~by Susi Pittman

Traveling away from where you live, allows you to see and experience a new environment and new people. But, there is nothing like the beauty of the landscape of home on our return. In the movie, The Wizard of Oz, that sentiment is echoed as Dorothy yearns to return to Kansas saying, “There’s no place like home…There’s no place like home.”

There is something special about home.

Earth is our temporary home…our home away from home.

We may not realize that we are away from home, as that part of our conscious selves, living in the reality of the natural realm, for the most part doesn’t know to acknowledge it. Yet, if we allow for our spiritual selves to lead, we can almost sense that we are indeed a stranger in a strange land.

The beauty of our life here on earth was brought into its first visual realization when we saw the earth for the first time in photographs taken from the moon. There it was, all blue and green and with wispy white clouds, a marvel of color and presence. Pope John Paul II remarked in his New Year’s message of 1987:

From the time that we were first able to see pictures of the world from space, a perceptible change has taken place in our understanding of our planet, and of it s immense beauty and fragility.

Astronaut Jim Irwin, of Apollo 15 fame, said this after returning from the moon:

The earth was very small, the size of a marble. I thought it the earth is that small, how small am I? Just a speck in the universe, but yet significant enough that God would love me and create me and love me enough to touch my life….I felt privileged like an angel to get God’s view of the earth.

Those Catholics, who attend the Latin Mass, know that at the end of Mass we listen as the priest recites the Last Gospel, which happens to be from the book of John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was made nothing that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men: and the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

In this recitation we are acknowledging our pilgrimage journey here on earth. That all things, having been created by God are in transit to an ultimate end, designed by Him, eternal and infinite in its place…a place called home!

The author T.S. Eliot wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

As stewards of creation we CANNOT forget this. Given a garden to tend for the Creator and caring for our fellow man with love is paramount to our fulfillment as caretakers of earth. In the Hebrew language “image” mans “stand-in,” meaning, representing one who is greater.

We are to exercise our dominion over the whole of creation, being conscious that we ourselves are God’s creatures and accountable to him. We alone are conscious of our creature status.

While we are away from our eternal home, we are to occupy and develop the land God has given each of us. We are not to exploit it in greed and violence.

We need to take seriously the care we give all creation as we walk in the footsteps of He who “makes all things new!”

For we will all see what God has promised to all things…when we are HOME!

Susi Pittman is founder of CatholicStewardsofCreation.com and Owner-President of Twin Oaks Publishing; she is author of Animals in Heaven? Catholics Want to Know!; an advocate for the Florida Catholic Conference; a member of the St. Joseph’s Catholic Council of Women in Jacksonville, Florida; an Associate of the Sisters of St. Joseph, St. Augustine;a member of the Florida Publishers Association, Independent Book Publishers Association, the National Association of Professional Women, the ASPCA, the Humane Society of the United States and the National Audubon society.