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Inspirational Talk

Dr. Efren S. Valiente,   CCTFI, CEA and CERRI joint annual Christmas Party,   December 11, 2011, St. Joseph’s Hall, Sacred Heart Center, Inspirational Talk: Environment is Theological

Environmentalism began as a religion. Modern men have awakened to nature when many first explored its wonders.and felt it in a religious way.   Many beautiful part of nature   around the world have become national parks fondly called special temples of Nature. This really goes back to creation, where God the Creator made nature and man in his image and likeness. Many modern men have made it their mission to save the soul from total surrender to materialism. Environmentalism — rooted in nature and the outdoors — was an antidote to secular, technological modern life.

John Paul’s Theology of the Body provides us a clear understanding of body and soul that avoids confusion about humanity. Our bodies tell a story. It's not just an arbitrary collection of atoms. Humanity, revealed through the body, is not just the end result of a chance evolution. But rather, it's the loving design of a creator who's trying to tell us a story. The first book that God gives us is not the Bible, but it's the book of creation where we realize that all of creation is telling us the story of God's life-giving love.  Look around at what all of nature is saying: If you look at a tree, what is a tree? If you look at a flower, what is a flower? If you look at the sun, what is the sun? What are the stars? Psalm 19 says "the sun comes forth from its chamber like a bridegroom." Why? Why is the sun like a bridegroom? For one, it gives life to the earth through its light and heat. When we start to look at what creation is saying, every blade of grass tells the story of a seed that landed in fertile soil and brought forth fruit.  Ultimately, that points us to Mary, doesn't it?  She is the fertile soil that opened to receive that invisible, immortal seed that "fell from heaven." And Mary, standing for all humanity as "the Bride" is "clothed with the sun." This is the story that all of creation is telling: God's story of life-giving love. Virtually every creature God has created is about the work of reproducing itself. And this is what makes creation so beautiful. Think about the beauty of a flower. Why does Christ invite us to consider how the wild flowers grow? There must be some mystery in there for us that's worth pondering. In an article in National Geographic about pollen and plant reproduction called "Love is in the Air." It was really fascinating to me from a theological perspective, to see how the spousal mystery revealed through the theology of our bodies is stamped not just in human beings, but in all of creation. You know that old '70s song, "Love is in the Air": Well, in a sense it really is! We're breathing in pollen all the time, and what is pollen? Plants are trying to reproduce themselves. In reading the book of nature, we begin to see that signs of the spousal mystery are everywhere. All of creation is singing a love song. The hills truly are alive with the sound of music! And we are the culmination of that love song; "male and female he created them." We are the crown of creation. The Catechism says that we give voice to all of creation, we, as male and female are a microcosm of the macrocosm, of the cosmos.  We express the truth of the cosmos in miniature. And what do we express? We express in our maleness, in our femaleness, the story of divine espousals: God wants to marry us. How do we know? Our bodies tell the story. The two are called to become one flesh. This is a great mystery, and it refers to Christ and the Church. When we recognize that our bodies tell God's love story, then everything the Catholic Church teaches about sexual morality begins to make sense. We're called to tell God's story. God wants to marry us; God is love, God is life-giving love. That's God's story. It's stamped in our bodies. Our bodies are theological.

Wangari Maathai, from Kenya who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 — making her the first environmentalist to earn the award — for her work with the Green Belt Movement, a nonprofit that focuses on planting trees and conserving the environment. Now Maathai has a new book called Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World, and she's preaching a green gospel. To Maathai, environmental work needs to be linked to spiritual values — and spiritual values should drive us to care about the environmentalism, contributing to what's called in Judaism tikkun olam, the healing of the world. "We have become detached from nature and as you move away from nature, you become lost.”   In her book, Maathai tells the story of how she began working for conservation in 1977, launching the Green Belt Movement. At the time her focus wasn't on religion or spirituality, though she grew up and was educated in the Catholic faith. Maathai wanted a practical way to help the rural folks of Kenya with their basic needs: clean drinking water, food, energy for cooking and heating. Planting trees and restoring natural habitat was a way to achieve those practical goals. "I didn't think digging holes and mobilizing communities to protect or restore the trees, forests, watersheds, soil or habitat for wildlife that surrounded them was spiritual work," Maathai writes.But over time, her feelings changed. She found what was driving those who joined the Green Belt Movement — and in time, what was driving Maathai herself — wasn't just about fixing material needs. It was about meeting something intangible within people. The poisoning of the earth, the destruction of the forest — Maathai came to believe that human beings could feel these losses. "If we live in an environment that's wounded — where the water is polluted, the air is filled with soot and fumes, the food is contaminated with heavy metals and plastic residues, or the soil is practically dust — it hurts us, chipping away at our health and creating injuries at a physical, psychological and spiritual level," Maathai writes. "In degrading the environment, therefore, we degrade ourselves." Maathai came to understand, however, that the opposite is true as well. As we work to heal the earth, we heal ourselves as well. There's even an emerging field of treatment behind this — "eco-therapists" have begun prescribing nature walks and time spent outdoors for the depressed. The challenge is that we're growing more and more divorced from nature. Today more than half of the world's population now lives in cities, and even Maathai's largely rural Africa is becoming more and more urbanized, and more and more industrialized. "In developing countries like ours, we're busy trying to catch up with the West and live the same kind of life that we see on TV," says Maathai. "But we end up destroying the environment to get the things that we perceive as development."

From a North American Indian tribe led by Chief Seattle (in whose honor the capital of the State of Washington is named) I quote verbatim “The earth does not belong to man, rather man belongs to the earth. This much we know: whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. How can a man buy or sell the beauty of the sky or the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us.”

What brought us to the current state we are in now is a few men’s unmitigated desire (or others call it greed) to possess a big chunk of nature intended by God to be shared with the entire humanity. The challenge to preserve environment is really on us. We, who belong to the business sector of society, must always be concerned about our surroundings. Every act that we do must always answer the question: is it for the good of humanity? If we don’t we are going against the purpose for which we are created by God.