O Lord, our God, how wonderful your name in all the earth! --Psalm 8:2
Mass readings: Genesis 1:20--2:4 / Mark 7:1-13
''Now eat up -- there's plenty more where this came from'' we commonly hear before a festive meal. Perfectly appropriate there. But since the Industrial Revolution, we've acted as though God had said the same thing in giving us dominion over the earth (today's Genesis reading). Air, water, trees, oil, animals -- there would always be plenty more, we thought. So we ''biggie-sized'' almost everything.
The first people to sound an alarm got the same reception all prophets get: ''What a nut case!'' Most of us now realize they weren't -- and that ''progress'' is sometimes irreversible destruction in disguise; that my standard of living may cause impoverished living for others; that tomorrow really may be too late. Hard lessons. But St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, ''Any error about creation leads to an error about God.''
Prayer: Father, Creator, make us good stewards of Your creation.