From St. Timothy’s Mission Center

At St. Timothy’s Mission Center, for our monthly JPIC faith sharing session last week, Sr. Janice presented a YouTube video entitled:  “Earth Champions, Superheroes, and Stewards”.

This 16-minute video was not only beautiful to watch, but it prompted a good deal of heartfelt thoughts and desires regarding the integrity of creation. It reminded one member to recall these words from THE COMING OF GOD by Maria Boulding, a nun/hermit from Stanbrook Abbey who died just this year.

“If all creation is reconciled and redeemed in him, this must include the evolutionary process. We are conditioned, and often led to sin, by those very forces of aggression and self-assertion which brought our ancestors through an intensely long climb to the threshold of humanity, and enabled them, once human, to survive. We are alive today because many, many creatures have died. Domination over other species in competition with ours has required nasty behavior, and the story is very bloodstained. We do not make great success of controlling the relevant instincts  [even] now. Yet they are part of the creative process, and therefore redeemed. Our bodies, which are the products of this cosmic evolution, are themselves longing for a fulfillment greater than anything life on earth can offer, but explicitly promised by God.  In them and through them the cosmos longs, the cosmos that evolved them and groans for its own fulfillment. Very significantly, Paul calls this painful desire birth pangs, and links it closely to the presence of the Spirit within us…” (cf. Rom. 8: 19-23) (italics mine – dab).