{"id":3911,"date":"2019-03-27T13:42:37","date_gmt":"2019-03-27T18:42:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/?p=3911"},"modified":"2024-06-20T15:48:22","modified_gmt":"2024-06-20T15:48:22","slug":"being-a-steward-of-creation-this-lent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/?p=3911","title":{"rendered":"Being a \u2018steward of creation\u2019 this Lent"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Michael Canaris, PhD (Assistant Professor at Loyola IPS, mcanaris@luc.edu<\/a>).  This piece was originally published in the Catholic Star Herald<\/strong>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lent has traditionally been an annual opportunity to recalibrate one\u2019s relationship with his or her neighbor and the gifts of creation, in addition to with God. In preparation to celebrate the Paschal Mystery more fully, the church has historically provided prayerful and ascetical tools and \u201cspace\u201d to rid ourselves of disordered attachments, so as to re-commit ourselves to the Risen Lord more emphatically. It has been clear for almost the entire history of the Christian faith that if believers do not consciously emulate the death of the Son of God in a very tangible sense in their own spiritual journeys, then the exultation of the empty tomb will ring exceedingly hollow in the subsequent Easter season. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This\nyear, I have decided to focus my own Lenten disciplines on attuning myself more\nintentionally to Pope Francis\u2019s call to integral ecology. Distancing ourselves\nfrom an addictive culture of disposability should not be a partisan issue,\nwhether in the church or in wider society. Catholic Social Teaching has\nconsistently made clear, at least since Pope Leo XIII\u2019s groundbreaking document\nRerum Novarum<\/em>, that orienting our\ndiscipleship of Jesus around principles like the common good, solidarity, and\nthe universal destination of created things demands that we interrogate our\nattitudes and lifestyles through the lens of the Gospel. This includes\n\u201cpractical\u201d as well as \u201cspiritual\u201d matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being\nstewards of creation mandates that Christians and all people of good will\nrefuse to treat things as trash, and other people as things. Such a\nreductionism is antithetical to a holistic approach to \u201cour common home,\u201d this\nearth across which the entire human race shares our origins, experiences and\ntelos (\u201cgoal\u201d) in the divine plenitude, as Nostra\nAetate<\/em> points out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Residents\nof the United States in particular are guilty of viewing the world as a spigot\nof limitless resources, and of generating immense quantities of refuse to\nsustain our relatively comfortable lifestyles. Questioning our (im)prudent use\nof the wonderful realities that technology and American ingenuity have brought\nforth in our era ought not to be a controversial initiative, if we claim to\ncare about our children \u201cto the seventh generation.\u201d Limiting one\u2019s extemporaneous\nuse of items that cannot be recycled, his or her carbon footprint, and our\ncollective egotistic practices that ignore their impact on wide swaths of the\nglobal population are legitimate Lenten theological aspirations. My own\ncomplicity in such patterns is acute and disgraceful, and so I feel called to\nexamine such realities in my personal and professional life in the coming\nweeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Human\nbeings, social creatures who exist in networks of love, responsibility, and\nblame, cannot experience the divine other than through our interactions in the\nnatural world. Our liturgical prayers emphasize that a matrix exists \u2014 between\nGod\u2019s abounding generosity and the work of human hands, in which we collaborate\nwith the divine to live out a sacramental reality, whereby the natural is the\nconduit through which we access the transcendent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Put\ncrudely, if there is no clean oxygen, pure water or soils protected from\nultraviolet rays, there is no Blessed Sacrament, whether understood\neucharistically or anthropologically, as the human being is the ultimate\nmysterious (saramentum<\/em> is the Latin\nversion of the Greek mysterion<\/em>)\nrecipient of God\u2019s most gracious gift of Self.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The coming season of reflective and consequential purification provides an excellent opportunity to examine how we can better take responsibility and agency in devoting ourselves to that vivifying encounter with that world which God and unfathomable amounts of time have provided us, and which we all too frequently disregard and degrade for immediate gratification. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Originally from Collingswood, Michael M. Canaris teaches at Loyola University, Chicago.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To learn more about IPS, go to https:\/\/www.luc.edu\/ips\/<\/a>.
For those interested in applying to IPS, go to https:\/\/gpem.luc.edu\/apply\/<\/a>.<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Michael Canaris, PhD (Assistant Professor at Loyola IPS, mcanaris@luc.edu).  This piece was originally published in the Catholic Star Herald. Lent has traditionally been an annual opportunity to recalibrate one\u2019s relationship with his or her neighbor and the gifts of creation, in addition to with God. In preparation to celebrate the Paschal Mystery more fully,  read more <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9,11,12,19,21,22,23,27,28,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic-social-thought","category-environment","category-interfaith","category-ips","category-jesuit-university","category-loyola-university","category-old-testament","category-parable","category-service","category-social-justice-community-development","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3911"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4944,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3911\/revisions\/4944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}