Reflection

I was ten years old when the event I am about to relate took place. I lived with my whole family in this small multi-ethnic community where my dad was both a teacher and a religious instructor. Kabwanga – that is the name of the small community – lies in the heart of the Congo Republic, in the province of Western Kasai. We were, therefore, a long way from the city.

The context in which we found ourselves was quite dramatic. One of my younger brothers, Rodrigue Kavula, was critically ill. Various attempts to cure him were not met with much success. Tension was mounting, and we were very worried. A friend of the family was at our side and observed our confusion. He suggested to my father that we try African traditional medicine in a last attempt to save his life and spare my family. He asked him to immediately call on a well-regarded traditional local healer with great experience. My father hesitated. We must keep in mind that he was a teacher and a religious instructor. On both accounts, he had reservations. That is understandable. But because of my younger brother's desperate situation, Hubert Matadi, my father, decided to bring his case to the healer whose talent and skills were recognized by all.

Forewarned, the healer, Mr. Ubeme (his name meaning ‘beauty’), was waiting for us. He requested that my father accompany him to the small forest located a short distance from his house. I followed. The healer suddenly stopped when he found the tree he had been searching for. He then signaled for us to stop. He looked at the tree with insistence and with a form of reverence. A smile briefly lit up his face, and he started to talk to the tree.

Here are, approximately, the words he spoke to the tree:

“We have come here to seek your help. One of your brothers is sick. He is dying. From our ancestors, we have learned that your generosity may heal the disease that threatens to take him away from us. We need to take an infinitely small piece of you. Don’t refuse us this favor. We rely on your generosity. Your brother will heal from this gift. Joy and peace will be with us again”.

Mr. Ubeme touched the earth as a sign of respect. And then, armed with his long knife, he cut a piece of the bark he needed. I couldn’t say precisely what he did with this bark or how he prepared the remedy he immediately gave my younger brother to drink. However, I remember the words he uttered before giving my sick younger brother the medicine. “Creation is filled with remedies and food for our living. The medicine you will take comes from the forest, our support. When you drink it, you will recover your strength. May our Creator and our ancestors answer our prayers. May they hear us”. After a few days of treatment, my younger brother regained his health. He is still alive.

I probably wouldn’t have related this event if I had not carefully read

Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ encyclical. I would even say that this event was the key to my understanding of the Jesuit pope's first encyclical. Whose name Francis refers not to his companion Francis Xavier but rather to Francis of Assisi, author of the Laudato Si’ prayer [Praise be to You…]. The pope wrote that he took Francis of Assisi’s name as a guide and inspiration because:

[he] is the example of excellence of care for the vulnerable and an integral ecology lived out joyfully and authentically. He is the patron Saint of all who study and work in ecology and is much loved by non-Christians. He was mainly concerned with God’s creation and the poor and outcast. He loved and was deeply loved for his joy, his generous self-giving, and his openheartedness. He was a mystic and pilgrim who lived in simplicity and harmony with God, others, nature, and himself. (LS, 10)

Let us now go back to the story of the healing of my brother to try and point out a few of its more meaningful aspects.

Firstly, the sad circumstances surrounding the event. What prompted our healer to search for a tree’s generosity was the disease suffered by my brother, the nature of which was related to him by my father. The context is, therefore, one in which a life had to be saved, joy regained, and peace recovered.

Secondly, the meaning of the relationship with the tree. The reverence of our healer toward the tree was impressive. To listen to a human being talk to a tree with such respect, and to hold the space in the forest with such reverence, would have brought a smile to my lips had I not found myself in a situation with no place for amusement. Considering this event, even though I don't want to compare my brother’s healer with Francis of Assisi, I must admit that when I read Laudato Si’ again, I have an even better understanding of the attitude of Francis of Assisi, for whom every creature reveals the presence of the Creator. I shall return to this.

Thirdly, the concurring of several elements in nature towards the protection of life

Understanding Laudato Si’ appears to me easier given the elements I have just mentioned—the context of suffering and disease—as an opening to the benevolence of nature, reverence, and respect, as the just and dignified attitude in the presence of creation, and finally, the necessity of an interconnectedness with nature as a condition for the protection of human life.

