This, from the Twitter feed of Union Seminary in NYC (non-denominational at Columbia U).
This is a GREAT idea for the upcoming Synod! They could bring in all sorts of trees and plants, maybe with some snakes and frogs still in them and then collectively confess our sins against them.
Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor.
What do you confess to the plants in your life? pic.twitter.com/tEs3Vm8oU4
— Union Seminary (@UnionSeminary) September 17, 2019
We have a lot to apologize for.
Think of all the plants being abused because of climate change!
We are making those poor plants work harder than ever before to save us from ourselves. They are sacrificing their own well-being to keep us from destroying creation with our closed-minded, blinkered, selfish materialist rape of the Amazon forests.
As Ed Pentin reported HERE:
From an ecological point of view, the Instrumentum laboris represents the Church’s acceptance of the deification of nature promoted by the UN conferences on the environment.
In fact, official UN documents, already in 1972, claimed that man has mismanaged natural resources mainly due to “a certain philosophical conception of the world.” While “pantheistic theories … attributed part of the divinity to living beings … scientific discoveries led to … a kind of desacralization of natural beings,” the best justification of which is reaffirmed “in the Judeo-Christian conceptions according to which God created man in his image and gave him the earth to subdue.” Conversely, the UN said, practicing the cult of ancestors “constituted a bulwark for the environment, since trees or water courses were protected and revered as a reincarnation of ancestors” (Aspects éducatifs, sociaux et culturels des problèmes de l’environnement et questions de l’information, UN General Assembly, Stockholm, June 5-6 1972, A/CONF.48.9, p. 8 & 9).
In the closing speech of Rio 92 in Rio de Janeiro, the then-UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali declared that “for the ancients, the Nile was a god that was worshiped, as was the Rhine, an infinite source of European myths, or the Amazon rainforest, mother of all forests. Everywhere, nature was the home of gods. They gave the forest, the desert, the mountain, a personality that imposed adoration and respect. The Earth had a soul. Finding it, resurrecting it: this is the essence [of the Intergovernmental Conference] in Rio.” (A / CONF.151 / 26, vol. IV, p. 76).
And this neo-pagan UN agenda is now proposed by a Synodal Assembly of the Catholic Church!
Citing a document from Bolivia, the Instrumentum laboris states that, “the forest is not a resource to be exploited, it is a being or more beings with which to relate” (n ° 23); it continues by stating that “The life of the Amazon communities still unaffected by the influence of Western civilization [sic], is reflected in the beliefs and rituals regarding the action of spirits, of the divinity – called in so many names – with and in the territory, with and in relation to nature. This cosmovision [I learned a new word!] is summarized in the “mantra” of Francis: ‘everything is connected’” (n ° 25).
We have no time to lose!
Apologize to your houseplants today!
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Cosmovision. Wasn’t that the name of that really tall TV antenna they had in the Soviet Union?
Wait…do I really HAVE to apologize to my Mother-in-Law Tongue???
[Think of the cosmic effect.]
Carrot juice is genocide. Eat more meat.
Unbe-leaf-able.
I’d rather confess to a priest who can actually do something about my sins, most of which have nothing to do with plants. Reason #873 that I’m grateful for confession.
This reminds me of the lyrics an old 90s grunge band Tool song.
My lawn needs mowing. Do I confess to it before or after I chop all their little heads off?
Not all plants are good, just as not all religions are good and not all people are good.
Dandelions are heretics, and I expunge them from my lawn.
Just in time for the Ember Day! I’ll have to add a second commemoration tonight in honor of the General Sherman. Or is that too traddie? Maybe if I prayed TO the General Sherman.
roma247: well, according to Wikipedia, your plant: “…in Africa…is associated with Oya, the female orisha of storms. In Nigeria it is commonly linked with Ogun, the Orisha of war, and is used in rituals to remove the evil eye.”
So, on balance, I would if I were you. Unpredictable things, Orishas.
Tongue-in-leaf now, but Francis has all this and more dialed up (coming to your parish Diocese and Catholic school) for May 14, 2020.
Don’t waste tine googling tgat date and “global pact.”
I stepped on grass today. In order to be absolved, must I confess to the particular patch of grass or will any plant suffice?
Also, we must resist the erroneous belief that we can ordain the female parts of the plant. Only the male components can be ordained!! Come on, people!!!
Didn’t they make you do this when you were in seminary the 90s?
We can harm things that we cannot (strictly speaking) apologize to. Some harms we do to fellow creatures (catching a fish, mowing the lawn) are prima facie virtuous acts approved by God. Other harms done to creatures are sins, offences against God (killing a fetus, telling lies). We can repent of and ask God’s mercy (“apologize” is not quite the right word) for having committed sins. And we can apologize to a dog for stumbling over it, or to a rose plucked carelessly; but to do so is at best innocent anthropomorphizing. God can forgive, but neither a dog nor a wheat-sheaf can accept our apologies.
Apologize to your houseplants today!
I don’t have any houseplants. Am I a bigot?
