Lectio Divina — “Returned”
First Saturday of October
Day 39 of the Season of Creation • Weekly theme: Changed
Lectio — Returned
> “The seventy-two returned rejoicing, and said, ‘Lord, even the demons are subject to us because of your name.’”
— Luke 10:17
Returned.
The seventy-two had been sent out. Now they have returned.
But the people who returned were not quite the same people who had left.
They had gone out carrying little, dependent upon Providence, entering unfamiliar places and encountering both welcome and rejection. They returned rejoicing over what they had accomplished. Yet Jesus immediately changed their understanding of the journey: “Do not rejoice because the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice because your names are written in heaven.”
They returned thinking primarily about what they had done. Jesus returned their attention to what God had done for them.
Perhaps that is what returning is meant to do. I leave, I experience, I learn—and then I return, hopefully changed.
—
Meditatio — They Have Returned
The woolly bear caterpillars have returned to The Glenn.
I notice them beneath the massive pumpkin leaves in the Three Sisters Garden, going about the ancient business of preparing to overwinter. The broad canopy of pumpkin leaves gives them shelter, and around them grows pigweed—something I regard cautiously because it can be toxic to livestock, but which these caterpillars can consume.
The creature I might quickly classify as a pest is doing something within creation that cannot be reduced to whether it is economically useful to me.
That thought seems particularly appropriate as this year’s Season of Creation draws toward its conclusion.
I had actually declared it finished too soon. I thought September 30 was the final day. I was wrong. So I have returned to the Season of Creation for these last days—and perhaps there is a small spiritual lesson even in that mistake.
Sometimes returning means admitting that I was wrong.
Sometimes being changed means allowing new information to correct what I thought I knew.
And sometimes returning means looking again at something I had already dismissed.
That is what the woolly bear asks of me today.
I can look at a caterpillar and see a pest. I can look at pigweed and see a weed. I can look at the sprawling pumpkin vines and see a garden getting out of control. Or I can look again and discover relationships already operating beneath those enormous leaves.
Laudato Si’ tells me that Saint Francis experienced such harmony with creatures that Saint Bonaventure described him as having in some way “returned to the state of original innocence.”
Returned.
What an extraordinary word for Francis.
He did not return by escaping creation. He returned by learning to see creation differently. Brother Sun. Sister Moon. Brother Fire. Sister Water. Creatures ceased being merely things around him and became fellow creatures before the same Creator.
Perhaps my Season of Creation is supposed to accomplish something similar.
If I finish this season seeing the woolly bear exactly as I saw it before, have I really returned anywhere?
The caterpillar will disappear soon. It will shelter through the cold, and what eventually emerges will be changed.
Maybe I am supposed to be, too.
—
Oratio — Return Me, Lord
Lord Jesus,
the seventy-two returned to you rejoicing.
Let me return to you as well.
When I wander into the illusion
that creation exists only for my convenience,
return me.
When I divide your creatures too quickly
into useful and useless,
beneficial and troublesome,
beautiful and ugly,
change my vision.
Thank you for the woolly bear beneath the pumpkin leaf,
for the pigweed I would rather not have,
for the garden that refuses to remain within my plans,
and for all the relationships I do not yet understand.
As this Season of Creation comes toward its end,
do not let its lessons end with it.
Like Saint Francis,
teach me reconciliation with my fellow creatures.
Like the seventy-two,
let me return rejoicing—
not primarily because of what I have accomplished,
but because my name is known by you.
And on this First Saturday,
may Mary teach me how to receive your Word,
ponder it in my heart,
and allow it to change me.
Amen.
—
Contemplatio — Returning Changed
A woolly bear crawls beneath a pumpkin leaf, and Magnifica humanitas invites me to think about something much larger: history itself can return from its worst impulses changed.
Paragraph 123 refuses to tell only the story of human violence. It also remembers those moments when human beings recognized an evil, changed their thinking, and eventually embodied that change in institutions, laws and practices intended to protect the vulnerable.
That does not happen easily.
Moral progress is not a straight road. We advance and retreat. We recognize something and then forget it. We make commitments and fail to fulfill them. We discover the dignity of the vulnerable and then devise new ways of overlooking them.
Perhaps humanity resembles those seventy-two disciples more than I first imagined.
We are continually being sent and returned.
And each time we return, Christ asks what has changed.
That question belongs in my Three Sisters Garden too.
I can impose upon the garden my own tidy hierarchy of value: pumpkin—wanted; pigweed—unwanted; caterpillar—pest.
But creation is not organized around my categories.
The woolly bear beneath the pumpkin leaf reminds me that life exists in relationships. Something unwanted by one creature becomes nourishment for another. Something that appears insignificant participates in a larger ecological community. Something I am tempted to eliminate may have a place I have not understood.
That does not mean good stewardship requires me to abandon discernment. It means good stewardship requires humility.
And perhaps this is where Saint Francis meets Magnifica humanitas.
Francis returned toward original harmony not by becoming less human, but by becoming more fully human—capable of recognizing kinship, vulnerability and responsibility. Likewise, humanity’s finest institutions arise when compassion ceases to be merely a feeling and becomes something concrete: What will we actually change to protect the vulnerable?
That question applies to nations.
It applies to the Church.
It applies to agriculture.
And it applies to me at The Glenn.
Tomorrow the Season of Creation reaches its conclusion, even though the Sunday liturgy takes precedence over the customary observance of Saint Francis. But perhaps that is fitting. A liturgical season or observance succeeds only if, when it ends, I return to ordinary life differently than I entered it.
The woolly bear will not remain a woolly bear forever.
It disappears into a hidden season and eventually emerges changed.
So today I ask myself:
When I return from this Season of Creation, what will have changed in me?
Perhaps the answer begins beneath a pumpkin leaf—with the willingness to look again at a creature I thought I already understood, and to discover that God’s creation has been teaching me all along.
First Saturday on Day 33 of the Season of Creation