1. Suffering and creation: what do they have in common?

A hasty reading of The Canticle of the Creaturesby Francis of Assisi, which inspired the title of the Laudato Si’ encyclical, can be misleading. Let us read these few verses to understand what I mean:

Praised be to You, my Lord,
In all your creatures, especially Sir Brother Sun,
Through whom You give us day and light;
And he is beautiful and radiant, with great splendor,
And bears a likeness of You, Most High One.
Praised be You, my Lord,
For Sister Moon and the Stars.
In heaven, You have formed them
Clear and bright and fair.

As I said, a hasty reading of these few verses could mislead one into thinking that their author wrote them in a state of great joy. And yet, it is the exact opposite! The man who glorifies, honours, and praises his Creator was a creature devastated by illness. The context in which he found himself – circa 1225 - was characterized by epidemics and calamities. We must not forget that the dominant theology, when Francis was praising the Creator through his creation, regarded with great suspicion “this earthly world in danger of being corrupted” and that “epidemics and calamities themselves also contributed to engender a fear of nature.”^[1] Francis of Assisi was familiar with this theology and used to practice it, but, once again, as Francois Cheung wrote, this Assisi pauper “…could see higher and further. He was sustained by his desire to glorify the greatness of Creation, thus praising all the gifts granted to us through which Life lasts, renews, and transforms itself.”

Thus, suffering turns into a path of adoration and praise. It is a difficult path but a path that is hard to avoid for someone who wants to meet the Creator face to face. Job’s experience brought me some understanding of this. To bring Job back to reason and to help him find, as Francois Cheung says again, the exact measure of his human capacity, God guided him back to creation. To a suffering and agitated Job who – with great audacity and courage – proposed to bring God to court, Yahve introduced himself as the Creator. But let us listen to him and try to understand that creative wisdom alone is capable of confounding a man conceited and full of himself:

Who is this who darkens counsel with words of ignorance?
Gird up your loins, now, like a man;
I will question you, and you tell me the answers!
Where were you when I founded the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its size? Surely you know?
Who stretched out the measuring line for it? (Jb 38: 2-5)
Have you ever in your lifetime commanded the morning
and shown the dawn its place
For taking hold of the ends of the earth,
till the wicked are shaken from it?” (Jb 38: 12-13)

From chapter 38 to chapter 41, God teaches Job the wonders of Creation and forces him to give this meaningful response: “I know that you can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be hindered. By hearsay I had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you”. (Jb 42: 2-5)

Let us go back to Francis of Assisi. It seems to us that his sincere praise of creation and his acknowledgment of the love and kindness of the Creator through his creation gives back to him, to he who is sick, suffering, exhausted, and infinitely small, strength, and renews his hope. According to Saint Ignatius of Loyola, “Man is created to praise, respect and serve God our Lord, and thereby save his soul. Other things on the face of the earth are created for Man, to help him pursue the end for which he was created” (SE 23). Thus, he helps us realize that it would be difficult to understand the beauty and depth of Laudato Si if we didn’t incorporate the dimension of suffering in our earthly pilgrimage. Francis of Assisi praised the divine creation because he became acutely aware that

…what he saw said that, despite everything, there is cause for praising. What else if not creation itself, with the splendor of the starry sky and the magnificence of the fertile earth, this creation where, once, everything arose from Nothing? While praising, he saw the whole process of creation as an all-out gift for which we have every reason to be wholly grateful. He recognized that, miraculously, the Being is and that because of this primary event, just as miraculously, he, the infinitely small, is too. Praising, he immersed himself into the Boundless, the Open. He knew he was an integral part of an immense adventure unfolding, the adventure of life, with all its challenges and passions, sufferings and joys, hurtling towards the abyss and rising to transcendence.^[2]

The experience of my brother’s sickness triggered these thoughts. Dramatic circumstances met with a happy ending, thanks to the healer enamored with creation. He helped us understand that we can rely on creation to prolong life and, above all, to celebrate it. I want to explore this relationship to creation briefly.

