Because all creatures are connected, each must be cherished
with love and respect, for all of us as living creatures
are dependent on one another. Each area is responsible
for the care of this family. ~ (Laudato Si’, 42).

Today, in Catholic and some Anglican communities, the household of faith celebrates the Feast of the Holy Family: Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. As a homilist, I’d venture to say that some of the poorest homilies are preached on this Sunday which immediately follows each year The Feast of the Nativity of the Lord (that is, Christmas). This is partially due to the fact that the Feast of the Holy Family follows Christmas so closely. This year the two are separated by only one day. The Christmas tree is still up. Many of the opened presents are still under the tree. The eggnog is still in the fridge and some leftover hot mulled wine sets cold on the back burner of the stove. As Sunday worship goes, preaching on the Feast of Holy Family is a bit like following Babe Ruth in the batting order. But my non-empirical sense of the lower quality of homilies is also due to the fact that Advent/Christmas fatigue too often produces the same stock homily on “family values,” especially when Christmas falls on a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday. I have genuine empathy for preachers. I really do.

As for the content of the homilies on this feast, I say alright all ready. We get it.  J. M. J. (which from grade 1 to 8 I had to write on the top right-hand side of every homework assignment I turned in) is celebrated as the model for Christian families. But let’s also be honest, we know quite little from our sacred texts about the nuclear family of Jesus. Much of the devotional literature, and devotionally-spirited homilies on this day, are based on hagiographical material that too often distances rather than draws us near to these human and holy figures. No inferiority complex for Catholic families trying to emulate these three. I wonder if Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were conferred on the subject, might they not confess to being a bit tired of all the fawning attention (or perhaps, even understanding of the yawning inattention). I wonder if they might try, with predictable humility, to get not only homilists but all Christians to make the connection between the true strengths, struggles, responsibilities, and signs of a healthy, caring family unit to another family that is in urgent and dire need of our attention today. I suspect they would.

In the year 2020, when it has taken a global pandemic to drive home the interconnection of the peoples of the earth, perhaps it is time for us to move from the qualities of a healthy, holy nuclear family to the family that is the entire sacred earth community. One of the most positive signs the last decade or so in Christian communities is how many are now celebrating The Season of Creation from September 1 to October 4, which is the feast of St. Francis, special friend to the more-than-human-community. At the 2019 World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, Pope Francis officially invited Catholics to celebrate this season in full. He said:

“Now is the time to rediscover our vocation as children of God, brothers and sisters, and stewards of creation. Now is the time to repent, to be converted and to return to our roots. . . We are beloved creatures of God, who in his goodness calls us to love life and live it in communion with the rest of creation. For this reason, I strongly encourage the faithful to pray in these days that, as the result of a timely ecumenical initiative, are being celebrated as a Season of Creation.”1

Four years earlier, in his landmark encyclical Laudato Si’ : On Care of Our Common Home, he wrote:

We need to strengthen the conviction that we are one single human family. There are no frontiers or barriers, political or social, behind which we can hide, still less is there room for the globalization of indifference. (52)

What better way to honor J.M.J. than to honor the universe and the earth on which we live? For while the truest truth is that the Ineffable Holy One, the source and giver of all life, is the One “in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28), it is also an important truth that the resplendent earth on which we dwell each day is still graciously and hospitably one in whom we live and move and have our being as well, despite the fact that we have put our knee on its neck. It is hypocrisy to say we revere the Holy Family — Jesus, Mary, and Joseph — but then dishonor our human brothers and sisters and desecrate the air, land, and sea creatures, life forms, and ecosystems. To be a person of faith is to make these connections. To be a responsible member of the human family and the earth community is to make these connections. It has become a sad, if not tragic truism to say we fail to do so, — that is, fail to make the connections, to revere God but not each and everything God has made through the motive force of love and generosity and superfluousness — at our own peril.

♦    ♦    ♦    ♦    ♦

What spawned these thoughts today was hearing the news that author, purposeful wandering vagabond, nature lover and nature writer, Barry Lopez died on Christmas Day. He was 75. National Public Radio said this yesterday about Lopez: “National Book Award winner Barry Lopez was famous for chronicling his travels to remote places and the landscapes he found there. But his writings weren’t simply accounts of his journeys — they were reminders of how precious life on earth is, and of our responsibility to care for it.”

(excerpt) Here are the final paragraphs of an essay by Barry Lopez that was published in ORION magazine.

As a naturalist, I have taken the lead of native tutors, who urged me to participate in the natural world, not hold it before me as an object of scrutiny.

When I am by the river, therefore, I am simply there. I watch it closely, repeatedly, and feel myself not apart from it. I do not feel compelled to explain it. I wonder sometimes, though, whether I am responding to the wrong question when it comes to speaking “for nature.” Perhaps the issue is not whether one has the authority to claim to be a naturalist, but whether those who see themselves as naturalists believe they have the authority to help shape the world. What the naturalist-as-emissary intuits, I think, is that if he or she doesn’t speak out, the political debate will be left instead to those seeking to benefit their various constituencies. Strictly speaking, a naturalist has no constituency.

To read the newspapers today, to merely answer the phone, is to know the world is in flames. People do not have time for the sort of empirical immersion I believe crucial to any sort of wisdom. This terrifies me, but I, too, see the developers’ bulldozers arrayed at the mouth of every canyon, poised at the edge of every plain. And the elimination of these lands, I know, will further reduce the extent of the blueprints for undamaged life. After the last undomesticated stretch of land is brought to heel, there will be only records — strips of film and recording tape, computer printouts, magazine articles, books, laser-beam surveys — of these immensities. And then any tyrant can tell us what it meant, and in which direction we should now go. In this scenario, the authority of the grizzly bear will be replaced by the authority of a charismatic who says he represents the bear. And the naturalist — the ancient emissary to a world civilization wished to be rid of, a world it hoped to transform into a chemical warehouse, the same uneasy emissary who intuited that to separate nature from culture wouldn’t finally work — will be an orphan. He will become a dealer in myths.

What being a naturalist has come to mean to me, sitting my mornings and evenings by the river, hearing the clack of herons through the creak of swallows over the screams of osprey under the purl of fox sparrows, so far removed from White and Darwin and Leopold and even Carson, is this: Pay attention to the mystery. Apprentice to the best apprentices. Rediscover in nature your own biology. Write and speak with appreciation for all you have been gifted. Recognize that a politics with no biology, or a politics without field biology, or a political platform in which human biological requirements form but one plank, is a vision of the gates of Hell (emphasis mine). 

NB! The full article “The naturalist” published in Orion Magazine can be found HERE.

1 Pope Francis, “Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis For the Establishment of the ‘World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation,” September 1, 2015.