THE GREEN SAINTS

As a devout cradle Catholic, I have always been fascinated by the question, ‘What does it take to become a saint, especially today? Every year I read and analyze the brief autobiographies of more than 400 saints. Its become clearer that green sainthood is possible especially today.

The Catholic Church defines sainthood as persons in heaven (officially canonized or not), who lived heroically virtuous lives and spiritually exemplary lives worth of imitation. What’s interesting is that the church leaves room for both baptized Catholics and non-Catholics to fit this category.

‘Hidden in crisis is opportunity, and the opportunity is greater the bigger the crisis’ goes a common Chinese saying. Yes, throughout history, times of great crisis have also given birth to multitudes of saints. Today the runaway global climate crisis and biodiversity loss provides unparalleled opportunities for a new kind of sainthood, the Green saints.

Saints like Mother Theresa, saw great material (environmental) poverty in their community and took matters into their own hands and helped as many people as they could for as long as they could.

What these saints teach us is that you don’t have to be perfect or extraordinary to become a green saint. You just need to do ordinary things for the good of our environment and even in your local community extraordinarily well and persistently.

It’s going to take a while and there will be challenges. Do not be naive in thinking that you will solve some of these longstanding injustices in some short sprints or simple basic moves.

No, the saints throughout history have not solved global poverty nor stopped the great injustices that seem to bedevil each human generation. However, they made life so much better for dozens and sometimes thousands of people, than if they had not tried.

Today many of these challenges handled by yesterday saints seem to have grown even bigger. These issues include both the internal evils and external evils. They include the kind St. Paul refers to in Gal 5:19-21; sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, and orgies.” Add to those what we see in the streets; murders, hunger, senseless wars, pollution, inequity, injustice, greed, and impunity in management of our common environmental resources.

Jesus seems to hint at this when he remarks, “…you will always have the poor with you” (Mark 14:7). Could such “poor” include those who are financially and materially poor? The kind who do not have access to environmental resources like, food, health, land, water, clean air etc? The kind affected by climate change disasters, such as devastating floods, hurricanes, famines, droughts, wildfires, heatwaves? Or could it also include those who are ignorant morally, spiritually bankrupt or just simply lack knowledge of environmental matters?

Isn’t that the irony of our human life experience? We live for about 80 years or if we are lucky 100, but each day God seems to present each of us with a set of new and old challenges - open invitations and opportunities to make a difference and access to that coveted honor of sainthood.

Green saints may not make global climate change, biodiversity loss or the pollution of our air, water and lands go away in our lifetimes. However, with every action taken by someone or group of persons to solve these issues even if it’s just for one person, therein lies the opportunity towards sainthood.

Many of the basic freedoms and fundamental human rights many of us enjoy today and sometimes even take for granted have been won and written with blood, tears and sweat of men and women, the saints of yesterday. Now is our time to do the same for future generations.

This world is so much better because yesterday’s saints lived and chose to do something about the grave evils of their day. The lives of green saints living walking and working among us today will continue to serve as a guiding light of heroic courage for you and me. The brave and courageous choices we make to solve the environmental evils of our day too could provide the next generation with similar hope. Our choices can rekindle that same saintly flame and inspire many generations to come towards creating a fairer, more just and greener world.

The next time you are walking down the street, tread careful, you may be brushing shoulders with the green saints living among us. Likewise in the not too distant past, many walked and brushed shoulders with Jesus Christ, the Son of God without knowing God walked among them.