At the Movies: The Letter: Laudato Si’ Film

There is normally a steady current of water flowing in the valley behind our home, but it’s been dry here lately—great for spending time outside, not so great for the thirsty ground. From my deck, all I hear are the falling acorns, distant hum of highway traffic, someone hammering, high-pitched crickets, and the caw of crows. No water flows.

But it isn’t just dry in Ohio, it’s dry across the country, dry around the globe. The maps are bright with the splotches of fall colors, signaling drought in varying shades of extremes. Where I sit, the drought conditions are moderate. The absence of rain makes the fall days warm and enjoyable, even as the leaves begin to curl too soon, even as the groundcover wilts, even as crops reduce their yield. It’s easy, here, to go about my day blithely unaffected by the climate.

But, in the words of Pope Francis, “Nature is starting to complain. Nature is screaming, stop.”

The Letter: Laudato Si’ Film—A Message for our Earth

In 2015, Pope Francis wrote his encyclical letter, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. It is a letter to every person on the planet, a 119-page canticle that urges “swift and unified global action” to address the irresponsible development, global warming, and environmental degradation that is adversely affecting all life around the globe.

In The Letter: Laudato Si’ Film, voices for the poor, the indigenous, the youth, and the wildlife are invited to the Vatican to meet the Pope and to share their stories of how rising seas, deforestation, extreme weather, and warming seas are intimately affecting these populations. A chief from an indigenous tribe in the Amazon, a young man from Senegal, a 13-year-old girl from India, and a pair of marine ecologists from Hawaii travel to Rome to give voice to the voiceless.

The film tells their stories and follows their journeys.

The Letter: Laudato Si’ Film is available on YouTube. 

Finding the Love: Faithifying Your Viewing

When the Pharisees urged Jesus to make his disciples stop praising him, he told them, “If they keep quiet, the stones will cry out” (Luke 19:40 NIV). 

All of nature is made to praise the glory of God. 

Throughout scripture, nature has a way of reacting to human’s actions. Our disobedience and arrogance provokes droughts and famine and floods. All creation groans.

“The cries of the earth and the cries of the poor cannot go on,” Pope Francis proclaimed.

We have agency and responsibility here. I’d like to bask in the bright September sunlight, oblivious to the lack of rain, and content to take what’s mine, but nothing is mine. Everything is given. All things rely on interconnectedness, and our actions have consequences, from rainforests to coral reefs, from flooding streets to rising seas.

We have been obeying and abusing the call to keep and tend the land ever since the garden of Eden. We have been fighting the allure of power and production since the tower of Babel. We have been battling the demands of the economy since slavery in Egypt. Civilizations throughout history have succumbed to the desire for more, more wealth, more power, and more stuff, all without measuring the human and nature’s cost. 

In this current cycle, our behavior threatens our very existence.

But God promises a way out: “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14 NIV).

The Pope’s encyclical is akin to the language of the prophets, who spoke the truth with the hope of conviction, so that, perhaps, the people would turn, or repent, again. Laudato Si’ provides blistering scientific evidence of the degradation of the land and seas alongside thorough theological support for our responsibility to make the spaces of creation sacred again, to treat the earth with its due respect, to love our neighbors—human and otherwise—with the same love and care as our common Creator.

“The theology in Laudato Si’ is in dialogue with science. Today, you could never practice theology without a dialogue with science. More than that, God gave us the capacity for investigation, the intellectual capacity to look for truths,” said Pope Francis.

The stories that are shared in The Letter: Laudato Si’ Film connect us to the personal, lived experiences of the poor, the indigenous, the youth, and the wildlife, so that we might be stricken to the core, so that we might humble ourselves, pray, seek the face of God, and turn from our ways. Perhaps then, God will forgive us. Perhaps then, God will heal our land.

In the words of the Chief from the Amazon, “The pain of one is the pain of us all.” 

May we turn. May we be healed.