I grew up as a rather prayerful Catholic girl in the middle of nowhere. And perhaps more than any innate sense of justice-seeking, more than any clearly delineated theology – the hallmark of my religious sensibility in those early years was the fact that I was absolutely enamored by the beauty of the sacred. In fact, I was in love with God so acutely that for most of my young life it felt like it was me and God – God and me – the two of us against everything scary, every injustice, every challenge. The two of us, God and me, in it together. And my heroes in those days, in these days too – were, are – the great female mystics of the Catholic Christian tradition who felt themselves to be in love with God just like me – and who were crucially able not only to feel that love as I did but to use that love – a love that called them out of all isolation and into holy work in the world.

One of the greatest of those female mystics was Hildegard of Bingen who was overcome regularly by a profound sense of spiritual transport – lifted out of her body and out of the everyday and into perfect communion with a source of grace she called viriditas – which in the Latin means Greenness.

The living, pulsing, thriving greenness of creation worked itself into her heart and she fell in love not just with a traditional notion of God, but with the greenness at the heart of things, the greenness at the heart of the earth itself, which held her, created her, and called her forth to work for justice in her own time.

Hildegard once wrote that there is one thing upon which our demand for justice depends and that – quite simply – is our willingness to fall in love with creation over and over again and let that love change our hearts and our minds and our actions. In her words, “We shall awaken from our dullness and rise vigorously toward justice.  If we fall in love with creation deeper and deeper, we will respond to its endangerment with passion.”

We are at a crucial juncture in these our days – where anger over the current and impending climate crisis of our time is not enough.  Where even fear for what lies ahead for our children and our grandchildren, for the cities claimed by the seas – even that fear is not enough.  And righteousness, railing against those who are yet so blind they do not see the moral obligation to care for the earth our mother – even righteousness is not enough.  We are at a crucial juncture in these days where perhaps only love is enough – falling in love with creation and letting that love activate and agitate us and our whole system toward justice.

In 1968, when Apollo 8 turned its camera lens back upon the earth and captured this spinning blue ball in the image we know iconically as Earthrise – for the very first time, millions of people saw just exactly what this home we share looked like, how precious and fragile and magnificent it was.  And millions of people, looking at her there, saw the earth and fell in love at first sight.  A love so commanding we could never go back.

Today, led by the example of Pope Francis who calls us to fall in love with the earth and with our brothers and sisters holding on for dear life upon her, we gather to be reminded of the power of that love.  The circles of commitment to climate justice will broaden not by our anger or our fear or our righteousness, but by a passion born of devotion to this the only home we shall ever know, the very viriditas – greenness – that runs as grace and life and hope through our veins.

So go from this place, friends – charged to fall in love again with the source from which we rise.  Knowing that this love can only pull us upward out of every dullness that ever settled on our hearts and may that love act upon us and upon those who have yet to hear our call in ways that can never be ignored, but captured in the heart – calling us out of all of our isolation and into the holy work ahead.

(Editor: this “Call to Action” was given on September 23, 2015 at the “For the Beauty of the Earth” service at All Souls Church, Unitarian as part of the celebrations of the Pope’s visit to Washington, DC.)