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The earth is mother
It is common, among the people of simple culture, who we missionaries are sent to evangelise, to feel and talk of the earth with so much intimacy and emotion. They believe that the experience of man is to be himself at the centre of the world (kosmos), or rather of a whole well co-ordinated reality: that the earth (ghe), emerged from the sea (thalassa, abyssos) and fertilized by heaven (ouranos) became a true reservoir of sacred strengths. Which is true for, in a religious perspective, earth is the clearest epiphany of a whole sacred reality: the ground, the stones, the trees, the water, the mountains and the wild landscape of the world. Earth is the base and the generating source of every expression of life; it is experienced as a mother, whose womb contains all the possibilities of life. Even dying is going back to the earth that has been nourishing human beings.
Our Christian tradition is rich of examples. Among the Saints, Hildegarde of Binger (1098-1178) wrote: "The Earth is mother of all. The Earth contains all moistness, all verdancy, all germinating power." Francis of Assisi the patron saint of ecologists and animals in his beautiful canticle of the creatures addresses the earth as sister and mother. "Sister Earth, my mother, who feeds in the sovereignty and produces various fruits with coloured flowers and herbs". Saint Francis' language and thought, his brother sun and sisters moon, resemble the language of Indians in America who had the same view of the earth and were horrified at the ploughing of the soil comparing it to the violation of the mother's womb.
So it is explained by a Cheyenne: "It is through the earth that we live. Without it we could not exist. It nourishes us and it maintains us. From her the fruits that we eat grow; the grass nourishes the animals and with their meat we keep on living; from her the water that we drink, which flows on its surface springs. We walk above her and, if earth were not so, we could not live". The North American Chief Seattle in his letter to the proposed plan of resettlement of Indians wrote to the American president:"The Earth is sacred. How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land?" Indeed, every bit of creation is sacred, from the lions in the savannah to the beetles in the rainforest. Our duty is to be stewards of it. How to understand this concept of stewardship? God's command to the newly created couple in Genesis 1:28, "Be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it, rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky, over every living creature that moves on the ground", looks like a utilitarian view of creation: the earth is there for our use, subduing it, having dominion over it. But the words are best understood as an invitation to human beings to act as viceroys of God, underlining the harmony that should exist between them and the natural world. "In the seventh year the land shall have a rest, or Sabbath, a Sabbath for Yahweh." (Lev. 25:4-7)