Today’s Reflection
Can the Ground Cry Out?
Does the earth feel pain? Can it groan and cry out to God? Can the earth curse us for our crimes? It would seem so, and not just because ecologists, moralists, and Pope Francis are saying so. Scripture itself seems to say so.
There are some very revealing lines in the exchange between Cain and God, after Cain had murdered his brother Abel. Asked where his brother was, Cain tells God that he doesn’t know and that he’s not responsible for his brother. But God says to him: Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Now you are cursed from the ground which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength.
Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground … and from now on the ground will curse you! Is this a metaphor or a literal truth? Is the ground we walk on, till and plant seeds in, build highways and parking lots over, and call “Mother Earth”, nothing other than simple dumb, lifeless, speechless, brute matter which is totally immune to the suffering and pain that humans and other sentient beings feel or indeed to the violence we sometimes inflict on it? Can the earth cry out to God in frustration and pain? Can it curse us?
When Jesus says that the measure we measure out is the measure that will be measured back to us, he’s not just speaking of a certain law of karma within human relationships where kindness will be met with kindness, generosity with generosity, pettiness with pettiness, and violence with violence. He’s also speaking about our relationship to Mother Earth.
The more our houses, cars, and factories continue to breathe out carbon monoxide, the more we will inhale carbon monoxide. And the more we continue to do violence to the earth and to each other, the more the earth will withhold its bounty and strength from us, and we will feel the curse of Cain in violent storms, deadly viruses, and cataclysmic upheavals.
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