From the pope’s monthly intentions for 2024:
“September: For the cry of the Earth. We pray that each one of us will hear and take to heart the cry of the Earth and of victims of natural disasters and climate change, and that all will undertake to personally care for the world in which we live.”
Earlier this month, I made a silent retreat at a Franciscan friary in Ireland’s County Donegal.
The natural beauty is stunning almost beyond belief. Photos can’t begin to do the area justice, partly because the beauty in large part consists in the panorama of sea, coves, shore, and sky. To walk, to smell the rich, sweet, damp, ferny bog and salt air, and to hear the cows lowing and the sheep bleating in the pastures above were rare treats.
Because of the views, secret beaches, and adjacent church, many people besides retreatants flock to the friary: dog walkers, surfers, young lovers, the lone elderly.
My first day I was walking back along the drive, with a wooded area on one side and the sea on the other. Along in the opposite direction came a dear small woman of indeterminate age, possibly 50ish, walking very slowly and dragging a well-worn suitcase: a halo of frizzed reddish hair; a moss-green coat that had seen better days. Our eyes locked. We exchanged friendly smiles. Then she came to a halt and began murmuring.
The Donegal accent is a bit difficult to decipher but I made out “waves lappin’ ” and “tryin’ to quiet the wheels” and as I looked into her eyes — alight, alive — I realized she was concerned that the sound of the suitcase might drown out the ocean’s lullaby. She was apologizing to a fellow traveler, lest she interrupt my musings; lest she intrude upon the beauty.
Well! She had picked the right person. I, too, move through the world, alert to and worried about things that no one else remotely notices (and correspondingly, I’m sure, annoyingly oblivious to things that others do).
“She’s gone to the fairies,” the Irish sometimes say to indicate mental deterioration. Personally I would way rather put myself in the hands of fairies than in those of a world deaf to the sound of the waves lappin’.
This small, plodding, smiling woman seemed not exactly lost but rather otherworldly. Had she been a figment of my imagination? I wondered. During the following morning’s prayer, it came to me that she perfectly embodied September’s intention: The cry of the Earth.
The climate change activist might approvingly observe that she was walking instead of driving, i.e., her carbon footprint was small.
Way more noteworthy to my mind, wherever she had come from and wherever she was going, her suitcase was small, too. Her clothing, mien, posture, facial expression, way of speaking, and words exuded simplicity and humility.
She was exulting in the trees, birds, and shore, and she assumed that I was, too.
Most telling of all, she stopped, smiled, and spoke to another human being. A stranger.
How different the exchange would have been, how soon I would have wanted to erase the moment from memory, had she stopped and said, “Yeah, the place might look nice now, but in 10 years this will all be a garbage dump! Are you a TOURIST? Did you FLY HERE? Are you RECYCLING? Don’t you feel morally superior to those who don’t CARE AS MUCH AS WE DO?”
People can’t be guilt-tripped, shamed, or virtue-signaled into love. A concern for the cry of the Earth presupposes an entire orientation toward life, nature, and — always — those around us.
I’m reminded of a quote from one of my favorite memoirs: Katharine Butler Hathaway’s “The Little Locksmith” (1943).
The New York Times reported, “It is the kind of book that cannot come into being without great living and great suffering and a rare spirit behind it."
Hathaway herself called the book a “story of the liberation of a human being.”
Born in Baltimore in 1890, at the age of 5, she developed spinal tuberculosis. In an effort to avert kyphosis (colloquially, hunchback), her doctors strapped her for the next 10 years to a bed pulley rigged with iron weights. It was here that, unable to move her body or head, she honed the interior life of the imagination that would nourish and validate her later calling to be a writer.
Many years later, she observed:
“It is the natural expression of those who are not so stupid and so rude as to have forgotten that they are guests. Those naïve, medieval people — and they exist always in every generation, usually obscure, unknown, and even ignorant — who begin and end each day in that most beautiful instinctive human attitude, the attitude of the sensitive, courteous guest of God, on their knees with the head bent down before an ever-present God toward whom their hearts open like drooping flowers or like radiant flowers — they are the only people who really understand admiration and gratitude.”
They may also be the people who most clearly hear the cry of the Earth, and who most closely order their lives around responding to it.
Use less. And as I was reminded during the ensuing five days of silence, maybe speak more softly, too.
