This reflection on “the poor you will have with you always” initiated a similar illumination for me regarding the “other issues” which are central to our mission , but call upon us to recognize a very important matter to “Salvation”, which is the Restoration of Creation as central to our being able to respond to any “issues”. We need our life and physical grounding to be there for us.

Reading this reflection on this passage makes me think of the matter of the ecological crisis, in a similar way (with a few differences), which is to say that the “special event” or reality is the danger to which we have exposed ourselves: if we fail to address this, we will have no other “causes” to which we will be able to respond, since ecological breakdown will become THE ubiquitous danger; the one which spawns so many cascading, interlocking tipping points that we will be always fighting for our lives. All other problems that exist and have for some time will be accelerants to the chaos, since the rich will pit everyone else against one another to ensure their own comfort. If we could only appreciate the depth and meaning and value of creation (the complex systems of life in which we are interdependent), then all the other problems would find a healthy base in which they would be found unacceptable and false.

This post was orginally posted to Facebook on my timeline at:

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10158775308541818&id=524281817&sfnsn=mo