Blessed Bingo
Blog Post #32
Blessed Bingo!
It’s an idea that arose from Pope Francis’ Encyclical, “Laudatio Si’: On Care For Our Common Home!” This week marks the 5th anniversary of this letter from the Holy Father to the faithful and we thought it would be fun to put it into practice via one of America’s favorite pastimes, Bingo!
Each square offers a suggestion to protect and honor our sacred spaces, our planet and our private sanctuaries (AKA our souls).
To take this Bingo game a bit further, we have highlighted excerpts from the text that correspond to a given Bingo square.
Happy reading and responding!
Read Laudatio Si’: “‘Praise be to you, my Lord.’ In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us...This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her.”
Perform a Digital Detox: “Today’s media do enable us to communicate and to share our knowledge and affections. Yet at times they also shield us from direct contact with the pain, the fears and the joys of others and the complexity of their personal experiences. For this reason, we should be concerned that, alongside the exciting possibilities offered by these media, a deep and melancholic dissatisfaction with interpersonal relations, or a harmful sense of isolation, can also arise.”
Walk with God: “If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously.”
Turn off your lights: “But a sober look at our world shows that the degree of human intervention, often in the service of business interests and consumerism, is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and grey, even as technological advances and consumer goods continue to abound limitlessly. We seem to think that we can substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievable beauty with something which we have created ourselves.”
Plant Herbs: “Soil, water, mountains: everything is, as it were, a caress of God.”
Listen to “Tend the Ground”: The biblical texts are to be read in their context, with an appropriate hermeneutic, recognizing that they tell us to “till and keep” the garden of the world (cf. Gen 2:15). “Tilling” refers to cultivating, ploughing or working, while “keeping” means caring, protecting, overseeing and preserving. This implies a relationship of mutual responsibility between human beings and nature.
Recycle: “Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years. Yet we are called to be instruments of God our Father, so that our planet might be what he desired when he created it and correspond with his plan for peace, beauty and fullness. The problem is that we still lack the culture needed to confront this crisis.”
Bird Watch: Pope Francis quotes the Bishops of Japan, “To sense each creature singing the hymn of its existence is to live joyfully in God’s love and hope.”
May we always reverence and respect this sacred ground given to us to till and keep from our living Creator!