Scripture:
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Luke 9:22-25
Reflection:
As 2025 began, fires in Southern California devastated thousands of communities. Homes, schools, community centers, businesses small and large, museums, and historic buildings were burnt to a crisp in minutes. The Passionist Retreat Center near Los Angeles suffered heavy damage. Regardless of how the fires were sparked, the bone-dry conditions met demonic wind gusts to spread the devastation so fast that people rushed to save their lives in minutes. Many were unable to escape and succumbed to the unleashed forces of nature.
Weeks later, in my home state of Kentucky, extreme weather took the lives of 23. Two of the victims were unhoused and froze to death on the street. In the Eastern Kentucky mountains, corporate interests have battered the land for decades by mountaintop removal coal mining and clear-cutting to harvest every tree. The stage was set for rainwater to rush from hillsides into valleys in seconds, wiping out homes and businesses. First responders and ordinary citizens scrambled to rescue the vulnerable from their little homes. Witness young men walking in waist-deep water carrying a feeble, traumatized woman to safety.
As the year continues, we can anticipate more climatic disasters. Droughts, excessive heat, tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, food shortages, and more flooding.
For years scientists and Pope Francis have foretold these apocalyptic events. Government policy makers, corporate leaders, and the majority of ordinary citizens ignored them. Nations have done and are doing too little to curb global warming, as the Pope reiterated in another recent warning. The future looks bleak for Mother Earth.
Capitalism without proper guardrails kills people and destroys the delicate balance in our environment. Profits are too often more important than the common good. Individual liberties are not balanced with the welfare of human communities.
Moses, like the pope, set forth two options for his people: “. . . life and prosperity, death and doom. If you . . .turn away your hearts and will not listen, but are led astray and adore and serve other gods, I tell you now that you will certainly perish; you will not have a long life on the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy. . . I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life. . .”
These words are difficult to hear. The temptation is to minimize what we see, what we experience. Won’t it all solve itself? Isn’t this just an aberration, an out-of-the-norm event?
We want to remain indifferent, to find comfort in our portfolios, retirement accounts, and positive self-talk. It is easy to escape by pleasure travel, sports, socializing with like-minded people, and hiding out in our personal home entertainment centers in safe neighborhoods.
A critical self-examination of consciousness, done in quiet prayer and perhaps with a wise spiritual director, might awaken us to how God is drawing us to respond to this moment in human history.
Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel are among the most challenging in the New Testament: “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. What profit is there for one to gain the whole world yet lose or forfeit himself?”
Jesus desires that we be indifferent to our fears. He wants us to put absolute trust in Him by choosing life each day. This may mean questioning why we are hoarding so much money in a world where poverty is killing our sisters and brothers. It may mean stepping into the places where Christ is being crucified today . . . nursing homes, hospitals, poor neighborhoods, children’s homes, shelters for the unhoused, and soup lines. It may mean traveling less and turning down the thermostat in the winter to cut down on our fossil fuel consumption, switching to renewable energies, planting home gardens and trees, and advocating for government policies that protect the Earth instead of corporate interests.
This is the spirituality of our time as the pope outlined in the encyclical Laudato Si’ in 2015. If you haven’t read it, now, during Lent, might be a good time to get a copy and make the words your own.
Thus we can respond to Moses, “We choose life.”
Jim Wayne is a member of St Agnes Catholic Community in Louisville, Kentucky, a Passionist parish. He served in the Kentucky House of Representatives for 28 years, is the author of the award winning novel, The Unfinished Man, and is a clinical social worker.