Sharing and Caring for Our Common Home

It is worthwhile to explore the riches of the Pope’s chosen term for Mother Earth – our common home. The word ‘home’ stirs up in us a world of memories and emotions. If you have had a happy childhood, home is the place for which you feel the greatest affection: it blends good relationships with the particularities of the place where you began your life. As Elvis Presley has it, home is where the heart is. This resonates with the saying, ‘It takes hands to build a house, but only hearts can build a home.’.

The Pope says:

Our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life, and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. (Laudato Si’, 1)

It is hard to imagine a more heart-stirring name for the world than ‘our common home’. ‘Our planet is a homeland and humanity is one people living in a common home’ (Laudato Si’, 164).

We must rediscover what our ancestors enjoyed – a deep and loving sense of relationship with planet Earth and all its inhabitants. As children, we shared what was perhaps a small home; now we share a planet, and like St Francis of Assisi of old, we in our time are charged with the task of protecting and repairing it.

Brian Grogan SJ, Finding God in a Leaf: The Mysticism of Laudato Si’