Affirming nature, its beauty and goodness, is the long term pattern, or climate, of the Gospel. Jesus’ words and actions create an atmosphere of communion with nature. He shows gratitude for the gifts of nature. The Gospel climate of affirming nature is especially true in Jesus’ parable of The Sower this Sunday. The parable tells of a sower whose seeds fall into different environments. Some environments are not well cared for and are destructive, “scorched” and “choked.” Other environments are cared for and have “rich soil and produce good fruit.”
It is becoming increasingly difficult, the world over, to find “rich soil” and to “produce good fruit.” That is because we are living within a long term pattern of nature’s destruction and climate’s chaos – by the military. We know this from WWI trench warfare and poisonous gases across Europe; from WWII global destruction capped by explosions of the atom bomb and its radiation poisoning across Japan, as well as the Pacific and the U.S. desert from continued testing; from Vietnam having 20 million gallons of poisons, like Agent Orange, dropped on human beings and on foliage; from the 1st Gulf War scorching the earth with oil fires and oil spills, and from the 2nd Gulf wars use of toxic missiles contaminating nature and still ongoing destruction. Each war exists in the larger context of all wars by all militaries and their cumulative destructive effects. Medea Benjamin is a peace activist who focuses on the military, war, and their environmental destruction. Her studies identify the military, specifically the U.S. military, as the greatest danger to environmental health. The U.S. military, in addition to killing people, ravages the ecosystems and natural resources of every area against which it wages war; land, water, air, plants, and animals. It therefore causes mass migrations of people. Across scarred landscapes foretelling the extinction, the military spawns decimated infrastructures, unexploded bombs, toxins, and diseases sabotaging healthy human life and earthly vitality. The military’s destructive climate includes its gorging on billions and billions of dollars year after year of taxpayer money for its wars, its capitalists’ planned reconstructions, and for the destructive weapons it uses to fight them. The U.S. military’s environmental destruction includes it being the single largest consumer of oil in the world and thus the world’s worst polluter. It makes sense the U.S. military is also the world’s most highly weaponized security detail for all the world’s worst extractive energy corporations. This includes the U.S. military being deployed in the U.S. against individual people and whole communities who are seeking environmental health. The people are invaded by soldiers because they are stopping corporate extractors from plundering them for fossil fuels like oil, coal, and natural gas through drilling or fracking. This is especially true in Native American communities. U.S. soldiers / police are also regularly deployed to news programs, talk shows, and documentaries to appear with celebrities errantly lauding the military as a partner in climate chaos awareness. But the military’s awareness is due to climate chaos’ negative impact on the U.S. military and on corporations who cause the pollution. The military’s awareness is not due to its destructive impact on climate with an intent to make changes. The military’s destructive impact is inherent to the military’s existence. The military that is the primary cause of climate chaos. The military is the existential threat to the planet.
“I love you as one loves most vulnerable things, urgently, between the habitat and its loss. I love you as the seed that doesn’t sprout but carries the heritage of our roots… I love you without knowing how, or when, the world will end—I love you naturally… I love you like this because we won’t survive any other way, except in this form in which humans and nature are kin.” (Sonnet XVII – Craig Santos Perez)
Prayer: Spirit of Life, thank you for the beauty and goodness of nature.
Question: How can I help keep nature from being destroyed?
July 12, 2020 Gospel Matthew 13:1-23 Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time