Week of August 22-27: How Do We Care for, Celebrate, and Grieve Our Planet?

Each Sunday, from now on, we will offer a brief summary of the meditations from the previous week.  This will be a kind of “index” that invites you to return to a previous meditation which may call to you.

Over the past week we have covered a number of topics. We began with Julian of Norwich who had the universe in the palm of her hand, then we heard from “geologian” Thomas Berry on the Cosmic Christ.

The next two days were spent with St. John of the Cross and his words on the sacredness of creation.  And finally we did two days on Grief–grief over climate change, and learning to have apppreciation and praise in spite of all the suffering and grief.

With a grand piano on a floating platform in front of a glacier on the Arctic Ocean, Ludovico Einaudi performs an original piece “Elegy for the Arctic,” to call for its protection. Ludovico Einaudi via Greenpeace, 2016.

DM 8/22/2022 Thomas Berry on the Cosmic Christ. Catholic priest and eco-prophet Thomas Berry talks about how, if we want to save our planet, “We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our prerational, our instinctive resources.”

Peaceful forest river. Photo by Philippe Bout on Unsplash

DM 8/23/2022 John of the Cross on the Sacredness of Creation. Christian mystic and reformer John of the Cross, in his creation-centered poem, calls God his “Beloved” and goes on to say that “My beloved is the mountains” and the rivers and much more. 

DM 8/24/2022 John of the Cross on the Sacredness of Creation, Part II. John of the Cross speaks about how each creature “is endowed with a certain likeness of God and in its own way gives voice to what God is in it.”  

DM 8/25/2022 Grief, Climate Change, Extinction and Appreciation. We face the disturbing reality of climate change as evidenced in unprecedented drought in China, and major rivers drying up in Europe and elsewhere. Meanwhile Matthew Fox reminds us that “appreciation matters” also.

Communion. Photo by Kristin Wilson on Unsplash

DM 8/26/2022 Grief and Praise, Walking Together. How do we express our very real grief for this beleaguered Earth while simultaneously recognizing the importance of giving thanks for it? Rilke writes, “Walk your walk of lament upon a path of praise.”

DM 8/27/2022 Speaking of Praise, Rilke Again. In spite of an extremely difficult childhood, Rilke learns the value of praise, modeling for us a way to make it through the difficult times.


Banner image: The Earth from Above. Photo by USGS on Unsplash.

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7 thoughts on “Week of August 22-27: How Do We Care for, Celebrate, and Grieve Our Planet?”

  1. Richard Reich-Kuykendall
    Richard Reich-Kuykendall

    Thank you Team !!! This looks great to me, and it is inspiring to revisit the thoughts of the week. Each brief sketch of each Daily Meditation brings it all back to me, and I rethink it and relive it again. Thank you !!!

  2. As we build bridges between cultures, all people, who are all many teachers and masters like us who live here and always will live on in Being, we are building bridges to the Earth and the multitude of Being (s) She hosts. All these bridges are guilt first with the divided landscapes and ecologies within our selves. As connections and balance is reestablished there first, all harmony is extended outward, joining again with one another of our species, all species, all life and all being. These are the primal connections beyond space and time within, that are the same as our primal timeless connection to our Whole Mother Earth. Then, in holistic ecology and cosmology, we may know that every particulate pulsing within the atoms that make up every one of us, every cell of our body, every animal, every plant, every grain of sand on the Living Earth, is the same as the stars, galaxies and living Uni-Verse, the home, Om, of Universal Being. Dr. Darryl Luke Pokea

      1. In narrow thoughts and not fully using all of your SENSE… if you surround yourself only with yourself, your conditioning, your prejudices…that is all you will see. If you surround yourself with the many faces of God in all human beings, animals, plants, forms of life, the earth, the stars and the whole Universe, you will see God in all of them. Dr. Darryl Luke Pokea

  3. Thank you DM team, and the new format of reviewing Matthew’s spiritual DMs of the past week is great. Acknowledging the suffering and grief we’re all going through for Mother Earth, Her creatures and blessings, and for all humanity has been very important for me to know that we’re all going through this together with our contemplative faith in God’s Loving~Wisdom~Just~Creative~Oneness~Compassionate Presence in our inner and outer lives with-in All of God’s ongoing co-Creation~Evolution in our multiverse Beautiful Earth and Cosmos….
    Blessings 🔥❤️🌎🙏

  4. Thank you for this new format and summary of the past week. “Walk your way of lament upon a path of praise.” especially speaks to me as a reminder that the foundation is thanksgiving even as we grieve. On this beautiful sunny day in Florida I just came in from glorying in the bright colors of the garden and the butterflies dancing in praise. No matter the dire political atmosphere, the beauty of nature trumps it every time.

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