"Love people even in their sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all of God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand of it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love." (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
Our Living God is both transcendent and also the dynamic Power at the heart of the world and its evolution. We human beings often forget that we are the most newly-arrived species on Planet Earth, and Planet Earth exists in an ever-changing and evolving universe. Be awestruck by this! Let it stretch out your heart!
"It is the Spirit who breathes life into the exuberant, diverse, interrelated universe....The universe is profoundly dynamic. Out of the Big Bang, the galaxies of stars; out of the stardust, the Earth; out of the molecules of the Earth, single-celled living creatures; out of the evolutionary life and death of these creatures, an advancing tide of life, fragile but unstoppable, up to the riot of millions of species that exist today; and out of one branch of this bush of life, homo sapiens, the species in which the Earth becomes conscious of itself. Human thought and love are not something injected into the universe from without, but are the flowering in us of deeply cosmic energies.....Bacteria, pine trees, blueberries, horses, the great gray whales: we are all genetic kin in the great community of life." (Elizabeth A. Johnson.)
Our great God does not dwell apart from creation. God the Trinity created everyone and everything out of free, generous love. Everything and everyone lives, exists moment by moment, because God wills it so. Everyone and everything lives in God, and God encompasses everything. St. Augustine imagined creation as a huge sponge dwelling in the infinite Sea, which is God. The sponge soaks in and is filled with the Sea (God). The sponge lives in the Sea and the Sea, soaked in, lives in the sponge.
God lives in loving faithfulness and attentiveness to all creation. Nature is filled not only with beauty and love but also bloody violence and death, death, which in the nature of things is necessary so that life can proceed from generation to generation. And God, the Creator, "dwells in compassionate solidarity with every living being that suffers, from the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroid to the baby impala eaten by a lioness. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without eliciting a knowing suffering in the heart of God, who constantly works to renew the face of the earth." (Johnson.)
We believe that Jesus died and rose to overcome death so that human life can live eternally. What of the rest of creation, of which human kind is one late-coming tiny branch on a huge tree? The natural world also bears the divine promise that on the final day, heaven and earth will be transformed by divine blessing: "Behold, I make all things new." (Rev. 21:5)
Knowing that the natural world is also loved faithfully by God, and that God's Presence indwells in it, we need to ask ourselves about our ethical responsibility to this world we live in and with. Brian Patrick asks "Who is my neighbor? The Samaritan? The outcast? The enemy? Yes, yes, of course. But it is also the whale, the dolphin, and the rain forest. Our neighbor is the entire community of life, the entire universe. We must love it all as our very self."
How wonderful it is to enlarge our hearts so that we embrace in prayer and awe the entire universe! Once we truly love creation, we will want to do what we always do with those we love: protect it. Live more simply. Try to run an ecologically-sensitive household. Stop being enslaved by the marketplace and conduct business with a green bottom line as well as a red and a black. And some of us will be prophets who take on the opposition of powerful political and economic interests. Our neighbor is the whole community of life. May our hearts enlarge to love it as our very self.