KCP - Catholic Diocese of Broome

These words are from a popular song written by Leiber and Stoller and recorded by Peggy Lee in 1969. When we look at the created universe what are we meant to answer to this question? For the Christian, there is something, or rather someone beyond; the ‘Creator of heaven and earth’ as we say every Sunday in the creed. So in that sense, what we see when we observe the world around us is not all there is.
In another sense, this is all there is; we have not yet discovered any other inhabitable planet. The earth that we have inherited from our ancestors is the only earth we have. While we believe that the Creator continues to infuse all created things with life and energy, it would appear that God prefers a somewhat less interventionist mode of allowing things to unfold according to the laws of nature that God has put in place, rather than a mode that would see God acting as a sort of puppeteer, pulling the strings, turning the lights on and off and changing the scenery in some ad hoc, albeit loving, fashion.
This is not to say that God is not intimately involved and intimately concerned; it is just that some people expect a different way of expressing that involvement and concern than the one God seems to have chosen. What is the way God has chosen? The incarnation gives us the clue; the fact that God ‘became man and pitched his tent amongst us’. We who profess the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we are the way that God seems to have chosen to express involvement and concern for that which has been created; for the ‘more than human’ world as Thomas Berry has called it.
So for someone to say that we can just carry on as we have been, in the face of mounting evidence that human activity is having a significant and adverse effect upon the way the earth is evolving and wait for a benevolent intervention of an all powerful God to reverse it all and restore the earth to its pristine state seems to me to be positing a stance close to the sin of presumption. Earlier in the month we celebrated World Environment Day and I hope that this reminded us of the responsibility we all bear towards caretaking the planet. In the same speech where he drew attention to the plight of Australia’s Aboriginal people, Pope Benedict recently reminded all nations of their ‘obligation to work for the development of all peoples and to do so in a way that protects the earth's resources.’
As we draw closer to the event that celebrates the 20th anniversary of the previous Pope’s visit to Alice Springs, we would do well to recall his words addressed to our Indigenous peoples at that time, ‘You did not spoil the land, use it up, exhaust it, and then walk away from it. You realized that your land was related to the source of life.’ We could do worse than to turn those words into an exhortation addressed to us today:
Do not spoil the land, our water and our air; do not use them up, exhaust them, and then walk away; realize that these things are related to the source of all life, and as co-creators we are responsible for ensuring that we pass on the possibility of the fullness of life to the generations yet unborn.