Pope Leo, the Joshua Tree, and the Paschal Mystery

I recently returned from delivering a lecture at the annual Los Angeles religious education congress and, as is my custom when possible, turned it into a “bring-a-kid-to-work” adventure. This time, my middle-school daughter and I slipped away for a brief visit to Joshua Tree National Park, nestled in California’s Mojave Desert.

As we enter Lent and follow Christ into the desert, I found myself drawn into meditation on the intricate interplay of life and death woven through that stark expanse. Standing among the iconic Joshua trees and endless fields of cacti, I was also reminded of Pope Leo XIV’s recent insistence that authentic ecology begins by reading creation in the light of the Paschal Mystery. In this mystery—the saving passage of Christ through suffering and death into resurrection glory—the Lord unveils the drama of self-giving love by which life emerges from sacrifice and all things are gathered into renewal.

To read creation in a Paschal key is to behold within it the covenantal logic of gift and sacrifice that forms the inner architecture of the natural world. Seen in this light, Leo’s call to cultivate a contemplative gaze before the splendor of the cosmos becomes a lens through which even a desert landscape discloses a vibrant communion of life beneath its apparent barrenness.

Pursuing this line of reflection and attending to Pope Leo XIV’s ongoing contributions to the Church’s vision of integral ecology, let us begin by considering the pontiff’s recent reflections on creation to help us see what such a vision entails.

Reading creation in the light of the Resurrection

In a delightful general audience on the resurrection and its import for living through the crises of our age, Pope Leo revisited the Church’s ancient contemplation of the natural world and encouraged the faithful to behold the death and resurrection of Jesus as the core of a spirituality that takes creation seriously. As for the rest of the tradition, so for Leo: the Paschal Mystery is the key to reading both of God’s “books”—Scripture and creation.

In continuity with his predecessors, Leo has stressed that the Cross and Resurrection ground our personal piety as well as its extension into the responsibilities of civic life. As he stated in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Theology, care for the environment and long-term ecological responsibility are “essential commitments” for believers: “As followers of Jesus, we are called to promote lifestyles and policies that focus on the protection of human dignity and of all of creation.” This is the Church’s doctrine of integral ecology, which “combine[s] social justice and environmental justice.”

Integral ecology is Paschal faith lived coherently within the whole created order.

This task is no mere matter of technique. Conscious of the insufficiency of technocratic solutions to environmental issues, Leo speaks instead of an “extreme need for a contemplative gaze.” When man forgets his sacred vocation as guardian of the garden of the earth, he turns from its custodian to its despoiler. The question that interests Leo is how we are to dwell in that garden where the Crucified was sown like a seed and rose again to bear abundant fruit (cf. Jn 12:24). By intentionally cultivating “a more direct relationship with creation,” Leo believes this will advance the healing of the deep fractures that characterize life in contemporary society. “If we allow it,” he exhorts, “Christ’s salvific act can transform all our relationships: with God, with other people, and with creation.” For the American pope, ecology begins with right relation, while policy debates and carbon calculations are situated downstream from this prior spiritual reality.

Scripture’s role in the recovery of creation’s covenantal grammar

If Christ in his Paschal Mystery restores integrity to our relationships, this raises the question: What kind of relationship was creation structured for from the beginning?

To answer this question at the level of our tradition’s deepest foundations leads us to the biblical concept of covenant. The Resurrection restores our capacity to read the covenantal grammar already inscribed in creation itself.

Pope Leo has offered a theologically rich articulation of this claim in conversation with St. Bonaventure’s Collationes in Hexaemeron. In this classic commentary, Bonaventure describes the earth as Scripture and the cosmos as a “book written from outside,” in which every creature reflects its divine exemplar. Even if this knowledge is “mixed with darkness” and we glimpse the Lord only “through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor 13:12), the Seraphic Doctor affirms that “the divine ray is reflected differently in each creature and takes on different properties.” According to the Catholic tradition, every being bears a refracted trace of its source, if only we have the eyes to behold it.

Sin did not deface this book. It did, however, dim our sight and lead to its pages being left unread. As Bonaventure explains in another passage of the Collationes, this condition meant that “another book was necessary, through which [the first book] could be illuminated to receive the metaphors of things.” And this book is the one most modern believers think of when speaking of the divine book—“the Scriptures, which posits the similitudes, properties, and metaphors of things written in the book of the world.”

As Bonaventure explains, Sacred Scripture is “the restorer of the whole world to knowing, praising, [and] loving God.” Scripture does not replace creation but restores our sight, re-speaking the original book in accessible human language so that creatures may once more lead us back to God—and we, in turn, return them to the Lord in thanksgiving.

Man’s priestly task of receiving the world and returning it in praise

Far from being a modern papal invention, this understanding stands squarely within the historical Catholic tradition, even if it has unfortunately receded from prominence in recent times.

Aristotle already observed centuries before Christ that the soul is, in a sense, all things. In his medieval development of this insight, St. Thomas Aquinas delighted in the human person’s capacity to receive the forms of other beings into himself without destroying them. In our own day, the Magisterium has shown how this anthropology grounds a distinctly Christian vision of ecology.

Pope Francis, for instance, presented this contemplative gaze as a spiritual work of mercy. When we engage in such reverent beholding, the creature acquires a new mode of presence within the soul of man—a register of being distinct from its embodied presence and one that cannot be accounted for by material causation alone. Received in gratitude, the creature is drawn into our distinctively human orbit and elevated to God through our praise.

