From Earth to Heaven ... by Analogy!

Since I rededicated this blog as "This Sacramental Earth," I've been struggling to come up with a reason why we Catholics in particular, and all Christians in general, ought to think of the natural world as a sacrament: a visible sign of God's invisible grace.

If Mother Nature, through evolution, engendered our material being in the form of species Homo sapiens, then I suppose we can adopt two possible attitudes. One is to think of our material being, and of the material world at large from which it derives, as purely disposable. We can think highly of just the immortal soul which comes to us from God at the time we are individually conceived and returns to God when we die. The rest of our "reality" can be gladly discarded, in this view.

The other possible attitude is to think of our material reality as imbued with God's grace. If we think of it that way, then it would be a desecration, pure and simple, to turn physical Nature into a trash heap as we keep plundering Nature unsustainably in support of our ravenous economic aspirations. If material reality is itself a sacrament, then we ought to be environmentalists instead.

But why should we not visualize our natural, physical being as, ultimately, some sort of waste matter to be tossed onto a figurative slag heap and forgotten after we have gone to our graves?

The reason is simply this: our Nicene Creed says, " ... we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come."

The word "resurrection" implies ongoing, or restored, corporeality — not just a disembodied soul floating eternally in the beatific presence of God in Heaven after we die. So the life we know today as bodily creatures here on Earth can fruitfully be envisioned as analogous to the promised "life of the world to come."

One specific analogy is the evolutionary succession of species here on Earth. Humankind in particular is the product of a long chain of precursor hominid species, all of which are now extinct. They in effect still exist today, though — in "resurrected" form, as us!

Another analogy with the resurrection our creed promises us after death is the return of temperate climes that arrived after the end of the last Ice Age, during which frigid time the prospects looked dim indeed for our early ancestors' continued survival.

The return of the Earth's fecundity each spring, following the death of green things that accompanies each winter, is yet another natural analogy of the personal resurrection our Christian religious belief promises us.

If we but accept the notion that such Earth-Heaven analogies furnish us with a true "optic" through which to view the credal promise of resurrection life in the Kingdom of God, then the natural world as we know it today automatically becomes a sacramental world. It makes no more sense to plunder and despoil Nature than to neglect the upkeep on our own house or burn it to the ground.