Did you know that rats are quite sensitive? A Chicago neurobiologist found them so distressed by the discomfort of trapped friends that they ignored chocolate in their haste to help them. (Ignoring chocolate is a Big Deal to me!)
Did you know that scientists have discovered that bluegill sunfish recognize their children, and remember fish they've met before?
Sixty years ago, says Nature journalist Brandon Keim, about the time that Jane Goodall was beginning her ground-breaking interactions with chimpanzees in Tanzania (see photo above), "mainstream science mostly denied that animals could think and feel in meaningful ways. Claims of animal intelligence... were dismissed as 'anthropomorphic, romantic, or unscientific.' Goodall's findings of tool-making, alliance-forming, emotionally complicated chimps helped seed a revolution.
"Nowadays, science overflows with such findings. A Google Scholar search for 'animal' and 'cognition' returns more than 190,000 publications in just the past five years as research has illuminated a menagerie of intelligence....Sperm whales engage in consensus-based decision-making during the course of their travels. Japanese great tits, songbirds related to chickadees, use syntax - a linguistic property long thought unique to human language - when they communicate..... Many species possess emotions: Giraffes appear to grieve, bumblebees show signs of happiness, and crayfish can exhibit anxiety." ( from "Does A Bear Think in the Woods?" in "Sierra" magazine, March/April, 2019.)
Christians believe that, as per the first book of the Bible, Genesis, God created human beings in God's own Image, and gave them the responsibility to be caretakers of all creation. Human intelligence, creativity, and levels of self-awareness, faculties of the human soul, are unique in their complexity, as are certain human manual abilities. Unfortunately, for many generations, human beings considered the rest of creation as far inferior to them, and interpreted responsibility for the rest of creation as power, as having the rest of creation under their feet, to be used as humans desired.
Pope Francis comments,
"The root of all evil, as we know, is sin, which from its first appearance has disrupted our communion with God, with others and with creation itself, to which we are linked in a particular way by our body. This rupture of communion with God likewise undermines our harmonious relationship with the environment in which we are called to live, so that the garden has become a wilderness (cf. Gen 3:17-18). Sin leads man to consider himself the god of creation, to see himself as its absolute master and to use it, not for the purpose willed by the Creator but for his own interests, to the detriment of other creatures."
Today, scientific investigations are teaching us that other species are far more complex and intelligent than we thought - which should teach us new understanding, compassion, and respect for all of creation, not just "us." Science can help open our hearts to truly become CARE-takers!
Pope Francis believes that expanding our hearts to develop a new respect and concern for the rest of creation can be part of our Lenten journey. All creation is awaiting redemption, as St. Paul told us, not just human beings.
In Romans 8, 19 - 22, St. Paul says:
"All of creation waits with eager longing for God to reveal His children. For creation was condemned to lose its purpose, not of its own will, but because God willed it to be so. Yet there was the hope that creation itself would one day be set free from its slavery to decay and would share the glorious freedom of the children of God."
All of creation waits with eager longing for God to reveal His children! Why? Because human beings, God's children, transformed by conversion, can be part of bringing the rest of creation towards redemption by our loving, healing, and proactive care. By conversion, by grace transforming our attitudes, we will become more attentive to other species' welfare, and work to cleanse our soil and water and air from the destructive pollution which is slowly destroying the atmosphere, earth, and all its life forms through climate change. We will also work to protect areas of land and sea which large corporations desire to industrialize and then pollute in the process of making a profit.
Pope Francis says,
"Creation urgently needs the revelation of the children of God, who have been made 'a new creation.' For 'if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away; behold, the new has come' (2 Cor 5:17). Indeed, by virtue of their being revealed, creation itself can celebrate a Pasch (Easter Feast), opening itself to a new heaven and a new earth (cf. Rev 21:1). The path to Easter demands that we renew our faces and hearts as Christians through repentance, conversion and forgiveness, so as to live fully the abundant grace of the paschal mystery."
If we repent and are converted, we become transformed, and reach out in self-sacrificing love, not only to our human brothers and sisters, but to the rest of Christ's Body - the rest of creation.
For St. Paul also says, in Colossians 1, that "God created the entire universe through Christ and for Christ. Christ existed before all things, and in union with him, all things have their proper place." The Cosmic Christ holds all creation together in himself, all things, not just human beings - this is his Mystical Body. By artificially separating ourselves from the rest of creation by considering ourselves superior in every way, we have lost sight of the truth that if all creation is united in Christ, we are "family" with the rest of creation. This is especially true of our relationship with planet Earth and all its species.
Pope Francis observes in his encyclical, "Laudato Si:"
"It must be said that some committed and prayerful Christians, with the excuse of realism and pragmatism, tend to ridicule expressions of concern for the environment. Others are passive; they choose not to change their habits and thus become inconsistent. So what they all need is an “ecological conversion”, whereby the effects of their encounter with Jesus Christ become evident in their relationship with the world around them. Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience." (217)
Early humans observed animals, learned from them, with a detailed intimacy that we only reserve for our pets. They observed how animals communicated with each other (their languages), their social or tribal organization - for example, bears are matriarchal societies. They understood that animals' habitats are their neighborhoods. Native Americans devised "pharmaceuticals" by using plants which they had observed bears using, certain herbs, berries, and roots. Is it any wonder that the Yakuts of northeastern Asia called brown bears "beloved uncle" and "grandfather"? Potawatomi biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her book "Braiding Sweetgrass," that most Indigenous languages "use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family."
Part of the results of original sin is that we lost this sense of loving intimacy with the rest of creation, and began to use and abuse it. Kimmerer says, speaking from her religious tradition,
“Philosophers call this state of isolation and disconnection 'species loneliness'—a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship. As our human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors. It’s no wonder that naming was the first job the Creator gave Nanabozho" (the spirit who helped in the work of creation, as Judeo-Christians believe Adam named the creatures.)
But, as we work on behalf of our planet, and we pray, we can begin to recover our sense of the non-human part of creation as also being part of our family, deserving of our respect, and appreciation. As we begin to learn again from these different "others," we re-discover that we live in reciprocity - we give to the earth and its creatures, and they give back to us. Kimmerer says, "Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.”
Who hasn't been transformed, healed, made awestruck, by prayerfully meditating on the Face of Nature, in which God is imminent? Whether it's a strong, rocky crag, a scooting ant, a shooting star, a lily, or a fawn, Creation is our first Bible! God is both beyond Nature (transcendent) yet God's Presence also dwells within Nature (God's Immanence), and so Nature is a priceless gift from God, another Face of God.
"The universe unfolds in God, who fills it completely. Hence, there is a mystical meaning to be found in a leaf, in a mountain trail, in a dewdrop, in a poor person’s face. The ideal is not only to pass from the exterior to the interior to discover the action of God in the soul, but also to discover God in all things. Saint Bonaventure teaches us that 'contemplation deepens the more we feel the working of God’s grace within our hearts, and the better we learn to encounter God in creatures outside ourselves.'”. (Pope Francis, "Laudato Si," ( no. 223)
This Lent, praise God, seen in the myriad Faces of Creation, and pray for wisdom and strength to know how God desires that you protect and heal our planet!