Reconnecting with the Earth

By Orlando R. Barone

Many years ago, I volunteered to help provide a group of inner-city kids a day of summer recreation on our beautiful campus at Villanova University. One of the kids got off the bus and immediately ran to a line of multicolored petunias blooming near a building. "Look at the artificial flowers," he shouted.

Our distance from nature, from the reality of life's circuit from seed to flower and back to seed, can be startling when you consider that each of us is pedaling the very same circuit, and that it is inescapable. And yet we seek escape, to the point where artificial flowers are what flowers are.

The Amish farmer - whom we have all seen, right? - strides behind his plow pulled by four mules, his feet caked with fertile dirt. This man is in intimate contact with something far more real than anything most of us touch in our daily lives.

In a recent remarkable, apparently unprepared statement to an audience at the University of Molise, Pope Francis said, "When I look at the Americas, also my own homeland, so many forests, all cut, that have become land ... that can longer give life. This is our sin, exploiting the Earth and not allowing her to give us what she has within her."

This pope, who speaks so often of people who are marginalized - the poor, the sick, the elderly, the oppressed - now seems to be implying that the Earth herself is being marginalized as it is depleted, stripped, beaten, "oppressed," made barren. He is due to issue an encyclical on the environment, but already we can detect an emergent theology of the place of our natural surroundings in the moral order.

The pope has frequently quoted Genesis, where God gives man dominion over the Earth and every living thing. He rejects the interpretation that teaches we are thereby free to exploit our planet as we wish. The dominion charge is, he says, a mandate to care for the Earth as our provider, as our primary giver of life.

This is pro-life thinking at its most robust. Yes, the Earth is ours, but not as property to be chopped up, dug out, and built upon. Earth is ours as our mothers are ours, to honor, care for, recognize as indispensible to our lives from beginning to end. Pope Francis calls reflexively on the image of Mary, the virgin mother, as symbolic of our life-affording planet.

When I spent time in the villages surrounding Ourense, Spain, I became aware that many of these Catholic hamlets boasted their very own Virgin, imaged in an individualized statue that was honored in processions and on special feast days. She emerges as a kind of woodland goddess, quite heretical if taken literally, but at the symbolic level she is seen as watching over the town, assuring the fecundity of its soil and the security of its inhabitants.

The virgin mother irony that so permeates Catholic thinking is, in these Village Virgins, a breathtaking reference to an Earth that yearly yields up life-sustaining shade and fruit, beauty and flower, only to return to a state of complete readiness for the next season of plowing and planting. Virgin and Mother, Mother and Virgin.

Francis will decry the depredations to our planet that enrich a few and endanger all, but his message always is aimed at the heart of each of us; it is deeply personal, as is the whole message of Jesus. He will call upon you and me to look inside and rediscover our inextricable connection to our first mother, the Earth.

He will urge us to walk through the dirt with the Amish farmer, behind his plow, and see for ourselves the miracle of a virgin giving birth. He will point to the city-dwelling child's first encounter with a flower born of Earth, not plastic.

He will teach us a love for a natural order we have too often upended for selfish ends and which may end up precipitating our end. We are born of Mother Earth, the great virgin life-giver. We are sustained by this mother's sweet flowing breast; there is no nourishment elsewhere. And we all will become a part of our mother in the inexorable return to her inviting soil, our ultimate contribution to her miraculous power to create life.