February 25, 2004

Recycling

When the liturgy prompts us each year to remember that we are but dust and to dust we shall return, it appears that the system of environmental stewardship which we have so proudly come to call “recycling” has been God’s plan all along.

Genesis understood this from the beginning with its story about God’s shaping the clay and spiritually informing it as his creation. Science has been slow to catch up, but now tells us something very much the same.

Even the elements which compose our bodies are second-hand. They’ve already been switched and rotated countless times in countless places, near and far, affirming that we are not so much mere stewards of the environment as if we were some alien groundskeeper, but that we ourselves are indeed inseparable from the environment and from the world’s rich and miraculous fecundity.

T S Eliot put it like this — “The dance along the artery / The circulation of the lymph / Are figured in the drift of the stars.”

When there comes that moment, that opportunity in our personal history to be marked by those same ashes, let us be blessed through their presence. Let us welcome and claim them as our sisters and brothers with whom we are so intimately connected. Let us remember to receive this life and time that we are given that we may be stewards of ourselves and of our neighbors and of God’s universe of which we are part, joining as companions on the Way.

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