One of my passengers (we’ll call her “Sister A”) posited that it might be necessary to tear the whole house down and start again. “Sister B” answered with another metaphor that has stayed with me powerfully ever since.

“Suppose, instead, we think of ourselves as pioneers who are crossing the country with all our belongings – furnishings for a new house included. There are mountains and rivers to cross. If we’re going to survive the journey we may have to let go of some of the things we’re attempting to bring with us. Perhaps Grandma’s loom has been in the family for centuries but it’s weighing us down. Hard though it is to leave it behind, we must if we’re going to reach our destination.”

Reading Sister Paula Toner’s thought-provoking article, “The Earth Charter: Incarnating a New Cosmology,” in this space last month prompted me to ask myself what we need to leave behind if we’re to enter that new mind-frame in which we see the universe, our good earth and all its inhabitants, not as ‘a collection of objects but a communion of subjects, mutually indwelling’?” (Thomas Berry)

I suppose one of the obvious answers is fear. Aren’t wars and violence of most varieties caused by fear that unless we (whichever “we” it is) control the resources and their distribution, “our people” will suffer want? And when “wants” so outstrip “needs” it takes most of the world’s resources to satisfy us, what then?

Even on the micro level isn’t it fear that prevents us from letting go of our cherished ideas, our way of life, our cultural mores – all the things we think we need to be securely who we are? Ours is a philosophy of plenty; a philosophy of security. There isn’t, we think, enough--of whatever it is—to go around.

The Executive Director of LCWR, Carole Shinnick, SSND, wrote in a recent article, which she called “On Being a Poet (or a Quilt Maker),” “. . .having everything needed and wanted does not guarantee success or perfection. In fact, it could guarantee mediocrity.” She refers to Mary Catherine Bateson’s book, Composing a Life, in which she describes pioneer women working together to create quilts from pieces of everyone’s old clothing, curtains, feedsacks, etc., and letting the material dictate the design. Often, the results were “magnificent works of art that now hang in museums.”

“In these days of strategic planning,” she said, “it may be good for us to remember that when women undertake a project or a task, they also need the creativity that comes from scarcity.”

As people of faith we could begin by exchanging “my” and “mine” for “our” and “ours.”

We could embrace the determination to “live simply so that others may simply live.” We could experiment with the possibility that carrying less may make the journey less burdensome. We could replace the fear that there won’t be enough with the conviction that our best security lies in efforts to guarantee that no person, no creature, is dispensable. As Donald Nicholl says in his book Holiness,

We are not independent entities, alien to earth. The earth is not, in turn, adrift in a vacuum unrelated to the cosmos. The cosmos itself is no longer cold and hostile—because it is our universe. It brought us forth and it maintains our being. We are, in the very literal sense of the words, ‘children of the universe.’ In other words, at the very center of the universe is a loving Heart whose longings are the source of our own hearts’ longings. Hence our own longings can never be in vain, because they correspond with reality, with that Heart upon which our universe is centered.”