Much is said these days about stewardship and about the environment. Stewardship is often broadcast in our parish communities as time, talent, and treasure; while talk of the environment often reflects an image of delicacy that we are destroying, and need to stop polluting to restore it. We are invited to engage in stewardship as if it was a list of things we check off after completion; while the image of the environment is often presented as disconnected from all of humanity. It lives in our imaginations as a pristine wilderness—untouched, clean, perfect. For me, this disconnect has always been a struggle to ‘engage’ in the conversation. If I am unable to engage in the conversation other than believing these are important things to look at and take care of, how then am I to communicate this to the young church with whom I minister?

In N. Scott Momaday’s book, House Made of Dawn, the reader is led to a point in the novel where the main character has lost his way in life; he has forgotten the story, his people’s story, and he needs help. The image of remembrance is offered to him as a way back. He is to go out and be with the land, to sit in one spot for a time and learn the life of it—watch a sunrise, feel the wind and the sun, to hear the water in the stream. He is asked to return with the season to that very spot so he can learn how the land lives and responds to the ever emerging needs, and changes.

This remembrance is what I hold up as a starting point into a spirituality of ecology. Remembrance is given to us every time we gather and pray as a community. We hold something very sacred and powerful through this process. In remembering, we get to experience the past and respond to our future. As Momaday challenges us, remembrance can, and should, change the way we encounter others and all of creation. When we remember an area, some land or a place, in turn, we find the connections—connections that tie us to creation and to the ongoing connection creation continually offers us. Creation willfully offers us life—life in all forms of plants, animals, the micro and the macro, from a cell to an aspen grove to the oceans—which produce seventy percent of our oxygen.

I believe when we do not remember, when we forget about the larger picture and leave other life out of our planning, we find ourselves in a place of neglect and arrogance. Is creation nothing more than God’s gift to be disposed of as we see fit? Some argue yes, but I find that very limiting. Where is the relationship of remembrance?

The ecologist and theologian, Fr. Thomas Berry asks, “What is the result of all of our technological, social, and scientific advances? All of our achievements have brought forth great advances, but at what cost?”

The only suitable interpretation of western history seems to be the ironic interpretation. This irony is best expressed, perhaps, by the observation that our supposed progress toward an ever improving human situation is bringing us to a waste world instead of a wonder world, a situation that found its finest expression in Endgame by Samuel Beckett (The Dream of the Earth, 17).

There are no unique guidelines I can offer to you as a youth minister that will somehow connect you to creation, and to environmental stewardship. The image that has been offered to me is one of caretaker; we are invited to be caretakers of creation—for awhile. While we are here briefly, we have been given a home to take care of, to watch over, so others may enjoy the home as well. The home, or creation, is not ours, but together we work to allow each other to live and flourish within it. When the master returns to the house we have had the opportunity to take care of it. I hope to hear the master say to us, “Well done good and faithful servant! You have found my reflection in creation, and you have embraced it.”