A Cosmic Kinship: Towards the Sacramentality of the Ecosystem

Abstract

The global environmental change has become a hot-button issue. Ample studies show that our ecological footprint is unsettling the equilibrium of the ecosystem. Through the ecosystem, humans experience God’s unfathomable graciousness and providence for our own flourishing and wellbeing. Supposedly, with their intelligence, humans are meant to compensate this God’s graciousness with the responsibility of caring, maintaining and safeguarding our common home – the Earth. The recognition of our finitude as creatures shows our limitedness and self-insufficiency, and hence, we need other creatures in the ecosystem for existence. This means that creation is in a constant interaction with humanity and, as a result, interconnected and interdependent. Consequently, the ecosystem forms an organic unit that creates a web of relationship which interconnects all creation. Thus, there is a kinship among all creatures, even as some cultures admits totemism. Therefore, the degradation and over-exploitation of the ecosystem by human activities dislocates the sacredness of totemism and negates the cosmic kinship and sacramentality of all creation. Hence, creation contains an aspect of God – the creator and source of all things.