Glenford Lowe sdb
The ‘Ecological Mystery’ begins with the breath of God blowing over every void and chaos. Life begins with a sacred breath. Darkness is scattered and light pervades. Creation is more than just an ‘intelligent design’ or the faulty miscalculations of a DNA stand. Life is the greatest of all mysteries and to really understand it, we would first have to love life and the giver of all life!
God is madly in love with the world. The sacred scripture wraps it all up in the profound statement found in Jn 3:16, ‘God so loved the world’. Loving his handiwork that he found very good, God entrusted it to us lesser mortals. He gave us ‘power over the work of his hands’. It is only deep love that allows one to surrender power to one’s subordinates.
Power, if not handled with care, can often enslave, destroy and dominate. Misdirected power cannot love. Misdirected power breeds on greed and de-creates. Misdirected power only leads to more void and chaos…an ‘ecological disaster’ waiting to happen. Power, if not channeled properly, becomes in fact, powerless. The really powerful are the ones who can love and breathe life. Humanity can only become powerful again if we too, as one, can ‘so love the world’. The ‘ecological mystery’ is a deeply divine-human adventure. God and humanity must come together to ‘so love the world’. Grace and human responsibility need to interplay once again to ‘renew the face of the earth’.
Prayer can be a good place to start this renewal. Prayer doesn’t change things; prayer changes people, and people change things. To re-new the world we need this interplay of touching heaven and transforming earth. While we struggle through warmer days and colder nights, drier summers and melting snowcaps, devastating cyclones and shattering quakes, erupting volcanoes and fast depleting springs, extinct flora and fauna and the doom of a world that will fast end…we make a ‘green prayer’.
Yesterday, while sliding my fingers over the rosary beads and with raindrops gently falling, it dawned on me that I could make a ‘green prayer’, a new green rosary that invites me to contemplate the ‘ecological mysteries’ of a God so loving the world and inviting me to responsibly love it in return...
First Ecological Mystery: Contemplate on ‘God CREATING the world and finding it GOOD’ (Gen 1–2:4)
Second Ecological Mystery: God LOVING the World so much, He gifts His son Jesus’ (Jn 3:16)
Third Ecological Mystery: God CALMING the World with His Word (Lk 8: 22–25)
Fourth Ecological Mystery: God PROVIDING for the World, we need have no worry (Lk 12: 22–33)
Fifth Ecological Mystery: God ABIDING in the World with us always (Mt 28: 18–20)
Join hands with me to contemplate this ‘green prayer’. Green prayers make green fingers and many ‘green fingers’ can turn everything ‘grey to green’. Go Green in prayer: it makes you powerful; it will make you responsibly love again ‘the world so much’.
Hey that's a nice prayer... promulgate it...
ReplyDeleteit is the need of the hour.... come to think of it our own woods at DB LNL are vanishing!!