interconnected - 17th week Friday

Feasts were established not just to remind the people of what God has done for his people but it is also an assurance as to what God will do for us.  Feasts have an anamnetic quality in them.  Anamnesis is a Greek word which is loosely translated in English as memorial or remembrance.  But it is more than just a mental remembrance of things and events.  Anamnesis means to make present what has happened in the past, and by making this present we participate in its grace and in its power.

If you notice the feasts mentioned in our first reading today are hinged in nature.  Its markers are the sun and the moon.  It changes with the seasons and as such it marks the beginning or the end of food production.  Our feast too as Christians and Catholics are hinged in nature.  In the northern Hemisphere Easter ushers spring, the feast of John the Baptist ushers Summer,   the feast of the archangels ushers autumn and the birth of the Lord ushers winter.  These are remembrances but at the same time they assure us of God’s constant help throughout the year.

The inter-relatedness of our feasts and nature speak in reality of the inter-relatedness of everything else in the world.  All of us are linked by unseen bonds and together form a kind of universal family.  We do not live in isolation and neither are our actions and their consequences isolated.  We affect each other.  Our actions here will have consequences in the North Pole.  It can be substantial or it can be minimal, but the fact is we affect each other because we are a universal family.

This again is a principle that runs through the encyclical of Pope Francis.  In fact that’s the point of the title of the encyclical.  The title came from the beginning words of St. Francis’ prayer Laudato si mi Signore – Praised be you, my Lord.  This is the prayer where St. Francis call everything around him, brother and sister  - brother sun, sister moon, brother wind, sister water, brother fire.

 The fact is, everything is interconnected, and I cannot act in isolation and my acts cannot be isolated.

Dengue is one disease that makes us realize that what I do or what I do not do in my own backyard can affect people around the neighborhood.  Bisan ano mo pa ka panglimpiyo sang imo palibot agod wala balayan ang lamok, kon ang imo mga kaingod indi manglimpiyo, ti wala pulos kay man ang lamok nagalupad.   The way of the world is to think only of oneself – wala ako labot, wala kamo labot.  We have become individualistic.  But our common predicament will make us think otherwise – we need to become community again, we need to put our acts together, we need to develop once more that consciousness that my actions or inaction can affect others.