Loving the little things…

If we dishonour the so-called inferior or unworthy members of creation, we finally destroy ourselves, too.  We cannot dismiss, pollute, or misuse animals, the earth, the trees, and the waters and pretend to love the Creator of all these things, or even to love ourselves in the midst of them.

St. Paul says “if one part is hurt, all parts are hurt with it. If one part is given special honour, all parts enjoy it … and it is precisely the parts of the body that seem to be the weakest which are the indispensable ones, and it is the least honourable parts of the body that we must clothe with the greatest care.” (I Corinthians 12:26, 22-23).

For some sad reason we humans thought that we were the only creatures that mattered, as if all of the rest of creation was just an arbitrary and throwaway part of God’s plan.  We took our narcissism to a cosmic level, it seems, and did not love and protect the weakest parts of the “Body of God,” nor did we “clothe them with the greatest care.”  Now we all “hurt” together, just as Paul predicted.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Hope Against Darkness, p.138

On this we must base the rest of our lives on this planet, we humans, if we are to survive. Perhaps we are just beginning to glimpse where we might have gone wrong?

I do encourage you to visit the Hilfield Project website. As the community states in their introduction:

Francis of Assisi, in his living the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the full, gives us an example of three ecologies:

• an environmental ecology, living in harmony with creation
• a social ecology, knowing all people as brothers and sisters
• a spiritual ecology, in praise of God as Father and Creator of all things

The Hilfield Peace and Environment Project seeks to express and share this ‘integrated ecology’ for the sake of and out of love for the world.