Listening to the Cries of Creation

By Melanie Guste, RSCJ

 As educators, we commit to listening deeply to the cries of humanity and creation and to responding with compassionate action with a preference for the most fragile and vulnerable. 

Sophie's Gift, p. 7

Our living planet is telling us a story. Each day, we hear it told on the news: the story of record-breaking heatwaves, extreme rainfall and other precipitation events, deadly flash floods, breakout wildfires and smoke stretching across vast areas of land. These climate realities are testaments to the truth-telling of our earth through stories that span the world.

The climate crisis is upon us, upon us all. It is a watershed moment—a time for conversion and caring, a time for reckoning and resilience, a time for hope and hospitality.

The 20th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on August 29 th   will mark for many a literal watershed moment, an historic turning point in the lives of an entire metropolitan area when residents became climate migrants and environmental refugees for a period of time. Twenty years after this storm, the city continues to deal with psychological trauma, socio-economic disparities, housing, and infrastructure damages.

These lasting impacts tell the continuing story of the cries of the poor, the displaced, and the earth across all cultures, continents, and communities around the globe. Poverty, woundedness and suffering connect us, as Pope Francis observed in his second encyclical letter, Laudato Si, Our Care for Our Common Home.  In that pastoral letter, he invites us to “to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it.” (#91)

Hurricane Katrina was a watershed experience in my life—and an ecological conversion. It was one that incubated lasting commitments to justice, to peace, and to an integral ecological community. What experience in your life has been a “watershed” one?

Questions for Reflection:

• In what ways has your watershed experience affected your journey? Your decisions and actions?

• How am I developing a "loving awareness" of the home we share and acting on the values we hold dear? (#220) How are our communities doing the same?

• How does listening to the cries of humanity and creation call you to respond and to commit?