Last week I attended a community screening at St. Bede’s of “The Letter: A Message for our Earth.” My church had shown the film a month ago, and I’d been thinking about it ever since and welcomed the chance to see it again. “The Letter” gets its name from Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, written to “every person living on this planet” with an urgent challenge to protect our common home.
“The Letter” follows the journeys of five people on the front lines of climate change who are invited to the Vatican to meet with the Pope. They were chosen to represent four important voices that he says are too often ignored: the voice of the poor, the voice of indigenous people, the voice of youth and the voice of wildlife. Arouna Kandé, a young Muslim from Senegal, was displaced by drought as a boy to a coastal city now threatened by rising sea levels. Cacique Dada is a leader of Novo Lugar community of the Borarí people in Brazil, whose lands include old-growth forests under siege from logging companies. Ridhima Pandey is a young climate activist from India working to hold governments accountable for protecting children from the dangers of a warming world. And Greg Asner and Robin Martin are marine biologists whose Hawaii Marine Education and Research Center seeks to increase coral reef resilience.
Released last fall, the film’s powerful images could be pulled from today’s top stories: floods, wildfires, overheating oceans, sinking boats full of desperate refugees. The relentless bad news of climate change can overwhelm and numb us, so that it almost starts to feel normal, like business as usual. But as Pope Francis says early in the film, “The ‘becoming used to’ is a terrible illness.”
Our healing begins with the courage to come together across different disciplines and traditions to care for the earth. As a marine biologist said in the film, “Science is a toolkit, but we need more than tools.” Faith communities are vital partners in this work. If anyone knows that creation is a sacred gift worthy of love and protection — that matter matters — it’s those who acknowledge, praise and seek to follow the Creator. Laudato si’ means “praised be,” from St. Francis of Assisi’s famous “Canticle of the Creatures” that names sun, moon, stars, wind and water and the earth itself as our siblings.
There’s not really a separation, after all, between humans and what we often call “the environment.” We are one, physically, we are interconnected, made of the same elements as plants and animals. “What if we are to love our neighbor as ourselves,” the Roman Catholic theologian Elizabeth Johnson writes, “and the range of neighbors now includes the entire community of life?” Many of us experience a sense of connection with the divine, or something bigger than ourselves, while out in nature, watching a sunset, spending time at the ocean or in a forest. Loving our planet is the foundation of taking steps to protect it and those most vulnerable to its extremes. Together, we can educate ourselves about our own neighborhoods, support local farmers, recycle, conserve energy, advocate for needed legislation. Being “converted to the earth,” Johnson says, means “setting our personal and congregational lives off on a great adventure.”
There is already a robust, powerful interfaith movement proclaiming the sacredness of God’s creation and standing up to protect the web of life. One local expression is Virginia Interfaith Power and Light’s upcoming “Climate in the Pulpits, on the Bimah, in the Minbar.” From Sept. 1 through Nov. 30, faith communities across Virginia are invited to to preach, teach and act to address creation care, climate and environmental justice, exploring how we all can work together for our common home. More information is at www.vaipl.org.
As a start, here’s the prayer for our Earth which concludes Pope Francis’ letter: “All-powerful God, you are present in the whole universe and in the smallest of your creatures. You embrace with your tenderness all that exists. Pour out upon us the power of your love, that we may protect life and beauty. Fill us with peace, that we may live as brothers and sisters, harming no one. O God of the poor, help us to rescue the abandoned and forgotten of this earth, so precious in your eyes. Bring healing to our lives, that we may protect the world and not prey on it, that we may sow beauty, not pollution and destruction. Touch the hearts of those who look only for gain at the expense of the poor and the earth. Teach us to discover the worth of each thing, to be filled with awe and contemplation, to recognize that we are profoundly united with every creature as we journey towards your infinite light. We thank you for being with us each day. Encourage us, we pray, in our struggle for justice, love and peace.”
More resources and a link to the film can be found at www.theletterfilm.org.
The Rev. Lisa Green is priest-in-charge at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Williamsburg.
