I know, I know! The whole Christmas thing is over by now. However, there is one incident of the pre-Christmas season that I can’t stop thinking about. In the very early part of November, I went out for a little lunchtime walk on the street in Toronto where our Catholic Missions In Canada office is, and I noticed a team of three men putting up Christmas lights on the branches of little poplar trees. Not too unusual, for I’m sure you’ve seen how they wind the small strings of lights on the bare branches. The problem though, was that when they got to the third tree, it was full of leaves, since we had had such a mild October, and nature had not had time to get rid of them.
Picture this, then: grown men on stepladders were picking the leaves off the trees, one by one! They had to fill up big bags with green leaves so they could continue with their job of beautifying the city streets with artificial lights. It’s not the first time human beings have forced nature to get moving so they could have their will, and it’s not the worst example.
Last year, an acquaintance of mine published some strikingly dramatic photographs in a Canadian magazine. They were all pictures of beautiful farming landscapes in the Waterloo, Barrie and Toronto areas, shown before and after they were ploughed under and disfigured, in preparation for development. And that was not in the 1960s; it was in 2006 and 2007.
I am not about to advocate that things in the above examples should be done differently, but we would do well to take a lesson from this for our own lives and communities. God has given us a path to follow, one of cooperation with His design for us all. In this New Year, we can keep thinking of how to go along with God’s way in various aspects of life.
The Holy Father, in his special message for the World Day of Peace this year, gave us some guidelines. Pope Benedict prefers that we put the family first in our thoughts and endeavours, with good reason. He said, “The language of the family is the language of peace; we must always draw from it, lest we lose the vocabulary of peace.” His words become even stronger, as he states, “…whoever circumvents the institution of the family undermines peace in the entire community.”
Later in the message, the Pope treats the notion of environmental protection: “Decisions aimed at strengthening the covenant between human beings and the environment should mirror the creative love of God, from whom we come, and toward whom we are journeying.”
“Love one another,” (John 15:12) is an appropriate theme for the year 2008 for all, since the statement stresses one of Our Lord’s central teachings. To be united in care and love is an ambition that we can aspire to and indeed, to achieve, in varying degrees. To cite the Holy Father’s statement once more, we see how fervently he feels about this: “I invite every man and woman to have a more lively sense of belonging to the one human family and to strive to make human coexistence increasingly reflect this conviction.”
