Laudato Si’
Advent is one of my favourite seasons where we are encouraged to embrace waiting and hope. If 2020 has taught us nothing else, it has certainly shown us what it is like to wait!
Perhaps it has also reminded us of what it is like to hope, to hope for an end to the pandemic, to hope for the health of our loved ones, to hope for a vaccine. The Gospel message at the beginning of advent calls us to “keep awake”. Jesus urges us not to sleepwalk through life but to be awake to the realities around us.
This includes being awake to our dependence on God’s creation. In a recent TED Talk Pope Francis said: “Everything in the world is connected… As the pandemic made sure to remind us, we are interdependent on each other as well as our Mother Earth.”
We are dependent on God’s creation for our food, water, growth, nourishment, the air we breathe, the environment we live in. Everything is connected. Human beings cannot be healthy if our planet, our common home, is not healthy.
And so, we must “keep awake”, to look and to really listen to what is happening to our beautiful world. This Advent time is an opportunity to reflect on what type of world we want to return to when this crisis has passed. What world do we hope for?
During winter, nature is showing us what it is like to wait and to hope. Creatures hibernate, growth slows, the soil rests and our attention is drawn inwards, it is a time to look and to listen. The earth might appear a dark place as our common home turns away from the sun, but this darkness is necessary for the bulbs and seeds to ready themselves for the burst of growth in spring. In the darkness of the soil, things are happening and so too in us.
So how can we cultivate hope in 2021? The young climate activist Greta Thunberg says: “When we start to act hope is everywhere.”
It is good advice. As faith communities we can be huge witnesses to caring for our common home, we can all do something. As we gather with families this Christmas let us spend more time in nature, noticing Christ present in all of it: “The entire material universe speaks of God’s love, his boundless affection for us. Soil, water, mountains: everything is, as it were, a caress of God.” (Laudato Si’ 84).” And when Spring comes, can we ready the soil for planting? What would it be like for every parish, every family to rewild their world? Turning over green spaces to wildflowers is one way of cultivating hope in 2021. Learn more here.
Jane Mellett is the Laudato Si Officer with Trócaire