Lent and the Earth

Friday, 15 April 2011 11:02

Written by Neric Acosta

The 40 days of Lent, in the Christian tradition, parallels the 40 days of Jesus Christ spent fasting in the desert before he began his public ministry. Through fasting, prayer, repentance and self-denial, the observance of Lent prepares the believer for the commemoration of Passion of Christ, marked by Good Friday and Easter Sunday – representing Christ’s death and resurrection.

Good Friday on this liturgical year, April 22, happens to be Earth Day, celebrated worldwide for the last 40 years as a reminder of how fragile our hold on life is, and how threatened our life-support systems are. A bishop has asked government to declare that Earth Day be moved this year because of Holy Week, and so as to properly and separately commemorate both.

But Earth Day might just as well be about Lent, which derives from the Germanic root for spring, the season when days lengthen after winter. If Lent is about repentance and redemption, there is perhaps no better way to observe Earth Day than to view things in light of how much we have to repent for humankind’s sins against nature, and begin the healing of broken ecosystems and the redeeming of life on this planet itself.

The cataclysmic events in New Zealand, Japan, Australia, China, Pakistan, and the Philippines this past year -- and in recent years – goad many to ponder about life on earth, not simply of individuals finding meaning and purpose in any religious sense, but of us rediscovering our essential connectedness to a complex web of life. Civilization as we know it may be headed for an apocalyptic future if present trends of ecological destruction and the impacts of climate change on communities, food, and health remain unabated.

Fasting and self-denial as forms of repentance on this holiest of weeks in Christendom, should be extended to the overall shift of profligate lifestyles and consumptive behavior in this modern age to a consciousness of living simply and with nature – or in Earth Day terms, of having lighter and smaller carbon footprints.

Earth Day began in 1970, when United States Senator Gaylord Nelson called for an ‘environmental teach-in’ across universities and communities across the country in response to widespread environmental degradation. Four decades ago, that event first catalyzed over 20 million people in the United States in a common cause of environmental activism. Today, over 175 countries and tens of millions mark the vernal equinox, the time when the sun crosses the equator making the length of night and day equal in all parts of the earth, as Earth Day.

The famous anthropologist, Margaret Mead, referring to the vernal equinox, declared in 1978 that Earth Day “draws on astronomical phenomena in a new way, which is also the most ancient way … attaching no local or divisive set of symbols, no statement of the truth or superiority of one way of life over another.” In this respect, the selection of the Vernal Equinox makes “planetary observance of a shared event possible.”

And speaking of Holy Week in the Christian calendar, Earth Day is, as Mead avers, “the first holy day which transcends all national borders, yet preserves all geographical integrities, spans mountains and oceans and time belts, and yet brings people all over the world into one resonating accord, devoted to the preservation of the harmony of nature and yet draws upon the triumphs of technology, the measurement of time, and instantaneous communication through space.” In 2009, the United Nations designated April 22 as International Mother Earth Day.

When we all retreat to the quiet of our homes or the sacred spaces of prayer next week, it should behoove us to return to the liturgical, but also life-affirming, meaning of the beginning of Lent, Ash Wednesday. The ritual of having ash brushed or dabbed on our foreheads – “ash to ash, dust to dust” – reminds us of our finite life on earth, our fundamental mortality. But it should also tell us that we are in essence of the earth, and return to the earth. And while on earth, we must have the greatest reverence for all of life on earth.

Life is short, but there is with our time on earth, the primordial responsibility to those that follow us. Our children and future generations will inherit the kind of earth we nurture – or destroy. While perhaps hackneyed, the truism holds: that it is from the future generations that we have borrowed the earth and its bounties, more than from our ancestors that we have inherited these from.

Redemption, from the old Latin, redemere, “to buy back,” points to the individual Christian deliverance from the wages of sin. But more than that, for each one of us inhabitants – Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, devotees or adherents of any belief system -- of this living Earth, redemption is about delivering us from ecological perdition and restoring balance and harmony, and returning us to our elemental connectedness to all life.

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