At St. Timothy’s Mission Center, for our
monthly JPIC faith sharing session last week, Sr. Janice presented a YouTube
video entitled: “Earth Champions,
Superheroes, and Stewards”.
This 16-minute video was not only beautiful
to watch, but it prompted a good deal of heartfelt thoughts and desires
regarding the integrity of creation. It reminded one member to recall these
words from THE COMING OF GOD by Maria Boulding, a nun/hermit from Stanbrook
Abbey who died just this year.
“If all creation is reconciled and redeemed
in him, this must include the evolutionary process. We are conditioned, and
often led to sin, by those very forces of aggression and self-assertion which
brought our ancestors through an intensely long climb to the threshold of
humanity, and enabled them, once human, to survive. We are alive today because
many, many creatures have died. Domination over other species in competition
with ours has required nasty behavior, and the story is very bloodstained. We
do not make great success of controlling the relevant instincts [even] now. Yet they are part of the creative process, and therefore redeemed. Our
bodies, which are the products of this cosmic evolution, are themselves longing
for a fulfillment greater than anything life on earth can offer, but explicitly
promised by God. In them and through
them the cosmos longs, the cosmos that evolved them and groans for its own
fulfillment. Very significantly, Paul calls this painful desire birth pangs,
and links it closely to the presence of the Spirit within us…” (cf. Rom. 8:
19-23) (italics mine – dab).
