E A R T H

Too many people who dream of bringing Good News to the whole Creation keep turning a blind eye to the slow death of the Earth.

I am made of earth, water, fire and air. I am made of birds, of branches, of fish and of insects. I am made of what I feed myself with. I am made of metal and of parcels of dust coming from far away galaxies.

The solar system, the planet Earth, plants, animals, humans, my own body, all of us are connected through an infinite number of particles of the same nature. A same energy moves us by pushing us towards the grandiose dance of the cosmos.            

I am a child of the earth, of the water and of the fire, and the breath of air that inhabits me makes me the brother of the wind. With the flesh and the blood, with all the cells, the fibers and the energies of my being, I am tied up to the universe. My breath is the umbilical cord which ties me to it; it makes me breathe with him and my mouth feeds on him.                        

In the past, we were only dust particles in the immensity of the universe, but now that some of us have succeeded in organizing and developing their selves, we behave as if we were the navel of the world. We have made of ourselves our own measure, our own center and our own end. We have become sick beings.

Yet, among us, there are men and women who dream of salvation. They dream about a Good News for the whole of creation, but most of them close their eyes on the slow death of the Earth and of its children. They sing requiems, but do not speak very much about resurrection, apart from that of a certain Jesus dead two thousand years ago and about whom people of that time say that he came back to life.

They recite psalms and phrases written by others, but they do not dare to utter any new word. They keep repeating more or less stale old theses, without uttering a single word that would recreate, a word that could awaken the human who was born clothed with stars and dew and who has been contained like in a tomb by the solitude and the boredom of our age.

No one dares say that Jesus is made of soil. We are afraid to affirm that our world itself is filled with God. Instead of looking first on how the creative Word takes shape within the flesh and blood of our world, we dedicate enormous efforts on decoding ancient texts that hardly a few mortals can manage to understand.      

We talk a lot about God but we know very little about the fact that he speaks to us especially through silence, and also through the fire and the wind, through the language of water, of oil, of bread, of wine, through the language of seeds, trees, birds, fish and animals, through the language of stones! Yet, long passages of the gospel were written by those creatures.

Nowadays still, those languages speak everywhere where Nature has not yet been buried under the asphalt, the cement, the pipelines and the chimneys, or under the arrogance of philosophies and theologies which do not tend to value the mud with which God has made us.

If God exists, if he is the creator of the immense world in which we live, how could he not be bursting with tenderness for the smallest ant and for the last-born among humans?

How would not his womb tremble for the Earth itself which is also very small? Is it not the little lamb that the great Shepherd of the universe prefers to so many planets and to important stars of his immeasurable flock?

« What man among you is asking Jesus, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them would not leave the ninety-nine in the desert and go after the lost one until he finds it?» (Luke 15: 4).

The Earth is the sheep that we have lost.

Without her, we ourselves are lost. To rediscover her as our friend and as our mother has become urgent and vital. God and History invite us to that profoundly human (and spiritual) adventure.      

The surest path to reach heaven is the one passing by the Earth.

Because all is ONE.  

                                                                       Eloy Roy