Tuesday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time

Then God said:

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.
Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea,
the birds of the air, and the cattle,
and over all the wild animals
and all the creatures that crawl on the ground.”

God created man in his image;
in the divine image he created him;
male and female he created them.

God blessed them, saying:
“Be fertile and multiply;
fill the earth and subdue it.
Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air,
and all the living things that move on the earth.”

In recent years much scorn has been heaped upon the Judeo-Christian tradition for this passage. The word dominion is read as domination and western civilization is apparently guilty of dominating the natural world into submission and near extinction. Critics believe we took this 28^th verse of Genesis 1 as a mandate to exploit the land and sea and sky, not to mention one another. Consequently, it is said, we teeter on the edge of ecological catastrophe.

Personally, I don’t doubt that we are perilously close to ecological catastrophe. It’s appearing in many forms all around us. But I doubt that the perpetrators found or needed any scriptural encouragement. Perhaps certain impious scoundrels referenced the passage but their motives were hardly pious, nor was anyone fooled by their sanctimonious citations.

In any case, I am not especially worried about Mother Earth. She seems perfectly capable of taking care of herself. If a million species disappear overnight, she will create another two million to replace them. She has all the time in the world. I worry more about the human species, which might not find a place in her recreated environment.

I read this placement of the male and female in God’s creation as a command to husband the earth. In the second chapter of Genesis, which was written by another author, we find Adam and Eve placed as gardeners in Eden. They should organize and manage the jungle, bringing energy, creativity and genius to the wilderness.

Had the ancient Hebrew writers known of paleontology, they might have known already that human beings occasionally waste their environment. Long before Genesis 1 was written, cities deforested their neighborhoods and vanished into history. North America is dotted with the mounds of lost civilizations. 

The first human beings, arriving with their dogs in Australia, wreaked havoc on the biota of that isolated continent. Eventually it adjusted to the dingo and the people developed a religion to suit their new home.

That is the challenge that lies before us. We have yet to understand that even the vast oceans of air and water, the continents, polar caps, and underground reserves of water, coal, oil and gas are limited. There is no infinite source of energy anywhere. We live in a closed system and we must learn to manage it. 

Despite the romantics in NASA, we're not going anywhere. Despite the doomsday sayers among the fundamentalists, we're going to be here a very long time. 

In the meanwhile we have God’s goodness and our receptivity to it. They are boundless.