By Barnes Mawrie
We are living in an era when we are face problems of global warming and climate change. There are more environment conferences today than any other kind of conference. The whole world is gripped with the issue of climate change. The COP version has reached 27 recently with the latest one in Egypt. Today humanity has wakened up like from a nightmare and suddenly realized that there is a great threat to its own survival. The impact of climate change has been so disastrous that human beings have no option but to change their attitudes and behaviour towards their natural environment. We have to switch over from an attitude of exploitation to contribution, from greed to caring, from individual amassing to collective well-being. Human beings have almost exhausted Mother Earth of all her resources and above all that, they have polluted her to such an extent that she is permanently wounded and since the Earth is an organism, hurting her is hurting ourselves. Human beings are digging the ground beneath their feet. If ecological disasters continue to grow as they do today, we may not need WMD (weapons of mass destruction) to exterminate us.
Let me bring forward a reflection on the ecological dimension of Christmas so as to make us realize how foolishly we have acted with regard to our relationship with Mother Nature. There are two important significances of Christmas where we witness a symbiosis between the three realities – the divine, the human and nature.
First of all, Christmas celebrates the incarnation of God among men. Christ the Son of God assumed a human form to insert himself into a human world. By doing this, God is telling humanity that he values us as the apex of his creation. By being born here on Earth and in a human culture, God shows that he has arbitrarily decided to identify himself with human beings and not merely with humans but with the rest of creation itself. To identify oneself with someone or something is a voluntary act motivated by love and predilection. Therefore when God identified himself with our existence in the world, he voluntarily chose our planet in preference to others. He could have been incarnated in other planets in the form of other beings, probably those whom we call “aliens.” But the fact that he preferred us to the rest of his creation, speaks volumes of his love for our world and everything in it.
Thus by inference we may say that our world has been doubly blessed and sanctified with the birth of Christ because Mother Earth had received in her bosom the creator God. The implication of which is clear that our world is sacred and everything in it and therefore they should be respected and treated with dignity. What we see today is man’s loss of the sense of sacredness of Mother Nature due to his sinfulness which results from his pride, greed and ambition. The horrific destruction of Mother Nature by humans, is an act of defiance and rebellion against God himself. The impact of climate change today in the form of rising temperatures, droughts, flashfloods, bushfires, furious cyclones etc, are to be seen as God’s punishment for these acts of men.
Secondly, when Christ was born in Bethlehem there was an act of solidarity by the whole cosmos. We are told that on the day Christ was born, a special star appeared in the sky to mark the event. Astronomers have proven that the strange star was actually the conjunction of planets which happens once in hundreds of years. Miraculously such a conjunction took place exactly on the day Christ was born. The coming in line of the planets created an extra illumination which appeared on that day as a very bright star, known since then as the “star of Bethlehem.” Thus we see how the cosmos itself displayed its solidarity with this wonderful event and paid homage to the Son of God. Besides this, it is ecologically significant that Christ was born not in a palace or in a mansion, but instead he was born in a stable in the presence of animals. Those who came to pay homage to the child Jesus were the shepherds along with their sheep. The significance of this is clear, namely, that we human beings are called to live in solidarity and harmony with the other species of life. Even during his three years of public ministry, Jesus showed a close connection with his natural environment. His parables were mostly connected with elements of nature like sheep, trees, flowers, birds, etc. He was closely connected to his natural environment. He talked to the storm at sea and it calmed down. He knew where the fish would gather and so his apostles could throw their nets to make a catch. He stayed forty days and forty nights in the wilderness and the wild animals did him no harm. At his innocent death on the cross nature itself disapproved of such a human crime and thus when he breathed his last, there was an earthquake, thunder and rain and many signs and portents. Thus Jesus was an environmentalist par excellence, one who lived in perfect symbiosis with Mother Nature.
This Christmas should therefore remind us of the pristine relationship that we need to rediscover and renew with Mother Nature. It is precisely because of man’s alienation from his natural environment that there is no love lost between him and Mother Nature. Humans have become self-seeking, self-focused and self-gratifying that they begin to look at Mother Nature no more as a living organism but as a non-living entity to be fully exploited without any prick of conscience. This is the root cause of ecological destruction which has landed us in the present impasse.
Just as Christ’s birth manifested a perfect symbiosis with the cosmos, so too humans ought to re-establish this divinely ordained symbiosis with the rest of creation. As Chief Seattle reminds us. “Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself.” Therefore, the true solution to climate change is not the number of conferences and summits, but man’s honest return to Mother Nature. Christ was born in Mother Nature to remind us that we humans need to be reborn again in Mother Nature so as to learn to respect, love and revere her. Happy Christmas to all the readers.