Little Goodness, Spreading

Laudato Si' by Pope Francis

As I type this, I’m sitting at our hand-me-down kitchen table while my son works across from me on a new Lego set. He’s occasionally asking me for help with a piece, and I’m occasionally asking him if he’s ready to go to bed yet. We’re wearing clothes I bought new, with the Eagles gently telling us to take it easy over a fancy blue tooth speaker my husband wanted. The dishwasher and the air conditioner are running. I’m sipping on ice cold filtered water out of an insulated tumbler.

These are all things that I rarely, if ever, consider consciously. They’re gifts of comfort, entertainment, and distraction that make up a family weeknight after a day of work and school. Like David Foster Wallace’s fish, ignorant of water, I swim through my Tuesday ignorant of the signs of an American life oriented towards the “freedom to consume,” as Pope Francis calls it in his encyclical Laudato Si’. But in the wake of reading that document, I’m pausing at many actions and items in my life that a week ago I rarely thought about. I started reading the work with vague awareness that it had something to do with climate change. But of course, it goes well beyond a call to environmental action, and is oriented more toward attacking the root of our modern era’s dilemmas, the state of the human heart.

Illustrating that our environmental problems and human problems are all tightly interrelated, Pope Francis challenges a reader to think of how we throw non-renewable fuel into our gas tanks just as thoughtlessly as we ignore the people who live on the other side of town. We discard random plastic toys we wasted money buying the same way we make and forget friendships of utility and convenience. “Constant noise, interminable and nerve-wracking distractions, or the cult of appearances” drives people to “frenetic activity and makes them feel busy, in a constant hurry which in turn leads them to ride rough-shod over everything around them.” All of this shakes the reader onto a higher plane of awareness, like a fish in the sky looking down at his pond saying, “Wait, have I always lived in there?”

And once we’ve been stirred up, feeling helpless about the state of the world and our complicity in it, the Holy Father pulls us towards the little way, the small acts of love, the quiet simplicity that Christianity promises us. In his last chapter, Pope Francis discusses “ecological education and spirituality,” careful to define ecology as the intersection of God, each other, and creation. He lists small, often obvious actions we can make in this spirit, from turning off unnecessary lights to teaching our children how to say “thank you” to praying before and after meals. After reading his urge for far-reaching dialogues between hemispheres, sciences, faiths, economic strata, governments, transnational bodies, and global industries, an individual can feel quite insignificant merely putting on a sweatshirt and turning the heat down. But the Holy Father encourages us here, saying “we must not think that these efforts are not going to change the world. They benefit society, often unbeknown to us, for they call forth a goodness which, albeit unseen, inevitably tends to spread.”

So as I sit here getting ready for another bedtime, I try to think of the little actions we can take tomorrow. The clothes we can donate, the items we can upcycle, the extra apple we can put in the car for that guy we see in the median every day on the way home from school. Instead of getting lulled into a sense of helplessness about what we can’t do, perhaps I help my family lean into the private goodness of the little way, and let it inevitably spread.

Have you read Laudato Si’? If it inspired you to take real world action, please share your works in the comments. Maybe we can share ideas for next little steps.