Return to Fountain Fullness by Patrick Carolan

In 1990, Fr. Thomas Berry wrote in The Dream of the Earth, “The deepest crises experienced by any society are those moments of change when the story becomes inadequate for meeting the survival demands of a present situation.” Today our world and our nation are in crisis. Have we reached that point where our story of life is more about a struggle surrounded by anxiety and despair rather than joy and hope? Our story is collapsing, and there seems to be no way out of the mess we have made.

Research released by The Lancet medical journal reported that malnutrition contributes to 3.1 million deaths annually for children under five, or about 45 percent of all deaths for that age group. More than 10 percent of the world’s population lives in a state of constant malnourishment. A 2022 report issued by Feeding America stated that 44 million people in America face food insecurity and hunger. Of that number, 13 million are children. As UNICEF has stated, “too many children are dying of malnutrition, which is entirely preventable.”

We are also facing a climate crisis. According to the EU’s climate change monitoring service, last month was the hottest June on record, and 2024 is on track to be the globe’s hottest recorded year. Despite denials from some political leaders, our planet is getting hotter, and no one is immune to rising temperatures.

In addition to the crises of the planet and the poor, we face a crisis of peace. There is an epidemic of gun violence across the US. According to the Gun Violence Archive, on July 22, 2024, there were already 309 incidences of mass shootings across the US. We are on track to set a new record for the most mass shootings in a calendar year. Not exactly something we should be proud of.

At the heart of our democracy is the electoral process. As people of faith, our political decisions should be based on our moral responsibility for the community: which candidate best represents our values of caring for the poor and marginalized, protecting God’s creation. But our democracy only exists if we have a peaceful transfer of power. This presidential election is even more critical because our democracy is teetering on the edge. For our democracy to continue and thrive, we all have to be engaged. Our inaction will only help push it over into chaos.

Throughout our nation’s history, faith leaders have been at the forefront of justice. There is power in religion and religious symbols, but it is also clearly misused. On January 6, 2021, violent armed insurrectionists simultaneously carrying Bibles and images of Jesus attacked the Capitol Building and threatened to kill elected leaders of both parties. After the attack, Pope Francis said: “There is always something that isn’t working . . . [with] people taking a path against the community, against democracy, against the common good.”

As people of faith, we should judge our candidates based on their ethical and moral values. We hope the campaigns are issue based with truthful, respectful discussions about how to move forward for the common good. We should have debates on how we can lift up the poor and marginalized, protect God’s beautiful and wondrous creation, and end violence. Instead we have campaigns based on lies, threats, and demonizing the other.

So, yes, it seems like our story is collapsing and our nation is in crisis, which can leave us with a sense of hopelessness. I know I sometimes feel that hopelessness. I ask myself how we could let this happen. How can we be so unChristian that we demonize each other and act out of hatred instead of love? I want to run away and hide. But then I remember my absolute favorite line from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” says Frodo. “So do I,” says Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

At the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, there is a wall with statements from political, religious, and business leaders alongside those from ordinary people who were alive during the rise on nazism. They all essentially say the same thing: I should have done more, I wish I did more, I should have not been silent, I should have spoken up. In 2020, the German Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a letter of apology for the actions of the bishops and priests during the rise of nazism. The letter stated that German clergy caught up in the power of Catholic Christian nationalism and forgot about the message of Jesus. As Tim Parks put it in his review of David Kertzer’s account of Pope Pius XII’s conduct during World War II, The Pope at War, “Church policy, then, was one of compliance born out of intimidation and the conviction that souls could only be saved by the presence of a legally recognized Catholic Church; a return to the embattled and sometimes outlawed condition typical of the early Christian era was not contemplated.” Let us pray that in 30 years there is not a wall in a museum with our names on it saying I wish I did more, I should have spoken up.

The 13th-century Franciscan theologian St. Bonaventure described the created universe as the “fountain fullness” of God’s expressed being. As God is expressed in creation, creation, in turn, expresses the Creator. I often wonder what kind of Creator are we expressing when we allow millions upon millions of children to die from hunger each year. In the prayer that Catholics most frequently pray, the Lord’s Prayer, there is a line where we say: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” We have to ask ourselves the questions: Do we believe that in heaven there will be children scrounging garbage dumps for scraps of food and living in cardboard boxes while others live in mansions and throw food away? Do we believe that in heaven children will be mercilessly gunned down in acts of violence? If God would not find these acts acceptable in heaven, what makes us think that they should be acceptable on Earth?

St. Clare—another 13th-century saint who, with St. Francis, founded the Franciscan order—challenges us to become a mirror of Christ for others to see and follow. She tells us to reflect Christ in our lives, to help build up the body of Christ through transformation in love. As the brilliant theologian and thinker Sr. Ilia Delio says in her book Clare: A Heart Full of Love: “Be yourself and allow God to dwell within you. Christ will then be alive and the world will be created anew.” The Franciscan priest and mystic Richard Rohr writes, “The true and essential work of all religions is to help us recognize the divine image in everyone and everything”—the imago Dei. It is the teachings of most religions that humans are created in the image of God. When we look around the world today, it is hard to imagine that we are created in the image of God. What image are we reflecting in a world filled with war and hatred of the other? A world where every day 18,000 children die of hunger related disease, where we are destroying God’s wondrous and awesome creation?

Again, I ask: where do we go, what do we do? We have to start with truth telling. Our elected officials, our faith leaders, have to challenge all of us, especially those running for political office, to always speak the truth. If candidacies are based on lies, then candidates are not following the teachings of Jesus, and we should reject them regardless of their positions on issues. We would do well to also remember the words and actions of faith leaders like the recently departed champion of justice Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” At this perilous juncture in our democracy, we need to understand that silence indicates complicity in stripping neighbors of their dignity and their right to flourish in our country.

Then we have to dream. We have to dream about what our world would be like if we followed St. Clare and became “a mirror of Christ for others to see and follow.” Such dreaming requires courage, because others will say it is foolishness. My friend the hip pop artist Genesis Be sings in her recording “Dare to Dream,” “When I am asked: How can you dare to dream: the audacity? I reply: How dare you not.” Sr. Ilia Delio, in her article “The Death of God and the Rebirth of God,” writes about the new/old story that Jesus taught us: “Jesus’ integral consciousness of wholeness evoked a genuine revolution in cosmic and social relations, a new creativity, a new structure of existence based on community and shared values. He saw all human beings (and indeed the whole creation) as part of himself and called his disciples to a new future, to create a transformed earth, where all could live together in justice, mercy, and peace.” Similarly, Pope Francis calls us to move forward in bold cultural revolution—not a revolution of guns, but a revolution of Spirit—in Laudato Si’. He implores us to stop living in a world where we are all separate and come together in a world of interbeing, a world where we are part of God’s creation, not separate from it.

Let us dream of a new earth where our story is not of separation but of oneness. As my friend and author Brian McLaren so brilliantly writes in his new book Life After Doom:

In my dream, our life-giving connection to each other and to the living Earth would be fundamental, central, and sacred . . . and everything else, from economies to governments to schools to religions . . . would be renegotiated to flow from that fundamental connection. In my dream, we would know God not as separate from creation, but as the living light and holy energy we encounter in and through creation: embodied, incarnated, in the current and flow of past, present, and future, known most intimately in the energy of love. ♦

Patrick Carolan is a Catholic activist, organizer, and writer. He served as the Executive director of the Franciscan Action Network for ten years; he co-founded the Global Catholic Climate Movement and Catholics Vote Common Good. His writing and activism are centered on his understanding and belief through Franciscan spirituality of the connectedness of all creation and God.