Ethic Of Care

What’s bothering our conscience today?   Perhaps the way we treat God’s creation.   Helping us answer this question is Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J., who wrote the 2009 article, “An Earthly Christology: ‘For God so loved the cosmos,” published in the celebratory issue of America – The National Catholic Weekly: 100 Years.  Here we are a bit more than 7 years later, and it worthwhile pondering the claim: “For God so loved the cosmos” especially because Pope Francis has given us his 2015 “Encyclical on Climate Change & Inequality: On Care for Our Common Home.”

Johnson begins with the following: “When the noted U.S. naturalist John Muir came across a dead bear in Yosemite, he wrote in his journal a biting criticism of religious people who make no room in heaven for such noble creatures: ‘Not content with taking all of earth, they also claim the celestial country as the only ones who possess the kinds of souls for which that imponderable empire was

planned.’ To the contrary, he believed, God’s “charity is broad enough for bears.”

Few in Muir’s day agreed.  The rise of ecological awareness in our day, however, provides a pressing context for new reflection on this question.  Does the creative love of God embrace bears, the salmon and berries they eat, the rivers where they fish and their hibernation dens with compassion for their mortality and the promise of redemption?  If not, then ruining their habitat and driving them towards extinction has little religious significance.  But if so, then the value of their lives and all of nature should become explicit in the church’s teaching and practice.”

She goes on to say: “…Since God created the world judging it to be ‘very good’ (Gn 1:31), nature is more than mere backdrop for the human drama of sin and redemption, more than simply an instrument to supply human needs.  It is God’s beloved handiwork, indwelt by the Spirit of life, with an intrinsic value all of its own.  This faith perspective flows into an ethic of care that honors the integrity of creation at every scale.”   She says a lot more.

I write this blog shortly after Donald Trump’s Inauguration on January 20.   Let’s hope his Administration has this ethic of care.   It’s a challenging ethic often taking a back-seat to an ethic focused on growing the economy through consumption and domination of the earth.  This is much to the chagrin of the bears, especially the polar ones facing widespread and large-scale changes in their snow and ice habitat believed to be caused by climate change.

Deacon David Pierce