Please see Equinox Memorial 2017.
MERCY and INTEGRAL ECOLOGY
Last March Pope Francis declared an extraordinary Jubilee, a Holy Year of Mercy. No question that the world needs compassion, forgiveness, and mercy! But I found myself a bit concerned: wouldn’t highlighting mercy lead to the Spiritual and Corporal Works of Mercy — all fourteen of which focus on people? Might this not reinforce a tendency to the anthropocentrism that the pope would later lament in his encyclical Laudato Si’? Further, the Works of Mercy have traditionally been more concerned with charity than with addressing the causes of the need for charity. Whether or not the pope was thinking of those fourteen works of mercy, how do we interpret them in light of this newly-understood interconnection of all creation and the need for global justice?
If we believe that the name of God is Mercy, it follows that Mercy (aka God) lives and acts in all creation, with no exclusions. We cannot care for people without caring for our common home. Deepening our awareness of the loving forgiveness and mercy of God/ Mercy propels us to make connections: humans with the rest of creation, mercy with justice.
Works of Mercy
In Matthew 25, Jesus lists the ultimate tests for being accepted into the kingdom: “Then he shall say to them … Come, you who are blessed by my Father … for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink … Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.”
The Church eventually listed seven essential Spiritual Works of Mercy, and seven Corporal Works:
Counsel the doubtful Feed the hungry
Teach those who lack knowledge Give drink to the thirsty
Admonish sinners Clothe the naked
Comfort the afflicted Welcome the stranger
Forgive those who hurt us Visit the sick
Bear patiently with those who do us ill Visit the imprisoned
Pray for the living and the dead Bury the dead
Seen originally as person-to-person relationships, we now realize that “Everything is related, and we human beings are united as brothers and sisters on a wonderful pilgrimage, woven together by the love God has for each of his [sic] creatures and which also unites us in fond affection with brother sun, sister moon, brother river and mother earth.” Laudato Si’, par. 92
Making Connections
Seen in the light of redressing causes, working for justice, and interconnecting with all of creation, these works take on even greater relevance. Feeding the hungry and giving drink to the thirsty, for example, are impossible when soil and water are seriously polluted and/or when climate change results in droughts or floods or salination or species extinction. Justice is also a factor, for food quality and availability are often endangered by laws that benefit corporations at the expense soil and farmers and the hungry who need healthful food.
The saying goes that if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime — but not if the fish stock is depleted by overfishing or climate disruption, if his access is usurped by big industry, the water is polluted, etc. And what about job availability and just wages to allow the workers and the hungry to purchase food?
Of course Christians want to welcome the stranger. Whatever we do to the least, we do to Christ. But take a look at the states where governors have said strangers are not welcome. How are we addressing the causes of and solutions to this lack of welcome? What are we doing to stop the causes — climate change, wars, persecution — that drive millions to leave their homes and flee to an uncertain future?
Integral Ecology
In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis devotes one of his five chapters to “Integral Ecology.” Try substituting “the works of mercy” for “the analysis of environmental problems” in this quote from par. 141: “Today, [the analysis of environmental problems] cannot be separated from the analysis of human, family, work-related and urban contexts, nor from how individuals relate to themselves, which leads in turn to how they relate to others and to the environment.”
The first sentence of Pope Francis’ declaration of the Year of Mercy provides the key to unlocking connections: “The call of Jesus pushes each of us never to stop at the surface of things, especially when we are dealing with a person.” Let’s look below and beyond and all around the Works of Mercy to see how they interconnect with everything else — and what we can do about it.
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SUBTLE ACTIVISM
Carmel Bracken RSM*, is the author of this guest blog, with Laudato Si’ addition from me.
Hidden Wholeness
In the heart of the Civic Centre of San Francisco there is a beautiful fountain which has two quotations etched on it. One quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt is written in a very prominent position and states that ‘The structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man, or one party, or one nation …. it must be a peace which rests on the cooperative efforts of the whole world.”
The second quote by John Muir reads ‘If you try to pick out anything at all in the universe you will find it hitched to everything else.’ This is written on a slab of stone that is underneath the water and easy to miss. For me this is very symbolic, that of the two quotations this was the one placed in a deeper, underwater place. It reminds us that we need to do deep soul work to uncover the hidden wholeness of all of life and that only by living from an awareness of unity consciousness, will we truly know how to co-operate with each other and all of life.
Essential Unity
Science is now offering us proof of what John Muir intuitively understood and what the mystics knew for generations, that “at our essence we exist as a unity, a relationship utterly interdependent, the parts affecting the whole at every moment…”
Pope Francis makes this point again and again in Laudato Si’. For one example:
It cannot be emphasized enough how everything is interconnected. Time and space are not independent of one another, and not even atoms or subatomic particles can be considered in isolation. (par. 138)
How do we embody this wisdom? What are its implications? Mercy Sisters have asked themselves this in their Chapter question “In what ways will we allow our place in the interdependent and interconnected community of all of life to influence us?”
Subtle Activism
In trying to live into this question, I found myself exploring the path and potential of subtle activism, which is based on an awareness that “every improvement we make in our private world improves the world at large for everyone.” Subtle activism is any “activity of consciousness or spirit, such as prayer, meditation …. intended to support collective healing and social change.” Subtle activism influences social change through the inner or subtle plane, rather than through conventional exterior means like marches, demonstrations, lobbying, etc.
The potential for subtle activism is only beginning to be tapped. As breakthroughs in quantum physics began to reveal “the unified field of universal intelligence at the basis of mind and matter” a number of scientific projects began to explore the effects of intention and meditation. A study in Washington DC showed there was a decrease in crime for a two month period in which 4,000 people gathered to meditate. Intention experiments — “a series of scientifically controlled, web-based experiments testing the power of intention to change the physical world” — have produced extraordinary results. Findhorn experiments showed how “positive thoughts improved the growth of plants, and Masaru Emoto’s experiments showed how human emotions effect the nature and composition of water.”
Subtle activism does not replace action in the world, it just extends the range of options open to an activist who is awake to a holistic and integral vision of reality where “the subtler, inner dimension of human experience is being reclaimed.” It can be a means of making a contribution to social change for those who no longer have the physical stamina for action in the outer world and for “people of a certain temperament, or who possess certain spiritual gifts.”
Subtle activism is deeply challenging for it calls us to live from a place of awareness, knowing that “Every thought, action, decision or feeling creates an eddy in the interlocking, inter-balancing, ever-moving energy fields of life, leaving a permanent record for all of time….” Subtle activism is not about telling others what to do, but a call to embody whatever quality we wish to see in the world, to “be whatever it is we ‘send’ out.” This is implicit in Ghandi’s call to “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
1 Lynn McTaggart, The Bond
2 David Hawkins, Power Versus Force
3 Gaiafield project
4 John Hagelin
5 Robert Moss
6 David Nicol
7 David Spangler
8 David Hawkins, Power Versus Force
9 David Spangler
*Carmel Bracken is a member of the Irish Congregation of Sisters of Mercy, Northern Province. A member of their Mercy Global Action Network (MGAN), Carmel received an MA in Culture and Spirituality in Sophia Center in Oakland, California. She has inspired me with her writings and presentations, and I am grateful for this blog.
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