Rebuilding Our Nation through Inclusive and Accountable Governance
The teachings of the Gospels have direct consequences for our way of thinking, feeling and living. Our Spirituality should motivate us to a more passionate concern for the protection of our world, interior impulse which encourage us, motivates, nourishes and gives meaning to our individual and community activity (LS#216). These spiritual treasures bestowed by God upon the Church, where the life of the spirit is not disassociated from the body or from nature or from the worldly realities, but lived in and with them, in communion with all that surrounds us. For this reason the ecological crisis is also a summon to profound interior conversion, an “ecological conversion.” The effects of our encounter with Jesus Christ becomes evident in our relationship with the world around us.
Lent is the time for praying in the desert, the deserts of our hearts and lives. We have many deserts out there because inside of us we have wider spiritual deserts (LS#217). Planting trees, almsgiving and prayer is one way of eliminating these deserts. We are called upon to look into our lives that challenges us to improve ourselves. If we wish to change the outer aspects of our lives we must first change the inner attitudes of our minds. Change requires substituting of new habits for old ones. It calls us to command ourselves do what needs to be done. The change of heart to which Lent calls us can be accomplished most of all through the power of prayer.
Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue, it is not an optional or secondary aspect of our Christian experience. We need to recognize our errors, sins, faults and failures and led our heartfelt repentance and desires to change. We must examine our lives and acknowledge the ways in which we have harmed God’s creation through our actions and our failure to act. We need to experience a conversion, or change of heart (L.S#218).
Social problems must be addressed by community networks and not simply by the sum of individual good deeds. This task the Pope tells us that, it will make such a tremendous demands of men and women that they will never achieve it by individual initiative or even by united effort of men and women bred in individualistic way. The work of dominating the world calls for a union of skills and unity of achievement that can only grow from quite different attitude. Ecological conversion is needed to bring about lasting change is also a community conversion. A number of attitudes which together foster a spirit of generous care, full of tenderness. It entails gratitude and gratuitousness, a recognition that the world is God’s loving gift, and that we are called quietly to imitate his generosity in self-sacrifice and good works: “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing…and your Father who sees you in secret will reward you” (Mt 6:3-4). This calls for loving awareness that we are not disconnected from the rest of creatures, but joined in a splendid universal communion. As believers we don’t look at the world from without but from within, conscious of the bonds which the father has linked us to all beings. By developing our individual, God given capacities, an ecological conversion can inspire us to greater creativity and enthusiasm in resolving the world’s problems and in offering ourselves to God, as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable (Rom 12:1). The call for serious responsibility stemming from our faith. Pope Francis calls us to live fully the dimension of our conversion, this can be evident in our relationship to other creatures and to the world around us, in this way it will help to nurture that sublime fraternity with all creation which St. Francis of Assisi so radiantly embodied.
Lent is a great window opportunity to plant a tree as a sign of your commitment to take care of God’s creation. What do we have to do? In a nutshell: turn from power to love, be kind, act justly and walk humbly on earth like a cat. May the Lord help us to let go of the rags of sin, so that he may clothe us in newness of life.
Each year the trees give a lesson in renewal
First the bud, then the blossom, and finally the shoot
Spring dresses the trees in a new robe,
And makes them young again.
But this is possible only because of autumn, they let go of their old leaves,
And in between endured a period of nakedness.
Lent is the springtime of the spirit. Let’s ask our Lord to help us not to be afraid to let of old habits, and to face our Spiritual Poverty, in order that he may renew us, and so that at Easter will feel young again in our discipleship to take care of our environment and leaving it better than we found it.
© Don. Joseph Baptist Nyamunga’21
