Franciscans and Creation: What is Our Responsibility?

4. TAKING NATURE SERIOUSLY: NATURE MYSTICISM, ENVIRONMENTAL ADVOCACY AND THE FRANCISCAN TRADITION

53 CHAPTER FOUR TAKING NATURE SERIOUSLY: NATURE MYSTICISM, ENVIRONMENTAL ADVOCACY AND THE FRANCISCAN TRADITION Keith Douglass Warner, O.F.M. Locus enim est principium generationis rerum. (For place is the origin of things.) Roger Bacon, Opus Maior What is our responsibility toward creation? This is an excellent and timely question for us to address as Franciscans. But before we do so in earnest, I would like us to take a step back and ask: what is our responsibility as participants in the Franciscan Intellectual Tradition (FIT) project toward the broader mission of the Franciscan Movement? The strategic plan for the FIT1 has provided an inspiring vision of how we might make ourselves available to the Franciscan Family and the Church as public intellectuals. The plan suggests ways we might prepare men and women in the classroom, but also undertake popular education projects to enhance our fidelity to the Franciscan charism. We have a long history as religious educators providing service in a variety of settings , but this vision we are working to implement has the capacity to enhance our collective fidelity as a Franciscan Movement. This is very exciting for me. And for many others as well! Quite a few friars have expressed to me enthusiasm for the work we are doing, and not just friars who have specialized academic training. This project has transformative potential because it has the ability to enhance the lived vocational experience of the lives of our brothers and sisters. We are constituting ourselves more clearly than ever as a community of scholars with a shared Franciscan identity. We are describing with greater specificity and relevance the Franciscan world vision. We are articulating this vision to the broader membership of the Franciscan Family. This is all very, very good cooperative action. One additional crucial linkage is with our 54 Keith Douglass Warner, O.F.M. Franciscan socio-political project, and I would like to make my professional contribution in this context. The work of Franciscans International (FI), the Justice, Peace, and Integrity of Creation offices of the Friars Minor (JPIC) and similar outreach by other institutions are the chief institutional expressions of our Franciscan socio-political project. This is some of the most important work we do as a Franciscan Movement. In addition to the tasks already identified in the strategic plan for the FIT project, I think we would do well to put our intellectual resources at the service of the hundreds and thousands of Franciscan men and women engaged in this work around the globe.2 This tripartite project of promoting peace, justice and the integrity of creation expresses the values our Father Francis brought to his encounter with the world. Francis’s conversion was profoundly religious , but from this core experience, he imagined more peaceful, respectful and reverential relations between God, humans and the natural world. Our Franciscan spiritual tradition intersects with the most compelling socio-ethical global needs in the three arenas. Since the eighth centenary of Francis’s birth, the Franciscan Family has made substantial progress in its justice and peace work, both in terms of conscienticizing our communities and engaging with broader efforts to promote humanistic values.3 Our work for social justice is founded, in part, on Francis’s meeting the leper, for this encounter stimulated his own conversion and his efforts to promote compassion and radical inclusion in his preaching and ministry. Our work for peace is firmly rooted in Francis’s peacemaking both within and between the Italian communes and between Christians and Muslims. But what about our work on behalf of creation? This is definitely the weakest of the three components. Justice and peace are strongly related to each other, but concern for creation seems to straddle several dimensions of Franciscan life: our socio-political advocacy, our contemplative practices and our tenuous tradition of studying the natural sciences . From what I can tell, there have been a few writings on the unraveling of our biosphere and a very few individual members of our movement who have undertaken environmental advocacy initiatives; but compared to the other two components of our project, care for creation doesn’t rank.4 This deficiency is especially surprising given that our Pope named Francis the patron saint of ecology. I have reflected at length on our shortcomings in this area since becoming a friar, and I welcome this opportunity to continue this reflection. Taking Nature Seriously 55 The reasons...