by Marybeth Lorbiecki

I was recently and quite unexpectedly invited to a conference at the Vatican, not by the pope, but by Cardinal Peter Turkson, from the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace. The night before, my friend Mary and I happily sat down to dinner and wine at a sidewalk café a few blocks from St. Peter’s Square. It was a lovely September evening with a full moon and a strolling accordion player. Just behind us was a chattering bright-eyed dark-haired girl of about three. She was life force incarnate, and her Italian mother and father were trying to quiet her, lest she bothered us. We gestured that there was no problem, we were enjoying her.
              In another stroller was another daughter, this one older but unable to speak except with her eyes. They followed her mama, who was close to her, but also her sister and papa and the whole street.  We were struck by this family of four, and this special child who participated through her vulnerable and joyful trust, the silent version of her younger sister. Though we knew it not, this family would circle back into our lives.
              The next day, my friend left to seek a good seat at the general audience with Pope Francis on the square of St. Peter’s Basilica.  In the hotel lobby, I was greeted by a staff member from the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace and escorted down the street past the guarded gate and through the Vatican greens to the home of the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences--a “casina” with a marble courtyard and columned entrance. We were assembling for the conference sponsored by the Council and Academy to help the Holy See in its preparation for the United Nation’s upcoming climate talks in Morocco in November. The guiding principles for us were to be those laid out in the pope’s encyclical “Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. The 45 panelists and participants spanned international climate scientists, development and poverty-alleviation specialists, theologians, ethicists, and those working with the poor, especially those in island nations suffering from rising seas and devastating hurricanes, such as the Philippines and Myanmar. I was invited as the director of Interfaith Oceans and author of Following St. Francis: John Paul II’s Call for Ecological Action.

     It wasn’t prayer that drew Emily Schosid to an internship at the Lama Foundation, a spiritual retreat center in northern New Mexico. An Ivy-League graduate student, Schosid was eager to share her fresh expertise in the latest environmental theories and innovations with an appreciative, though technologically-challenged, audience. No one, she wrote later, was “more ready to spread the gospel of academic sustainability than me.”
            Yet months in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains taught Schosid unexpected lessons in caring for people and the Earth, which she eloquently shares with readers of a new anthology, Coming of Age at the End of Nature: A Generation Faces Living on a Changed Planet. Published this month by Trinity University Press, the collection presents Schosid’s work along with twenty-one other essays by young adults—members of the Millennial generation—who grew up in a time of melting ice caps, bleaching coral reefs, acidifying oceans, and shrinking biodiversity around the world. As co-editor, with Susan A. Cohen, of Coming of Age, I rejoiced in the privilege of getting to know our gifted contributors, and in learning about their hopes and fears, dreams, struggles, and faith as they navigate toward an uncertain future.

As we think of Rio, we see Christ the Redeemer standing tall over one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World, Guanabara Bay --“ the bosom of the sea.” Encompassing the largest bay water volume in the world, it has nurtured marine species of all kinds, tucuxi (Guiana) dolphins, crabs, fish, and seabirds. With its sparkling beaches and blue waters, it evokes a Biblical paradise. “And God said that it was good.”  

Yet when Olympic sailors tested themselves in preliminary regattas, they ran an obstacle course of floating plastic bags, submerged sofas and mattresses, and trash of all kinds, even the carcasses of dead horses, dogs, and sometimes people too. 2012 Bronze Medalist Allan Norregaard from Denmark complained: “I have sailed around the world for 20 years, and this is the most polluted place I’ve ever been.”

Yesterday I went to the new Star Wars movie, and of course, cheered that the forces of darkness and oppression can be fought with bravery, love, perseverance, and an opening of oneself to the Force. Most of the time, our actions of hope, courage, and prayer, though, are not so dramatic. And they are not defeated through war but through getting out of war and preventing wars. They can be a candle lit though there is the threat of oil running out; a young couple expecting a child walking to a town far away because of a repressive government, soon to flee and become homeless refugees; a dance under the stars and sharing of a meager feast and a coat when it seems that cold and darkness and starvation of winter will prevail; conversations over tables about a changing atmosphere that no one can hold in their hands, yet agreeing to try to change our ways as a world and as nations.

Life is messy. Human growth and progress never move in a straight lines, from point A to B, no matter how logical it may seem to do so, just as trees rarely grow exactly straight, and coral reefs emerge over eons in varied bulbous colorful shapes.

As we are on the brink of the climate change talks in Paris, some growl in despair that they shall just let us down again, that nothing real will be accomplished. But those are not the voices of faith or hope or even reality. We are in a new place, poised differently than we have been in the past. The voices of faith are starting to stand up with the voices of science to guide the world to new possibilities, new visions of who we can be.

“Laudato Si, mi Signore” – “Praise to you, my Lord.” In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace. “Praise to you, my Lord, though our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs.
            The sister now cries out to use because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our responsible use and abuse of the good with which God has endowed her….

Thus begins Pope Francis’ encyclical, just over a hundred pages long, but one sure to cause a firestorm of reaction because its talk about climate change – not in a political context but in one of love and faith. And it calls all Catholics, Christians, and fellow humans of all faiths, or none, to immediate and resolute actions on fossil fuel and other pollution that harm God’s earth and hits the poor the hardest.

  “Now on the twenty-fourth day of this month, the people of Israel
were assembled with fasting and in sackcloth,
and with earth on their heads.”
Nehemiah 9:1
 
      As I was thinking about Pope Francis’s upcoming encyclical, I played Bible roulette, letting God lead me to the passage I should pray with.  This is the one my Bible opened to, one I never remember reading before.  And it shocked me.

            “. . . .  fasting and in sackcloth, and with earth on their heads. . . . ”