Sunday Reflections
Every week, we will be featuring a Sunday Reflection coming from different sources. We have also included below a list of links to other possible sources of Sunday Reflection.If you have personal reflections on the Sunday Readings, please share them on our blog. In the first reading, God's promise to Noah is a covenant to protect God's people, but also all of creation. God promises to not devastate the earth. Sadly, as God's people we often do not follow God's lead on this account. In Genesis, God calls us to be stewards of Gods creation and our rich Catholic social teaching upholds and continues to promote that call. Yet throughout the world “economic growth” and material prosperity seems to trump our care for creation. It is certainly not an easy balance to strike.
While living in Kenya, I wished for the people to have greater comfort and ease of life, but I pray to God that Kenya and other “impoverished” countries never reach the day that every family has a TV, car, refrigerator, air conditioning and washing machine. None of these convenience items would be considered an extravagant item by western standards, but they are all luxuries in poorer parts of the world; perhaps one in every 100 people in Kenya has a personal vehicle. Where will the energy to operate these items come from? When the items have broken down beyond repair and usefulness, how will we dispose of them on such a massive scale? This is even more troubling in light of the “planned obsolescence” that so many manufacturers practice in order to get us to consume more.
There needs to be a meeting in the middle. My limited experience of the poorest people in Kenya is that they do desire some increased level in standard of living. If impoverished folks want to see their material comforts increase, then for the sake of humanity and our planet we “westerners” must become downwardly mobile, and not in quaint subtle ways, but rather large-scale, more radical gestures. However, I emphasize the “if” because I think it is presumptuous to assume that the global South (third and fourth world) countries have the same desire and expectations as “westerners.” My assumption is that several decades ago there was not a global trend toward wanting a life of consumption and waste as it is modeled by the more wealthy economies.
I fear, however, that in our globalized world where my Kenyan friends earning $3-4 a day can watch the WWF Wrestling, CNN, and “The Bold and the Beautiful” in their homes or at the home of a friend that a global attitude of consumption will infect other nations. Even those in the rural areas are receiving increasing messages of consumption and waste. I recall a number of times being in areas where I was unable to get clean water, but if I walked less than a kilometer I could get Coke-Cola! And in areas with no systems of waste removal or recycling, Coke was now moving away from the return and deposit glass and towards plastic which would get some limited re-use but within a short time would spoil the environment that was once clean and natural.
It has been said that there are three kinds of poverty: material, spiritual and solidarity. It is clear that all three are connected. One could certainly argue that some degree of solidarity poverty can be reached outside of embracing material poverty, but it seems clear too that the greater material simplicity one embraces, the easier it become to stand with, walk with, and enter into solidarity with those who are marginalized. In so far as we wish the materially impoverished a life with all their basic needs met, then so too we must wish for our own material simplification, our own downward mobility, for one is not feasible without the other. Finally, spiritual poverty requires a certain emptying of ourselves to make room for God. While justice for the poor might have been one of Jesus’ motivations in calling the rich man to sell all he had and give it to the poor, the scripture seems to be even more about the rich man freeing himself materially so that he might become spiritually free and available to God. The same is true for the story from Luke 18 when Jesus tells us that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom. Exegetes can parse this story any number of ways and come to different historical realities about what is meant, but one thing seems clear: Our consumption and acquisition of goods and thirst for money is no asset when it comes to following Jesus. In fact it is at the very best a serious liability and at the worst, riches are an insurmountable barrier in our efforts to live in relationship with God.
The Church itself is dependent on its identification with poor people, and poor people will turn to the Church as long as it identifies and embraces vulnerability the way the impoverished of the world are vulnerable. Indeed poor people are the artery of the Church, and in our downward mobility we get closer to the heart and soul of the Christian message. For those of us in most of the “western” world our salvation lies in our embrace of a downwardly mobile lifestyle. Such efforts also serve as a conduit for God’s action in the world; in such action we hold up our end of the covenant and we aid God in God’s covenant to protect the earth. This Lenten season perhaps one of the ways we can hold up our end of the covenant relationship with God is to try in various ways to embrace a downwardly mobile lifestyle.
"We need to work for peace from the perspective of the suffering of orphans and widows and the tragedy of the assassinated and the disappeared. We must keep our eyes on the God of life, the God of the poor, and not the idols, or the gods of death that devour everything" - Ignacio Ellacuria S.J.
Prepared by Curt Klueg, former lay missioner, Mombasa, Kenya (2003-2007)
Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns: Peace, Social Justice & Integrity of Creation
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