Holy Earth Day

Next Monday, April 22nd, is Earth Day. About one billion people (12% of world population) in 193 countries will engage in some sort of Earth-caring activities, but the majority (88% ), will ignore it or won’t care about it. I was part of that uncaring and unaware majority until my terrestrial transformation two decades ago.

When I was a young boy, I wanted to become a priest. That desire was part of my religious conditioning in a conservative Catholic family in a remote village in South India. Our family had already produced four priests and seven nuns who were role models and guiding lights in my early years.

The purpose of priesthood was to “glorify God” who was understood as a “Heavenly Father” who lived above the clouds, far away from the Earth, separated from humans due to our “sinfulness and unworthiness.” Life on Earth was something to be endured rather than celebrated. Earth was viewed as a valley of tears, with suffering, pain and tribulations.

We were told to keep our gaze focused on heaven above, not on Earth below. As a priest, I believed and preached that life on Earth was not an end in itself, but only a preparation for life after death, in heaven. The role of the Church was to prepare believers for an evacuation from this evil world, and priests and nuns were its field workers. In my priestly mind, Earth Day was a secular day which was never mentioned during Sunday worship services.

So, for the first five decades of my life, I walked on Earth, feeling alienated from its ethos and unaligned from its rhythms, engaging in religious infantilism. I paid no attention to the ground beneath my feet, or experienced the magic and mystery of the the magnificent universe around me.

I was a sleep-walker on Earth during the first half of my life.

In the early years of the 21st century, with looming environmental disasters and concerns about climate crisis, I began paying attention to planet Earth and other earthly concerns. During the Earth Day weekend of 2010, I preached a sermon about the importance of caring for our home planet. That day, a nice lady chided me for talking about Earth in church instead of Jesus.

How an earthly topic could belong in a heavenly place, she thought.

I began experiencing a shift in my spiritual consciousness from being heaven-centered to Earth-centered, a shift from God-in-Heaven to God-on-Earth. That spiritual transformation was significant enough to elevate Earth Day to the level of a holy day such as Christmas and Easter!

We should erase from our minds the mistaken idea that the Earth is an inanimate object and, view it as an intense an intricate process. In quantum mechanics, the boundary between animate and inanimate is fading fast.

This vision of Earth as a living process will help us replace the unconscious notion that we are living on the Earth, with the new awareness that we are living with the Earth, participating in Mother Earth’s ethos and rhythms. Changing something so simple as a preposition — on and with — can have a profound impact on how we experience and manage life as earthlings.

For example, living on the Earth makes us mere users and abusers of the resources of the planet, while living with the Earth can make us co-creators and collaborators on a cosmic journey of hope.

Martin Buber’s notion of I-thou relationship between humans should be expanded to include our relationship to the Earth as I-Thou. The person-hood laws enacted in countries like Ecuador, New Zealand, and India, recognizing Earth as a person, should guide us to accelerate our thinking in that direction.

In 2017, a high court in India declared the Ganges and Yamuna rivers and their tributaries such as streams, meadows, jungles, wetlands, springs, and waterfalls as “legal and living entities having the status of a living person with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities.” Enforcing these laws may be difficult, but the sentiments behind them are praiseworthy.

We don’t come to or on Earth, but we come out of the Earth.

We are dust and unto dust we shall return.

Our body is an outgrowth of the Earth.

It is part of the planet, not apart from it.

Remember that all the elements of the Earth such as oxygen, hydrogen, helium, carbon and nitrogen are contained in our body. We have iron in our blood and calcium in our bones. Just as about 70 percent of he Earth is water, our bodies are also 70 percent water. Moreover, the steel in our refrigerator door, the aluminum in our “tin” cans, the copper in our pennies, and the lithium in our smart phones — all come from the Earth!

Lamenting about the utilitarian approach to our home planet, Pope Francis wrote in his Encyclical Laudato Si (On care for our common home):

“We have come to see ourselves as Nature’s lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts…is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air, and in all forms of life.”

I realized the fallacy of misinterpreting the the Creator’s command to have dominion over the Earth as a license to dominate the terrain and exploit the planet for our selfish purposes. The awareness that only about a mere 2 percent of the planet is livable for humans, made me realize that we are not masters of the Earth, but mere servants.

Who belongs on Earth? The fish that can call 70 percent of the earth home or me who can only claim a mere 2 percent?

The sudden erosion of my hubris was a spiritually humbling experience. We cannot survive without the Earth, but the Earth can survive without us! I have capitalized Earth throughout this piece to acknowledge mother Earth’s preeminence and dominion over me, rather than the other way around.

Given all this, it is remarkable how incurious and unconcerned most of us are about mother Earth that has birthed us, supports us and sustains us. It is time to end our sleep-walking on Earth.

Consider this question posed by spiritual writer Sallie McFague:

“What if we saw the Earth as part of the body of God, not as separate from God (who dwells elsewhere), but as the visible reality of the invisible God?

Let us join prophet Isaiah and humbly proclaim: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole Earth is full of his glory.” (6:3)

Even though it appears that we are staying put on sturdy surface on a static Earth with our solid bodies, the reality is that we are a collection of atoms with consciousness, swirling around in space on a spinning planet, involved in a spine-tingling celestial ride.

Make your ride an enjoyable and exciting experience, by embracing the entire Earth as holy and hallowed.

Question:

How do you feel about elevating Earth Day as a religious holy day like Christmas and Easter?