Creer y actuar para renacer

41 crecer y actuar para renacer the dust and you shall return to the dust.” It can also be translated: “Remember that you are from the earth and you shall return to the earth.” But how will we be greeted when we return to what Pope Francis calls our common home, Mother Earth? Will she welcome us home with a hug? Or weep rage as she hurls back the trash at us that we have vomited out upon her during our lifetime? How we treat the earth, and how we treat each other, and how we treat the least among us are all bound together. If we notice our common ground with the earth and each other, we will discover our power. In Laudato Si , Pope Francis also quotes the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who says, “It is our humble conviction that the divine and the human meet in the slightest detail in the seamless garment of God’s creation, in the last speck of dust of our planet.” (p.8) The divine and human meet, not just in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, therefore, but in the last speck of dust on our planet Earth. Earth itself is a sacrament of God, its Creator. We were created from this dust. The earth and we are holy…even if we are powerless…or feel so. Fyodor Dostoevsky, the great Russian writer, said, “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” I would also add, “..and by entering its slums.” And today, when the world is threatened by enormous ecological changes that threaten the very earth itself, we can add, “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by observing its waste.” I want to make the case that prisons are the trash bins of Society! Not because those in prison are human trash, but because we treat them as trash and many of them then believe us… Prison is fear, isolation, walking in lock step, numbing the mind, turning human beings into robots rather than rehabilitating them… and yet, some tell me: “God got me in prison so I would wake up and start living with faith.” I now would like to offer you an example of prison ministry and how getting to know the prisoners in their humanity woke me up. A young Puerto Rican man whom I met in prison this past Sunday, Domingo, he was the only one at mass –just one?! But, his story, his