Care for Creation: Laboring with God – November 22, 2017

I hope those of you in the KC Metro will mark your calendar for 7:00 pm on Tuesday, November 28 and join us at SFX as we pray for personal and communal conversion of heart and the grace to repair our relationship with creation.

Planet Earth, our common home, is in trouble.  Climate change is real and our actions (and lack of action) are contributing to it. 

An Ignatian approach to praying about these issues invites us to see creation as God does – in all its splendor and suffering. 

The Ignatian Solidarity Network has created an ecoexamen, inspired by Pope Francis’ Encyclical “Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home” that helps us to hear the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.  In part, it reads: “I see signs of our sins reflected in the ‘symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life.’  I see how indigenous peoples have been displaced from their lands and seen their water contaminated due to an economic system that prioritizes profit over people and the common good. I recognize how a ‘throwaway culture’ discards not only things but people as ‘leftovers,’ and how it is the poor and vulnerable who suffer most from climate change. I see how poor people and persons of color disproportionately live in neighborhoods near industries that produce contamination and waste, whether in urban cities, rural areas or in precious natural biomes such as the Amazon. I see how poverty, inequality and globalization contribute to ‘social exclusion [and] an inequitable distribution and consumption of energy and other services.’  I am pained by the increasing negative impacts of globalization on the earth and humanity. We cannot ignore the cries of creation, the poor and the earth who ‘is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor.’”

Read more and pray the full examen at http://www.ecologicalexamen.org/.

Tuesday’s prayer service is the second in a series of prayer services co-sponsored by our Justice & Life and Adult Faith Formation Committees.  They all have the same title:  Laboring with God Toward Reconciliation.  This theme is inspired by the work of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) General Congregation #36.  GC #36 calls all of us to be reconciled with God, with one another and with creation.  It is labor.  It is work.  But it is work we do WITH GOD.  We are not alone.  And this gives me hope.

Join me in hopeful prayer Tuesday.