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June 3, 2009 The connectedness of everything to everything and the degradation of the earth was the theme of a special presentation June 3 to the annual gathering of the Sisters of Our Lady of the Missions (RNDM) held at St. Michael’s Retreat House. Sister Maureen Wild, SC, titled her talk “Spiritual Homecoming to Cosmos, Earth and Our Authentic Selves.” Wild is a member of the Sisters of Charity and is a noted writer, speaker and retreat guide on themes of Cosmology and Ecology and their interface with Spirituality, healing, justice and ethics. Several guests were invited to join the RNDM Sisters for Wild’s lecture. Wild used the teachings of Father Thomas Berry, a self described “Earth Scholar” but described by Newsweek Magazine as an eco-theologian in her presentation which included a DVD that also frequently quoted Berry. “There is a deep cultural pathology that is causing damage to the entire planet earth and its biosystems,” Wild quoted Berry. In order to get ourselves out of this mess, Wild said, we have to start with ourselves. “We have to heal ourselves first then collectively we can grow,” she said. She began by telling her own story of connectedness and disconnectedness to earth. Often left alone in a family of 6 with a father who farmed and a mother who was a teacher she spent a lot of time outdoors and became connected to small farm and wild animals and the flora and fauna that existed near the Peace River country where she grew up in Northern Alberta. Her father taught her to fish something else to which she said she became connected. Her disconnects included a stories of a local farmer who offered 5 cents for every pair of Magpie legs brought to him and how her brothers chased with snowmobiles and eventually ran over and killed coyotes. She said one of her brothers is now a conservationist and has a quarter section farm in Alberta that he has placarded as a conservation area. “All creatures are loved by God. They have an inherent dignity,” she said. She talked about and showed photos of clear cut forests in British Columbia and the tar sands in northern Alberta as other examples of earth’s degradation and disconnect. She again quoted Berry; “after eons of more and more (diversity) there is now less and less and we are in the midst of a mass extinction,” caused by human activity. The DVD presentation opened with a blank screen and the narrator intoning that in the beginning there was nothing then 13.7 billion years ago in a mili-second a huge explosion created a still expanding universe. From that beginning, everything was created. “We are the universe in the form of the human. We are related to everything.” Sister Wild said Indigenous people have been aware of this connectivity for eons. “We were not placed here, but came from the same source.”  Enlarge photo |
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