“I baptize with water; but there is one among you whom you do not recognize, the one who is coming after me, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to untie.”

In reflecting upon this reading with John the Baptist, the sacrament of baptism easily comes to mind. John the Baptist, being the man who is not worthy to untie the sandal straps of Jesus, nonetheless baptized him. From thereon, John is and remains a man deeply entwined with the holy sacrament, both in name and in reading. 

Apart from choice, congregation, and clergy, baptism requires water. For John, this was the currents of the river Jordan. For many Catholics, this is a stone vessel located within a church. The joy of parents or an RCIA candidate culminates in the trickle of liquid down the head. This movement often joins with the tears of many emotions. Like drops of water disappearing into one, through Baptism, the recipient joins God’s family within the church. 

I think what this week’s Gospel can offer to our lives is a challenge. What flows forth is a call to think more deeply about the role of nonhumans, like water, in our lives as Catholics. A quote that speaks well to this comes from Kenyan environmental activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai. In her book, Replenishing the Earth, Maathai writes that beings apart from humans were made first by God, and “God […] waited until Friday to make human beings […]. [because] if we’d come into existence on Monday, we would have been dead by Tuesday, because there would have been nothing to sustain us” (70). What Maathai captures here is how human life is predicated upon the existence of nonhumans like plants, animals, and water; put simply, there is a reason something is coming before and something is coming after. To live is to require that which is created by God but not human. As Maathai puts this “[i]t’s a sobering thought that if the human species were to become extinct, no species I know would die out because we were not there to sustain them” (71). We need nonhumans to live just as we need water to join God’s family, and thus the environment is needed as much to sustain us physically, as Maathai suggests, as it is to sustain us spiritually. 

Working from this, the disheartening and common truth about Christian thought is that nonhumans are viewed as expendable compared to the interests of humankind. It holds that God gave us creation for our own benefit, and this has given rise to the conclusion that the environment is of no concern, that we have no moral or ethical responsibilities to it. This can be further, though falsely, rationalized by the better circumstances contained within the afterlife (when the soul enters heaven). This is to say that ecological apocalypse is of no concern because the new beginning following The End is accelerated. But in this, tomorrow is placed as more important than today even though this is the day the Lord has made and the one on which we rejoice and are glad. 

In this season of waiting, we might pass the days by looking more favorably upon the nonhumans in our lives. To practice this, we might opt to leave parts of our yards to grow as they please and be inhabited by whatever animals come by or plants that choose to grow there. I do this with my own backyard. While I mow most of the grass around my house, there’s a patch on a hill behind my garage that I let “do what it wants.” Unlike the stubby, lifeless yards that surround, this patch is alive and changing. Currently, in this colder season, there are gullies carved by snowmelt meandering through the knotted slopes of uncut grass. In the warmer months, the patch is a choir of locusts and crickets playing their hymns at all hours. 

What keeps me wondering is what flowers might grow here? What animals might burrow? What trees are coming? While I await the answer, I have faith that it is coming. In doing this practice, leaving landscapes as they are, our eyes can be sharpened such that they see more like the Lord, that the world around us is good, that there is a reason that the environment has come before us rather than after. While we wait so very much in our faith, we need not wait to cherish the Earth, to care for it, and to love it as God does.

Image description: In a green and brown grassy lawn is a patch of grass that is longer than the rest, with bits of leaves in it.

Amazingly, a group doing this is the Ohio Pollinator Habitat Initiative. They partner with a mix of institutions to create healthy habitat for animals like butterflies and bees. One of their partners is the Ohio Department of Transportation or ODOT. A few stretches of the ODOT-administered roads I drive have signs from the Ohio Pollinator Habitat Initiative. These routes of hard asphalt pass thick patches of coneflowers, milkweed, goldenrod, and other flowers. Passengers may even catch a glance of a tiger swallowtail’s yellow wings or the stripes of a flitting monarch. The rush of semis and automobiles mix with breezes and winds to sway the stems of flowers and ruffle the leaves of bushes. Here, what the Ohio Pollinator Habitat Initiative does is similar to what I do with my yard. But the challenge that is added is to view the most unlikely places as worthy of care. Even the busiest of roads can contain an ecosystem worthy of care.