What a way of life to espouse: to live with humility and gentleness, patience, bearing with one another through love, striving to build community where we can, to be a peacemaker, to be a person of hope. In today’s first reading, Saint Paul urged the community in Ephesus – and us – to be one body in the Lord. For indeed, this was Jesus’ stated wish, his dream, that we would be one body. We celebrate this dream – ours, his – at every Mass. Living as Saint Paul urges would indeed bring about such community.
Our Psalm today (Psalm 24) adds another dimension to the kind of community Paul speaks of (Cf. Romans 8:22), Including Mother Earth. The psalmist says, “The Lord’s are the earth and its fullness, the world and those who dwell in it.” Not just people.
The Jesuit priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, believed and taught that if you want to love God, love all of creation, not only our fellow sisters and brothers but also the smallest to the largest creatures and things in nature. (Because of his emphasis on God’s unconditional love for creation, he is fondly remembered as the patron of environmentalism and ecologists, and all of us working to save the planet.)
The psalmist prays today, “Lord, this is the people that longs to see your face.” Chardin believed that if we want to see God’s face, look not only in the eyes of the little child, the beggar, and our neighbor but also into the gifts (eyes) of God’s creation, the trees, the flowers, the moon, and the sun, all those creatures that creep and crawl. This day, come to all God’s creatures with humility, gentleness, patience, and love.
Let Us Pray:
I am looking at a tree, but I see such astounding beauty and graciousness. The tree must be You, O God. I look at the wild weeds playing across the fields, and their wild, joyful freedom speaks to me of You, O God. Yesterday, I saw a child crying alone on a busy corner, and the tears are real, and I thought, You must be crying, O God. God, you are the mystery within every leaf and grain of sand, in every face, young and old. You are the light and beauty of every person. You are Love itself. (Excerpted from The Christic by de Chardin, SJ)