesting information and resources. It reminds us that “when life around the globe returns to normal, our world cannot return to business as usual. We have the solutions, both natural and technological, we just need the will”.
This time please don’t just say that is the work of governments, big business, other people’s work. We all can contribute to caring for our earth by “small daily actions” LS. We need to be convinced we are one with the earth and all other species, interconnected, interdependent.
I quote from Sr Nellie McLoughlin’s message for earth day 2020- “I am (the earth) life’s respiratory system par excellence and I need to keep healthy. I want to breathe freely, so that all of life continues to live and flourish”.
We have witnessed the global pain and suffering of what its like not to be able to breathe. Our collective destruction of the planet is compromising its health. Our forests are the lungs of the planet.
So, in the words of Pope Francis LS:
“Let us be protectors of God’s Creation, protectors of God’s plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment we share.”
REFLECTION
An invitation for today or one of the days close to earth day:
Take some clay in your hands. Walk on soil.
Soil, clay has been a long time in the making.
Clay is the product of the activity of weather
and microbes on rocks and decaying debris.
The process took thousands of years.
Clay is alive with goodness, with fertility.
Clay is alive with wholesomeness, with life.
We are intimately connected with clay.
The nutrients in our blood come from the clay.
In a spoonful of healthy soil
there are thousands of organisms working away quietly.
Give thanks, stand in awe.
Commit to preserving a healthy earth.
Sr. Mary Judge
