it's not yours - 17th week Thursday

Today in the book of exodus we see what the Israelites call the shekinah, the cloud that covers the tent, the cloud that becomes a pillar that guides them during the day, the cloud that becomes a pillar of fire that guides them during the night.  The shekinah, the cloud, the glory of God is God’s presence to his people.

This shekinah is a reminder that God though present among us is totally other.  It speaks of the transcendence of God.  God is different, God is beyond, God is above us, God is all powerful, God alone is creator – we are not in the same level with God. 

Two things therefore from laudato si.

First, the shekinah is a reminder that we are not God.  Many of our ecological problems come from the belief that we can do what we want.  Laudato si is telling us that we are not God, we are not the lords of the cre­ation; we are not the lords of mate­r­ial things; we are not the lords of our own money; and we are not the lords of other human beings.   Indi ka tag-iya, tagdumala ka lang. So one cannot just simply assert, I can do whatever I want with my things.  This is a basic principle which Pope Francis holds and he applies this to everything.  He applies it to food saying wasting food is stealing from the poor.  It is not your food, you do not own it.  You are just steward, tagdumala.  You cannot just throwaway things.  Why should you throwaway things – are they yours?  No they are not yours.  You are not owner, you are caretaker.  God alone owns these things.

Second, Shekinah, the cloud which hides and at the same time reveals God’s presence instill and draws out reverence.  The pope wants us to recover the sense of the sacred, to recover reverence for nature.  We Filipinos have a fear and a kind of aversion for certain places and things in nature.  We call them mariit and because of this we invented a traffic sign which says, slow down mariit.  Pope Francis wants us to go beyond that.  He wants us to have reverence for the world around us, for nature especially.  He wants us to recover a sense of the sacred in the world.  It is good that you go on camping once in a while because doing so you begin to love nature.  It is good to pray and to stay quiet under the trees and facing nature because that way you begin to see God in these places and to be drawn by them to pray and feel God’s presence.  In fact Pope Francis advises us to set aside our gadgets and to go to nature, to commune with it.  This way we begin to value it, to appreciate it and not to put it to waste.  Remember the shekinah – God’s presence in the world, in nature and in his people.