By Joy Prakash, OFM –
A Franciscan nun one day told me how sinful she felt when she chased away a spider. “I am supposed to love all creatures and I feel bad that I chased this creature away,” she said. Quite genuinely this person was concerned about her unwelcoming attitude towards this harmful creature. In the Canticle of Creation St. Francis wisely leaves out these harmful creatures, and yet that Hymn of Creation embraces all of creation. Why?
God in his generous and sovereign freedom created for all of humanity a viable context and home for the human community. No reason is given for Yahweh’s unutterable act of forming an earth that is so viable for life. God so ordered the “preexistent material substratum,” which was wild, disordered, destructive, and chaotic, to make possible an ordered, reliable place of peacefulness and viability. God’s good intention for life imposes a will on destructive forces and recalcitrant energies. The outcome was a place of fruitfulness, abundance, productivity, and extravagance, in fact a real blessing. We are told that this fruitfulness “God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living that moves upon the earth.” (Gen 1:28).
God’s will for this newly ordered world was that it should be fruitful, invested with ‘the power of fertility’. God has authorized in the world the inscrutable force of generosity, so that the earth sustains all its members, and so that the earth has within itself the capacity for sustenance, nurture, and regeneration. This capacity for generosity is no human monopoly; it is assured that every genus and species of creation can “bring forth,” according to its kind. “You cause the grass to grow for the cattle, and plants for people to use, to bring forth food for the earth, and wine to gladden the human heart, oil to make the face shine….” (Ps 104:14).
All creation – including human creatures but not especially human creatures – is looked after, cared for, sustained, and protected by the generous guarantees that the Creator has embedded in the creation.
Human persons are authorized to “have dominion” over all of creation, but that dominion was not understood by the human person who has been exploiting all the resources of our earth. In the Book of Genesis the human person has been entrusted with the earth, Genesis 2:15, to “till” and “keep” the earth. The verbs suggest not exploitative, self-aggrandizing use of the earth, but gentle care for and enhancement of the earth and all its creatures. In this regard the mandate of obedience issues in stewardship, the wise care for the world and its creatures, who are entrusted to human administration.