27th Sunday in Ordinary Time.
If you ever took the Archer Avenue bus to go downtown, somewhere past Ashland Avenue, you will remember that the bus goes over a little tributary of the Chicago River. It is just a branch—kind of a dead-end little section—with old rusting warehouses and sheds and ruins of brick factories forming the background. And lining the scrabbly edge of the water thick with dirt and debris there are the usual weedy trees of paradise along with hundreds of scrubby bushes.
(It has always intrigued me that the favorite tree of dumps and coal yards and abandoned dead-ends is called the Tree of Paradise.) Anyway on one particular day—I was taking the Archer Avenue bus. I was looking out from the bus window looking at all the old buildings—and when we rode over that very spot of the river, I looked down and I noticed bubbles popping on the surface of the water—as if it were starting to rain. Bubbles here and there—all over. I looked up and the sky was clear. I couldn’t figure this out.
Bubbly Creek
So when I got home that evening I mentioned this strange phenomenon to my father who came from that neighborhood, and he laughed and said, “Oh that’s Bubbly Creek!” “Bubbly Creek!?” I asked.
And my father told me “That is where the Darling Company dumped all their animal refuse for a hundred years. All the tons of animal fat and organs and skin that were not fit to render is sitting there on the bottom of the Chicago River fermenting and decaying and rotting away. That’s where the bubbles come from.” I was not an environmentalist by any means—just a kid in high school and I wondered “What gave the Darling Company the right to toss all their dirty greasy garbage—by the tons into a river that belonged to all of us? Who said they could foul it for generations to come?” And I began to ask myself—as a young Catholic just starting to think about things—Does the Church have anything to say about this? In other words insofar as nature is created by God, what should our relationship as humans be to it? Is nature something that we can use and abuse until we finally destroy it and move on? Or is it a gift from God that creates the context or the envelope within which we live and love as humans. And if nature comes from God how must we care for it? Since at least the Enlightenment, man has thought that he needed to subdue nature. And that was because since God was irrelevant, then Nature did not really belong to God in any meaningful way. And so Nature was man’s—to conquer and re-form and exploit. “It belongs to us. We can do with it as we please.” Nature for an atheist is not a gift from God to help us live on earth and then get to heaven—nature for the atheist is something we must beat down and twist and contort to our designs and desires. It is our laboratory— our workshop and nothing is forbidden—all abuse can be useful. The subjection of nature—even if it means the destruction of nature is our way of being little gods—and ignoring the true God.
Ember Days
You know, last week—if we followed the old Latin Mass Calendar—we would have celebrated Ember Days.
They were special days—Wednesday, Friday and Saturday that occurred at the start of each of the four seasons.
Ember Day Masses had extra readings and I remember how we all fasted on those days. When there was Ember week—we gave up meat on Wednesday and Saturday as well as Friday.
The point of Ember Days was to celebrate nature—to meditate and rejoice about God’s beautiful creation of the material universe. And we used the four seasons as our starting off point. Yes—in that way, we Catholics were environmentalists before they even had the word. We were the guardians of the true use of nature.
What we Catholics would see in the Ember Days would be the loving hand of God holding the earth—turning the earth—giving us just the right amount of sun and creating the seasons and the trees and the animals. In the Ember Days we were taught to see the glory of the Good God even in the seemingly pointless movements of bugs. Ember Days meant to tell us that Nature was a gift from God and is good in itself and good for us.
Now of course we know all that—even without Ember Days. If anyone is paying attention—even the atheists, know that the Catholic Faith teaches that the point of nature is to bring us to super nature.
For example, God saved us by taking on our human nature, our flesh and blood. The invisible God becomes visible in the natural body of Jesus.
As well, God gives us the sacraments which use created things like water and oil and bread and wine and words and touches to bring Uncreated grace.
All of this is to say that it is important for Catholics to recover that sense of the sacredness of nature which is sacred not in itself, but because it comes from the Hand of God and is a means of our salvation.
In a certain sense—to reverence and treasure nature is to follow the will of God. And to thwart nature and hurt it and pervert it and make it do what it should not do—or make it stop—is an affront and a challenge to God.
The New Abuse on Nature
The problem however is that the atheists have taken over our cultural understanding of the universe and of Nature and of Life. And they have twisted us to think that anything that anyone wants to do to abuse nature and the environment is fine—as long as they can show some other benefit. In this way they create the context by which they can do their evil—first with trees and rivers and baby seals—and then with everything else including human life and love itself. Nature, they say, belongs to us and we can do with it as we please. This new abuse occurs these days and most dangerously in the context of the human body.
Do you think
the modern campaign for same sex marriage is not a campaign against nature? When human biology tells us along with the Bible that God made them male and female and for this reason a man clings to his wife and two of them become one flesh—is it not troubling when our society tells us that Nature does not count. That the human body and biology is irrelavant? Is this not anti-environmental? When our young people are told that gender is simply something that they choose and not something they have already been given by God in their bodies—does that not disturb us and is that not an attack on nature itself? When women are given pills and devices that obliterate and shut down their capacity to conceive human life— and become mothers—is that not a crime against nature? Is not the real war on women—the assault against their nature? And their femininity? And when we have killed—world-wide—hundreds of millions of babies in the womb—is that not the greatest affront to the God of Nature—the Lord of Life? To extinguish what He has brought into being? Does not a true regard for nature look at life and especially human life and say, “Let it live!” Don’t worry about organic vegetables if you are not worried about the life of the baby in the womb.
And don’t forget the new-genetics—the new biology—where they are inventing ever new ways to combine previously un-combinable things—humans, animals—machines. What do you think is on the near horizon? Chimeras, hybrids and horrors. Just because it is a scientist in a lab coat who twists and perverts nature does not make it less sinister.
We need Ember Days again—and today more than ever. Because we need to be aware that God is the God of nature—as well as the God of super nature—and His creation is being threatened as never before.
And it is not just baby seals that are being threatened—it is not just trees in the woods—not just fish in the ocean—that are being hurt—it is not just the Chicago River that is being fouled. Yes, those things all need to be part of our concern.
The problem is that it is a short step from thinking we can abuse the rivers and forests to abusing human beings. Rivers and forests and animals are the symbols of the care we need to take with human nature and human love.
Anything that attacks nature—is an attack against God; and even as Catholics—and especially because we are Catholics—we cannot stand by and let them do it to Gods earth or to us.