Seeing nature with new eyes
November 29, 2023 - Wednesday, 34th Week in Ordinary Time
Daniel 3:62-67
For the third consecutive day, we listen to the song of the three young men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who refused to worship the golden image set by the Babylonia king Nebuchadnezzar. Today, the three young men invite the sun, the moon, the stars, and the elements of nature - rain and dew, winds, fire and heat, cold and chill - to praise the Lord (Daniel 3:62-67).
It is said that the ancient people worshipped nature, the Sun in particular. It is said that the entire nature was seen as divine. In the Bible, however, the natural world is the revelation of God - His existence, His beauty, His artistic creativity, and His power. “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork” (Psalm 19:2). Our Catechism teaches that when we listen to the message of creation we can arrive “at certainty about the existence of God, the cause and the end of everything” (CCC, 46). Centuries ago, St. Augustine taught that the beauty of creation points us to their creator whom he called “the Beautiful One”.
Unfortunately, we have lost this ability to see in creation the revelation of God’s glory. We do not invite creation to praise the Lord because we have stopped praising the Lord ourselves. We do not anymore, like St. Francis, call the Sun, the wind, and the fire brothers or the moon, water, and Mother Earth sisters. For us, nature is an object to be used for our benefit. In the words of Pope Francis, “We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her [the earth] at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life” (Laudato Is, 2).
Today’s fragment of the hymn of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego accompanies, the first reading from Daniel that narrates the story of the Babylonia king Belshazzar who under the influence of alcohol committed sin against the God of Israel (see Daniel 5:1-28). At the heart of the story is the mysterious writing, “MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN” (Daniel 5:24), that nobody on the court of the king could understand. Then, Daniel enters the stage and explains its meaning. For his pride and irreverence, the mysterious writing spelt out the end of King Belshazzar and the Babylonian empire.
In his encyclical letter, “Laudato Si”, Pope Francis writes about the “technocratic paradigm” (Laudato Is, 106-114) that dominates our present world in which technology is seen as a tool to dominate the world and “the principal key to the meaning of existence”. The outcome of this paradigm is a twenty-first-century man and woman heading towards self-destruction. Our only hope is liberation from this paradigm. And perhaps the first step in that direction could be to put down our gadgets and see the beauty of nature around us. Our brothers - the Sun, fire, and winds - and our sisters - the moon, water and the Earth - can teach us a lot about God and the meaning of life.