But ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being.
The phrase that
remained with me was verse 10:
In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being.
Earlier in September I
reflected on the work of Fr Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) and his remarkable piece of work
entitled The Mass on the World. I commented on his ConsistentEucharistic Thread in a number of posts in early September. The
Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, in Francis of Assisi: A Model
for Human Liberation (Orbis, 2006), draws on Thomas of Celano’s Second
Life to show how St Francis recognised creation as kin.
We are often inclined
to grasp, use, dominate and discard the materials of Earth, yet Scripture and
Francis invite us to see creatures as God’s work, held in his hand. We share
genetic kinship with other creatures, though human beings stand above them in
dignity as made in God’s image (Gen 1:26-28; LaudatoSi’ #90).
The theologian Sr
Elizabeth Johnson CSJ, in Ask the Beasts (Bloomsbury, 2014), whose title
comes from Job 12:7, uses the term ‘deep incarnation’, a phrase coined in 2001
by the Danish Lutheran Niels Henrik Gregersen. Fr Richard Rohr has drawn on her
work in one of his recent daily mediations, Creation as kin,
She writes:
The flesh that the Word of God became as a particular human being is part of the tree of evolving life on earth, which in turn is part of the vast body of the cosmos….
In John 1:14 (‘the
Word became flesh’), God became one of us and, at the same time, in solidarity
with the whole created order. He assumed
our nature (Catechismof the Catholic Church 464-469). In John 6:51-58, that same flesh given in
the Eucharist unites us to Christ and to one another (CCC #1396). Pope Francis
sees the Eucharist as ‘the living centre of the universe’ (Laudato Si’ #236).
If every living thing
is held in God’s hand along with the breath of every human being, as Job says,
how much more should we value unborn human life? Jesus says we are ‘of more
value than many sparrows’ (Mt 10:29-31). Concern for creation cannot be reconciled
with justifying abortion (see also CCC#2270-2274). In Laudato Si’ #120,
the late Pope Francis reminds us that:
Since everything is interrelated, concern for the protection of nature is also incompatible with the justification of abortion. How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable beings, however troublesome or inconvenient they may be, if we fail to protect a human embryo, even when its presence is uncomfortable and creates difficulties? “If personal and social sensitivity towards the acceptance of the new life is lost, then other forms of acceptance that are valuable for society also wither away”.
