Waste: Feeding of the 5000 |
Bishops are often accused of talking rubbish. I do not apologise for doing so. It is a very important subject.
There are two ways of taking life.
You can take it with thanksgiving or you can take it for granted.
Genesis and Darwin agree that we are creatures of dust – star dust in fact. In the course of evolution we have been given the capacity to reflect upon life. We are the universe reflecting upon itself.
We were meant to take life into ourselves, to use the earth by turning it into praise and expressing love for one another.
Instead in our spiritual unawareness we have not used the earth, we have abused it and converted much of it into refuse. Fish are a potent symbol in the Christian world view. Jesus offered his disciples fish after his resurrection and the letters of the Greek word for fish “icthus” stand for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.
We have come so far away from our Christian moorings that EU figures suggest that 40-60% of the fish caught in European waters are discarded before even they are landed.
Conversion in life means turning away from being a mere consumer; turning in the direction of being a citizen, practising love of neighbour and a contemplative seeing all things with a loving regard.
A 19th German atheist sneeringly said that “man is what he eats” Der Mensch ist was er isst. But that is the message of the Bible and the meaning of the feeding of the five thousand. But how we eat is vitally important. We are to take the world into ourselves and convert the world into spirit.
We should be treating our earth with respect knowing that our well being depends on the well being of our planet. We should be mindful of the hungry in a land of plenty where we can apparently afford to discard 25% of what we buy. We should devise a simple prayer over our dustbins and develop our awareness of how heavy or light is our footprint on the earth.
God the Creator and Source of life we thank you for the fruits of the earth and the human labour which prepares them for our use. May we take the life of the earth into ourselves and so nourish a way of being in the world that is unselfish; mindful always of the needs of others and full of praise. Through him who took bread and gave you thanks; then gave his very self to others, Jesus Christ. Amen.
