Community of Subjects
By Fr. John Leydon, SSC

Today, we finish our special masses for the Season of Creation which included reflections on the basic elements that make up creation: Fire, Water, Air and Soil. The Season itself will finish here in the Philippines on Oct. 09 which is Indigenous People’s Sunday. We also include in our liturgy today the feast of St. Francis of Assisi which is celebrated on Oct. 04, but which we celebrate here on a Sunday with the blessing of the animals.

In the gospel, today, Jesus encourages us to have faith, even a little, the size of a mustard seed. As we reflect on our current ecological in the Season of Creation, it would be easy to be overwhelmed by the current problems and the future which we, especially the young, have to face. He assures us that if we hold on to even a tiny bit of faith then great things can happen.

In the first reading the prophet Habakkuk complains to the Lord about all the violence and destruction taking place. We could apply this to our current situation, with so much violence against the earth and the poor. The Lord assures him that this situation will come to an end, and he is instructed to write a vision of how the Lord will intervene to bring about peace and harmony.

These are the times we live in. Weekly, if not daily, we get reports of major disasters happening due to the climate crisis all over the world and here in the Philippines we had a major storm last week that brought devastation to many farming communities. We could allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by these things but our Creator urges us to not to give up hope.

St. Francis lived in similar times. Being a man of God, he saw that his world was changing and that it would inevitably lead to the disaster we are experiencing now. Francis lived at a time when Europe was going through massive changes. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe was just waiting for the end of the world to come which many believed would happen in the year 1000. The end didn’t come and gradually people began to concentrate on this life rather than on life to come.

Francis’ own family was involved in this. His father was a successful trader and they became rich. But Francis renounced his wealth, leaving his ‘magarang mga damit’ with his family and joined the beggars and the lepers at the edge of town.

He also was aware of a change of attitude to ‘nature’ or to God’s creatures. This was reflected in the language which is with us until this day. We talk of nature as ‘natural resources’ in other words ‘things’ – to be exploited for our pleasure.

A teacher that I follow, has said that the problem with modern society is that we look on the world as a ‘collection of objects, rather than a collection of subjects'. In other words, Nature is not a thing but a living community. We don’t have to look any farther than the reclamation taking place opposite us in Manila Bay. The mentality that drives projects like this is operative all over: in mining, deforestation, in building mega-dams.

We are doing all this and it is driven by greed. But greed or ‘unlimited accumulation’ is the highest value in our modern civilization. However, we have a deeper problem that the moral one. We have a problem of vision. We think that the living earth community is a ‘collection of objects’ rather than a ‘community of subjects’. It is a collection of objects that is there for us to ‘exploit’ for human satisfaction.

We think we know what reality is and we are gravely mistaken. The result is that our present way of running things is non-viable. We have no future! This is tragic! So, what are we to do?

Pope Francis in his encyclical Laudato Si outlines the problem and the solution. We need a new culture, what he calls ‘a bold cultural revolution’. At the heart of the new culture will be a new relationship with the earth community.

Today as we celebrate the feast of St. Francis, we take a very small step by inviting into our worship our pets and plants. It is a gesture by which we celebrate our unity with all of God’s creation. Let us celebrate with joy.

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