2. Reverence and respect as the dignified and just attitude toward creation

The attitude of reverence and absolute respect of Mr Ubeme, my younger brother’s healer, has never ceased to impress me. Words sadly cannot emphasize this attitude, which reveals the mysterious interaction between him and the tree. Reading and meditating on Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures helps us better understand the mysterious relationship between man and creation. The sun becomes our brother as he gives us daylight, a symbol of The Almighty; the moon becomes our sister as she bestows upon us, along with the stars, radiance, and beauty… one knows how much light and beauty are capable of healing and strengthening life. Preserving our planet, our common home, depends on our attitude towards the elements that make it up. If we respected creation, we would also appreciate the humanity to whom the Creator entrusted it.

3. The mystique of Ecology: when several elements come together to safeguard our common home.

My brother’s disease required a new course of action on the part of my family. We needed several events to happen together to see my younger brother recover. We were among friends, one of whom suggested to my father that he consult with a traditional healer. The latter trusted a tree from the forest with whom he engaged. He spoke to the tree, calling on our ancestors, even better, calling to the Creator, who created both the tree and our ancestors. The concurrence of these events restored peace and joy to our family.

This experience, both sad and joyful, made me aware of the different challenges that Africa will need to face. This is the subject of what follows.

4. The Society’s Challenges in Africa

a. Preserving ancestral (Indigenous) knowledge

One of the main objectives of the Center for Research and Sustainable DevelopmentCommunication (CERED), of which I am the managing director, is to gather, encode, and validate or invalidate ancient African knowledge.

My connections with the rural world have revealed to me the richness of ancestral wisdom and the risk of losing it. There is a rich and unquestionable knowledge that those who came before us have built on over the centuries. This knowledge has been orally transmitted through generations (myths and storytelling). Amadou Hampate Ban, a famous African writer, wrote: “In Africa, every time an older person dies, a library burns to the ground.” The generation of wise African elders is disappearing. It is becoming urgent to start researching African wisdom and share it through writing with the world and future generations. The areas that could be the object of such research are medicinal plants, art, traditional initiations, their learning processes, etc.

b. Education and training of young people in the area of social networking

Another challenge is related to young people's education and training during social networking and globalization. While they are essential for communication and interpersonal relations, social networks challenge our ways of educating and training young religious people and other young people to a sense of responsibility, discretion, patience, and self-reflective work. They also challenge the adults who can feel overwhelmed by their omnipresence. Everything seems to be happening instantaneously. Little time and importance are given to thinking. Events occur at such a rate and are shared so quickly that we need new tools for analysis in this dynamic context.

c. The challenge of educating through role modeling

Young people don’t need discourses anymore. They sometimes challenge their tutors and teachers. They want to follow those who act rather than those who make the rules and who are often entirely removed from their day-to-day reality.

d. The Environmental Challenge

The Republic of Congo, my country, is one of the lungs of the biodiversity mentioned by Pope Francis in his Laudato Si encyclical. This document challenges us. How do we avoid wasting our resources, such as water or electricity? How do we use renewable energies in the context of poverty? How do we educate people, practically, in preserving our ‘common home’ in a context of injustice, where those who decide what the future of the world will be are the same people who destroy, for often selfish reasons, this very ‘common home’ of ours? How do we explain to those who think they are its victims that they also have, at their level, a share of responsibility in destroying our ‘common home’ and that they must contribute to safeguarding it?

These four challenges are intertwined. To name them and differentiate between them is not to separate them. We must find the common thread that highlights their intrinsic unity.

Conclusion

The severe disease suffered by my younger brother and its subsequent cure started me on this train of thought. A sad, even dramatic situation gave us some lessons on the nature of our relationship with creation and its Creator. The attitude of Mr Ubeme, our healer, is no different from that of one of humanity's lovers of creation, Francis of Assisi. The appeal of Pope Francis for safeguarding our ‘common home’ will be achieved through respect and reverence for creation, whose mission is to protect our lives and the lives of humanity. Only the creator of the heavens and the earth can bestow this grace upon us.

Original in French
Translation Veronique Piales

^[1] François Cheng, Assise, une rencontre inattendue [Assisi, an unexpected encounter], Paris, Albin Michel, 2012, p. 30.

^[2] François Cheng, Assise, une rencontre inattendue[Assisi, an unexpected encounter], p. 34.