“I know every bird in the sky, and the creatures of the fields are in my sight.”

Psalm 50, another of Asaph’s psalms, speaks to us from the viewpoint of God. In these words, we hear God telling us what is important and what is chaff. His creation, His world, His dominion. Oh, how often we forget that we are not the only creatures God drew from the dust. Quite the opposite, in one of the two creation stories, we were created after every other living thing. Yet we place ourselves above them because God has given us dominion. But much like fallible humans do, we abuse that power. We treat God’s creation like our personal playground—throwing trash out of car windows, leveling forests, pumping sewage into the seas… The list is long and disgusting.

I’m no tree-hugger. I won’t claim to be an eco-warrior, but I do attempt to be mindful of God’s creation, of God’s creatures. All of them. We decided a long time ago that domesticating wolves was a good idea because the puppies were cute. We decided a long time ago that killing whales for their parts benefitted us. In some countries (I’m looking at you, Japan) dolphins are rounded up and slaughtered as part of a festival. A festival!

God sees us. It isn’t just the sin of being terrible to one another that God laments. It is also the sin of mistreatment of God’s gifts to us. We are called to be stewards ‘of thy bounty’, as we say in Rite One. Yet time and time again, we fail. We fail to see the importance the honeybee plays in the world; they’re loud, scary to some, and pests that need eradication. If we say that we want to walk in God’s will to the glory of His name, then doesn’t it make sense to at least try to protect that over which we have been given dominion? God entrusted us with His Son. We killed him; we can’t take that back. But we can still do something about being mindful of the other things He has entrusted us with; His great economy (the world) being one of them.

Let us see with new eyes, allowing grace to cure our blindness to the destruction we commit. God sees everything. I hope we can at least see a little of it…

Faithfully,

Fr. Sean+