A Pilgrimage of Hope

When I witness simple acts of kindness, they encourage me to do likewise. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said that “hate begets hate” and “violence begets violence,” I believe that love begets love, and compassion begets compassion. And I think Dr. King believed that, too.

I was reminded of this on Sunday afternoon, when a small group of our church members participated in “a pilgrimage of hope” led by members of the Laudato Si’ movement out of Austin.

Laudato Si’ is an encyclical of Pope Francis subtitled, “Care for Our Common Home,” that focuses on care for the natural environment and all people. It is the foundation of the Laudato Si’ movement’s mission to “inspire and mobilize the Catholic community to care for our common home and achieve climate and ecological justice, in collaboration with all people of good will.” As the Laudato Si’ movement’s website explains, the pilgrimage of hope invited us “to come together to pray, collaborate and mobilize in response to ‘the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.’”

Our group of Catholics and United Church of Christ Protestants set out on foot from Saint Mary’s Catholic Center to the Gardens at Texas A&M. Along the way we stopped at sites like the Century Tree—a 125-year-old tree showing the beauty of nature and conservation—and the All Faiths Chapel—a multi-faith gathering place serving as a beacon of hope to all denominations and creeds. At each stop we learned the sacred significance of where we were standing and took a moment to pray.

At the Gardens, we split up and explored on our own. Taking a cue from Psalm 46:10 to “be still and know that I am God,” I stopped to take in majestic monarch butterflies perched on wildflowers, to stand in awe of a towering corn maze, and to overlook White Creek, flowing with water from the previous night’s rain.

When we regathered to conclude the pilgrimage, we learned about past injustices that devastated the air, soil, and water—God’s creation—that we share. We learned how, during the early 1930s and late 1940s, a business called Cotton Poisons Inc. operated near downtown Bryan without the health and safety regulations in place today. The plant’s production of pesticides ultimately led to the arsenic contamination of three lakes in the plant’s watershed: No Name Lake, Finfeather Lake, and Bryan Municipal Lake. This pollution continued through the early 90s.

We learned about mutations that are common with arsenic that were evident in the lakes’ wildlife: asymmetry, missing eyes, missing fins on largemouth bass. Turtles appeared to have hyper-keratinization, where their scales would grow over their nares, or nostrils, and even over their eyes.

As our guide was sharing this information with us, I looked at her co-facilitator, a woman named Linda, standing next to her and noticed that when the guide mentioned arsenic contamination causing scales to grow over turtles’ eyes, Linda closed her eyes, shook her head in lamentable disbelief, and made the sign of the cross. And seeing Linda’s response to that information—seeing her genuine, heartfelt show of compassion for God’s creatures harmed by human negligence—I was moved. I felt her care for the water in those lakes, and the life in those waters, and I was encouraged to feel likewise, to lament likewise, and to respond likewise. Transformed by what I had heard and witnessed in that moment, I was invited to respond by loving the whole of God’s creation and everything in it as a clear articulation of loving my neighbor as I love myself.

Seeing Linda’s reaction to what she heard on that pilgrimage, and recognizing how her show of compassion stoked compassion in me, I thought about what Jesus told his disciples on the last night he shared with them—to love one another as he had loved them, that by doing so the world would know that they are his followers—and I felt the power of those sacred instructions from a fresh perspective. Love, and others will witness it and be moved to do likewise. Share compassion, and onlookers will be moved to share the same. Care for creation with the tenderness that you care for a helpless human being, and the world might take notice and be moved to do likewise.