GOD created the earth from nothing but man and woman He created from the earth. Today, Ash Wednesday’s rites aptly remind us of this with the words: “From dust you are to dust you shall return.”
Indeed, we are born of earth’s womb and earth is truly our mother. But because we are the most intelligent and the only self-conscious beings of her children, we alone can be aware of our mother’s need to be healthy enough not only to nurture all her children but also to give birth to and nurture many more.
With the awareness comes the responsibility of taking good care of our mother.
Unfortunately, mother earth is in a poor state of health and it is due mainly to the abusive and destructive treatment she gets from her top-of-the-line children, humans.
We are poisoning her withtoxic waste thrown indiscriminately on land, air and water.
We are denuding her forests and exposing her to the devastation of floods and landslides. We are clogging her arteries with plastic and other non-biodegradable waste. Instead of increasing we are diminishing her capacity to regenerate and sustain life.
We are sapping her life energy with wasteful and destructive use of her resources, irresponsibly forgetting that our mother is as finite as we are, that she can also die and when she does we will die with her.
At the rate we are abusing our mother she is not likely to die a natural death. Unless we stop the abuse, she is going to die either of poisoning or premature aging. And this could happen fast, even before the children realize what they have done, and continue to do, to her.
When we ruin the health of our mother, we sin against our brother and sister humans and other living creatures because we deprive them of the care they deserve from a healthy mother. We should confess these sins sometime during Lent and atone for them by caring for our mother better. We should keep her healthy enough not only to care for us but for our children and our children’s children.
Thus, this Lent instead of fasting and abstaining from meat, which is good only for our individual health, maybe we could fast and abstain from throwing plastic, used oil and other toxic non-biodegradablewaste indiscriminately at our mother. We might also fast and abstain from super- luxurious living that unnecessarily depletes mother earth’s now scarce and limited resources.
More relevant than ritual fasting and abstinence is dying to our abusive (of earth) habits and caring for mother earth because if she suffers we all suffer with her and if she dies we all die with her. But if she resurrects to new life, we resurrect with her and life will continue to thrive on earth.
That might not be a bad idea for a Lenten mantra.