Life On Earth, By Rosemary Reuther

I can think of ten lessons for life on earth taught by earth. I call them earthly lessons for a heavenly life on earth. I rarely think about going to heaven after death, but always think of ways to make life on earth a heavenly one. In fact, when Jesus said that the Kingdom of Heaven is in the midst of you, and taught his disciples to pray for thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, he was referring to creating and experiencing heaven-on-earth.
The first lesson the earth teaches is to celebrate diversity. The fact that the earth is a very diverse place is stating the obvious. We may know about alligators, antelopes, and ant-eaters, bears, bullocks and buffaloes, cows, camels and cats (I am only up to letter ‘c’) but there are 2 million
We are part of a universe that is inter-related and inter-dependent. The root cause of our unhappiness and misery is the mistaken belief that we are separate from the earth and other humans. A thriving life is possible only when we realize that we need each other and that we need to take care of each other. In creation, no part can really flourish if the other parts are being injured or destroyed. As theologian Rosemary Reuther puts it, in a system of interdependence, no part is intrinsically ‘higher’ or ‘lower.’ Plants are not lower than humans because they don’t think or move. Rather, their photosynthesis is the vital process that underlies the very existence of the animal and human world. We could not exist without them, whereas they could exist very well without us. Who then is more ‘important’?...We must start thinking of reality as the connecting links of a dance in which each part is equally vital to the whole, rather than the linear competitive model in which the above prospers by defeating and suppressing what is
This lesson was pungently proclaimed by the author of Ecclesiastes thousands of years ago: “There is nothing new under the sun.”10 It is human nature to look for adventure and excitement. We get easily bored by monotonous schedules and ordinary routines. Nobody revels in repetition and so we relentlessly request relief from redundancy. That is why we wear different clothes every day and own several pairs of shoes. We replace our good and working phones every year, lease or buy a new car every three years. In the United States, about 50 percent of married people get rid of their spouses and replace them with new partners, only to find out in a few years, the painful fact that, there is nothing new under the sun after all. There is very little patience and maturity to discover the newness of the old. As we look for constant drama in our lives, the predictable becomes