THE GREAT WORK OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

"The Lord is my shepherd, I need nothing more."

When history was not yet, in Eden's time, God created all that is human and all that is other than human. God spread out the earth under the canopy of the skies. God pronounced it all good. There was harmony and peace. God entered into covenant partnership with cosmos and creatures. God gave a task to our ancient ancestors. It is called earthkeeping.

God brought us to 2000! History has been with us generation unto generation. Slowly, marvelously, magnificently God has shaped the garden of the earth. It is so beautiful and breathtaking that those who have traveled into space have looked down with wonder and amazement on planet earth.

"You give me rest in green meadows, setting me near calm waters, where you revive my spirit." Myth makers and mystics, frontier explorers and wilderness dwellers have rested, contemplated, gazed on great plains and purple mountain's majesty.

How goes our earthkeeping task in this new millennium? How do we want to be present to creation in this new century?

"You guide along sure paths, you are true to your name." We need to ask God's guidance so that our earthkeeping walks along sure paths. This means that we will need to change from plundering the biosystems to befriending the creation that is other than human. Healthy humans cannot thrive on a sick planet. Sustainable development is the name for the sure path that God guides us along.

"Though I should walk in death's dark valley, I fear no evil with you at my side, your shepherd's staff to comfort me." What is the dark valley earthkeepers face? The human community is still shocked by storied of homicide and suicide. It is not yet shocked by stories of biocide and geocide. The human community gives scant thought to our conscious intrusion into the natural rhythms of the Earth. It is prone to a great evil. The human community is inclined to plunder the living systems of the planet, to exacting what people with power need and want from the planet.

The dark underside now comes to light. When the human community disrupts the biological integrity of the planet, we lose our intimacy with all that is human and all that is other than human. Why? Because we become rapacious and greedy. This closes us off from the depths of the mystery of God's creation.

"You spread a table before me, as my foes look on. You soothe my head with oil; my cup is more than full." God calls us to reinvent the human within the community of life systems. "The greatest of human discoveries in the future will be the discovery of human intimacy with all those other modes of being that live with us on this planet, inspire our art and literature, reveal that numinous world whence all things come into being, and with which we exchange the very substance of life (Thomas Berry. The Great Work, Our Way into the Future, 149).

This can become graced time for planet earth. "Goodness and love will tend me every day of my life. I will dwell in the house of the Lord as long as I live."

_