DRESSED IN GREEN

More and more the Church is taking a strong stance on stewardship of our earth. Our past three popes have had much to say in this.  Pope Francis is generally regarded as a pope who has made great strides in promoting environmental stewardship writing the encyclical, “Laudato Si” which states that a paradigm shift is needed as we must be neither exploiters of nature, nor worshipers of it. We need to change structures as well as a change hearts with a return to ethics and moral realism, seeing a connection between social issues and environmental issues. 

“In the end, everything has been entrusted to our protection, and all of us are responsible for it. Be protectors of God’s gifts! Whenever human beings fail to live up to this responsibility, whenever we fail to care for creation and for our brothers and sisters, the way is opened to destruction and hearts are hardened.” 

But his predecessor, Pope Benedict, has been called the “Green Pope”  as he was the one who laid the groundwork and was extremely vocal on the importance of being a faithful steward of creation.

 “The deterioration of nature is in fact closely connected to the culture that shapes human coexistence: when ‘human ecology’ is respected within society, environmental ecology also benefits.” Pope Benedict XVI

We must also remember  Pope Saint John Paul II had much to say on this issue: “The earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship. We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future generations.”    

We all know how much the outdoors and nature meant to this saintly pope and throughout his 27-year papacy he was very vocal in this urgent matter. Speaking in 2001, he said: “If we scan the regions of our planet, we immediately see that humanity has disappointed God’s expectations. Man, especially in our time, has without hesitation devastated wooded plains and valleys, polluted waters, disfigured the earth’s habitat, made the air unbreathable . . . We must therefore encourage and support the ‘ecological conversion’ which in recent decades has made humanity more sensitive to the catastrophe to which it has been heading.”

For the feast of ST. HILDEGARD this year- not liturgically celebrated due to being on Sunday- I want to give some more of her insights in our care of land and nature, which she gave us over 900 years ago.

St. Hildegard’s passion for the natural world and her cognisance of our place in it, makes her so relevant in our crises today. She felt an understanding of nature, helped us better understand ourselves and the planet which has been given to us. She saw the spiritual kinship between us and the earth: “The soul is a breath of the living spirit, and with excellent sensitivity, permeates the entire body to give it life. Just so, the breath of the air makes the earth fruitful. Thus the air is the soul of the earth, moistening it, greening it.”

She made it clear that we are not separate from nature, but an intimate part of it. She saw God in all creation. “Every creature is a glittering, glistening mirror of divinity.”

 For St. Hildegard the earth was sacred. “The Earth sweats geminating power from its very pores,” she told her nuns. She asked them to pay close attention to the rhythms of nature, because it holds the secret to our physical well-being and to the vitality of our inner life. She urged the community to become partners with the natural world, saying: “Humankind is called to co-create, so that we might cultivate the earthly, and thereby create the heavenly.” 

St. Hildegard saw the necessity of working cooperatively with nature to create heaven on earth, a concenpt in direct opposition to our present dilemma of climate change, failing ecosystems and extinctions of species, all of which has put us on a path of destruction.

God desires
that all the world
be pure in his sight.
The earth should not be injured.
The earth should not be destroyed.

From St. Hildegard, 900 years ago to our modern Popes we have been shown the way.  God help us to act on it!

From the artist Daniel Mitsui:

Here, I drew the saint wearing a golden crown adorned with an Agnus Dei and three crosses; rings; and a white veil. These items were worn on feast days by the sisters at Rupertsberg, a realization of one of Hildegard’s visions recorded in Scivias.

I drew her wearing a green habit; this refers to the concept of viriditas, a spiritual greenness that she constantly evoked in both her theological and scientific writings.

The inscription in my drawing includes several words in her invented language (lingua ignota): it reads Ziuienz Hildegardis Vrizoil Falschin, or Saint Hildegard, Virgin and Seer.