by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
“Laudato Sii” to the Hudson Valley and the Catskills
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach …”
Today, as Pope Francis’s encyclical on creation and climate change gets an official release, I’ll be offline and out of range – with family and friends on a school camping trip in the Catskills. And I’ll be glad to be there and not in the hurly-burly of instant commentary. How better to deliberate about the natural world and our place in it than to go out in the natural world for a little while?
Cardinal Newman in the Apologia pro vita sua told of a man who wished to have a papal bull with his Times and his breakfast each morning. That’s a little bit what the anticipatory chatter about the creation-and-climate encyclical feels like. I haven’t read it – haven’t read much of the summaries, either – but there’s every indication that the encyclical is necessary, eirenic, expressive of the tradition of the church and the character of Francis alike, and well timed. And yet there’s something nutty about the thought of several thousand members of the press speed-reading the text and drawing instant conclusions from it, at once racing against each other and borrowing from each other as they comment, post, tweet, retweet, and opine. And we most of us know that.
I’ll read Laudato Sii over the weekend. Meanwhile, I’ll have in mind the letter to the world that is Thoreau’s Walden:
“Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry — determined to make a day of it.”