All of this brings to mind a tale I read as a child; one that I had long forgotten until seeing this BLOG. In 1949 Roald Dahl wrote ‘The Sound Machine’ (found online at: https://fleurmach.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/rdahl_screamingtrees.pdf). It is the story of a scientist who developed a device that could greatly magnify sounds. Whilst testing the machine, he suddenly heard loud, piercing inhuman screams. There was nobody about save for a neighbor who was picking flowers. Each time a flower was picked, there was that horrible shriek of pain. By now you certainly know what is to come. Based on Father’s BLOG and the comments above, I am now convinced that Dahl’s short story may become required reading for the upcoming synod.
Do I have to apologize to the tomatoes and lettuce I turned into salad?
With deep concern for the environment, I couldn’t even consider bringing another plant into the world such as it is.
CasaSanBruno: PlantParenthood can help you there…
If Treebeard and the Ents knock on my door I’ll heat my Country Bunker with coal instead of wood.
Maybe, to save the forest, we should all go nuclear. Every house could have its own reactor humming away in the corner. Bonus: the spent fuel rods will cause the trash cans to glow and keep the raccoons away. Then there is the abundant supply of lightbulb-free night lights for the kids’ rooms.
Humorist PJ O’Rourke has chapters on the Rio Summit and Amazon eco-tourism in his book “All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty.”
Great comments here. jaykay: “Plant Parenthood.” Somehow I’m not surprised you went there.
SemperG: Heh!
PJO’R is great, he and Steyn both. The title of his book (which I must immediately access) in itself is a user’s guide to Leftism for the unwoke
They don’t want us to eat meat, now they want us to worship plants. Some others are telling us we have to eat corpses. Any more words fail me.
And the Academic Dean at Union Seminary is a Roman Catholic sister…
In reparation to the plants I harmed last night by sacrificing them for a salad, for breakfast I had some bacon.
No plants were harmed in the making of that breakfast.
I don’t want to live here anymore.
Leaf them aloe to their ways, in the meantime lettuce pray.
Paint Your Wagon, Clint Eastwood sings, “I talk to the trees…”
They’re just desperate for an audience with the same intellectual abilities as themselves.
I thought this was a link to Eye of the Tiber at first.
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“…whose gift we often fail to honour”.
This describes how they’ve abandoned reality. If someone gives you a present, you don’t thank the present, you thank the person who gave it to you.
Of course, we should be grateful for God’s bounty, but it is insane to give the credit to the bounty itself.
This typifies the accuracy of Chesterton’s definition of insanity, that those who are insane have not lost their reason, but everything else except their reason. This shows that no education is better than a bad one.
At the risk of seeming unduly positive…
CS Lewis said some things about man’s relationship with nature which were not too far off what’s being said in this (admittedly very dopey-sounding) document. In the Abolition of Man he clearly says that when, for example, we stopped seeing dryads in our forests and started seeing only trees, and using those trees as just raw material with no true nature of their own, we lost something essential to a full view of reality.
Could an optimist say that there is something healthy lying beneath some of the daft verbiage?
Pantheism. Going from God as creator to God is creation. We have been down this road before – the Golden Calf – and it never turns out well.
In some states they will jail those plants if they fail to tell what they heard…Can we let them wilt in prison ??
You all haven’t lived unless you have read all of the twitter comments to that plant confession tweet. ROLLING on the floor laughing! A few quotes for you skimmers:
1) Those people should leaf right now (pun intended)
2) I don’t engage with plants, I believe in celeracy
3) What penance did the plants give them? Answers range from: “Three hail dairies” and one glory beef to “Three hail prairies and one glory leaf”
4) There are also some great and well versed Catholics on there doing great work to inform and convert.
Struck me last night that, in these days, we may not all (yet) be called to be martyrs, but we had better all sign up to be confessors at the very least.
Well, Father, in today’s news NBC is asking viewers to confess their climate sins!
Mac,
That’s false about dandelions. They make a great, free and healthy salad (assuming they’re not sprayed with various chemicals). They actually sell at Posh grocery stores for outlandish prices.
Should I confess my sins to all the fruit flies i’ve Killed this past week?
This thinking is counter intuitive. If we are not to use the earth than vegetarians and vegans are the worst of the bunch. They are directly raping Mother Earth for their need of substance. So we should all be eating synthetic foods and clothing. No more natural cotton. How dare you use the flower of the earth to cloth your nakedness. They should all move into caves.
The thing is nothing is created. Everything you use even if it is synthetic has to be made from something already in existence.
Re: global pact post….
Um, dude. In 2020, May 14 is seven days before one of the Rogation Days.
Of course, bringing back the Rogation Days would be sensible, so I don’t expect it to happen quickly.
jaykay: In Steyn’s book America Alone (in which he smites Europe regarding demographics, Islamification, etc.) Steyn managed on occasion to find the lighter side of things. I think the book was banned in Canada.
One of O’Rourke’s quotes on the environment, and a rebuttal to Union Seminary:
“Most of the people who have grabbed hold of climate change and greenhouse gases, pollution, oil dependency – they have another motive, and their motive is to attain the appearance of virtue without having actually done anything virtuous.”
FrAnt,
I believe the meme goes, “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.”
If we’re getting serious, I should recount the anecdote about an atheist blog I once ran across that ranted against “the animistic fallacy”, by which he meant not doing science because you believe that nature is populated by spirits. He seemed to think this was defeated by the loss of religion, overlooking how one religion said that whatever principalities and powers move the world are not gods but are governed by the law and order of the one true God. Wonder what he’d think of Catholics denouncing confession to plants?
I am Groot.