From this Patristic perspective, and against a prevalent anti-human strain in secular environmentalism, man is not a parasite upon the earth but rather its priest. Sacred Scripture itself dares to speak this way, proclaiming the baptized a “royal priesthood” (1 Pt 2:9; cf. Ex 19:6). The Catechism calls this as the “common priesthood of the faithful,” explaining, “The faithful exercise their baptismal priesthood through their participation, each according to his own vocation, in Christ’s mission as priest, prophet, and king” (CCC, §§1546–1547; 1535). In the words of Vatican II, we fulfill this baptismal calling in our homes, workplaces, and smallest daily actions by “consecrating the world itself to God.”

Yet this priesthood does not end at the threshold of domestic and civic life. The world itself is the field of this priestly work. As microcosms of creation, with one foot in the material and one in the spiritual realm, the Catechism describes our priestly role within the natural world as offering all creation back to God (CCC, §358), giving voice to the praise that other creatures silently offer by their very existence.

In the words of Gaudium et Spes §14, “[Man] gathers to himself the elements of the material world, which reach their crown through him, and through him raise their voice in free praise of the Creator.” Seen in this way, John Paul II could say, “Man appears in creation as the one who received the world as a gift, and it can also be said that the world received man as a gift.”

The Joshua tree as a witness to the law of gift

Man’s priestly vocation does not arise from self-aggrandizement but from the covenantal architecture of creation itself. Pope Benedict XVI observed that “covenant is the inner ground of creation, just as creation is the external presupposition of the covenant.” Indeed, Scripture speaks of a covenant not only with Israel, but with “every living creature” (Gen 9).

Fashioned according to its Trinitarian archetype, creation is constituted as communion, and this relational structure binds all of God’s creatures together in a manner that is more than merely sentimental. Self-gift is woven into the very structure of the cosmos because creation reflects the Triune life precisely as manifested in the Paschal Mystery of Christ, in whom all things hold together (Col 1:16)—what Leo refers to as “the one divine Mystery that embraces all creation.”

This covenantal reciprocity is grounded in what Pope John Paul II called “the law of the gift”—a principle he applied explicitly to the human person, but one that is embedded more fundamentally in the very structure of created being as participation in the self-giving generosity of God. As I was recently delighted to learn, a striking illustration of this “law” can be found in the Mojave Desert. Just as Christ urged his disciples to “learn a lesson from the fig tree” (Mt 24:32), so too the Lord’s “first book” of creation offers a lesson in the Joshua tree to those willing to read its signs.

That lesson unfolds in a remarkable biological partnership. For its reproduction, the Joshua tree (Yucca brevifolia) depends on highly specialized yucca moths of the genus Tegeticula, as they alone serve as its effective pollinators. The moth, in turn, depends upon the tree: it lays its eggs within the blossoms, and its larvae feed on a portion of the developing seeds. Each species entrusts its future to the other. Neither flourishes alone.

This species-specific mutualism is more than a biological curiosity. Seen from the perspective of faith, their reproductive interdependence represents a marvelous instantiation of a grammar of gift and receptivity written into creation itself—a structured reciprocity that, however analogically, reflects the logic of covenant written into the created order.

And what is more, this is by no means a rare occurrence. While I am underscoring here what I recently beheld in the California desert, elegant patterns of such reciprocity abound in the natural world, including those that involve our own species—as seen in the mutually beneficial relationships between humans and honeybees, cultivated grains, beasts of burden, and livestock, to name just a few examples. Like the desert’s quiet drama I have described, these relationships manifest, however humbly, creation as a theater of covenantal communion.

Centrality of sacrifice within the grammar of creation

At the same time, looking at all this through the lens of the Paschal Mystery reveals that covenantal communion within creation is not simply a matter of reciprocity among equals. Indeed, it often assumes the form of sacrifice: an asymmetrical hierarchy in which one covenantal partner must take the life of another in order to live.

Man stands within this same sacrificial economy inscribed in creation. While we owe other creatures kindness and must avoid inflicting unnecessary suffering upon them (cf. CCC, §§2416–2418), the fact is that they are not bearers of inalienable rights as is the human person, the only creature on earth that God has willed for his own sake. The dignity of other creatures is real, yet it is ordered toward the good of the wider communion of creation rather than for its own sake.

Though it may initially seem counterintuitive, we may even help other creatures achieve their divinely appointed end when bringing about their death. Within the paschal architecture of creation, killing animals for nourishment becomes a form of participation in a providential order. In this existential drama, created life—mirroring the inner life of the Trinity—is continually received as gift and poured back in thanksgiving.

While he lacked this specific personalist verbiage, St. Thomas Aquinas articulated the same metaphysical insight seven centuries ago. What may at first appear straightforwardly evil—corruption and defects at the level of a particular creature—he explains, is in fact “in keeping with the plan of universal nature,” since “the defect in one thing yields to the good of another, or even to the universal good.” In fact, divine providence, ordering all things well, permits such defects precisely so that “the perfect good of the universe may not be hindered, for if all evil were prevented, much good would be absent from the universe.” (ST I, q. 22, a. 2).

In this vein, Aquinas insists that nothing ultimately falls outside the order of divine providence. What seems to depart from the divine will in one respect “returns into it in another order” (ST I, q. 19, a. 6). Within this ordered hierarchy, “the imperfect are for the perfect,” as a result of which it is lawful for man to use plants and animals for nourishment (ST II–II, q. 64, a. 1). To support this claim, Aquinas appeals directly to Scripture: “Behold, I have given you every plant… and every tree … for food” (Genesis 1:29–30), and to the Noahic covenant: “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything” (Genesis 9:3). Significantly, this metaphysical framework discloses that taking the lives of other creatures in accord with right reason can become a participation in the wider economy of creation.

In biblical Israel, killing exposed the gravity of creaturely life and reflected an ordered relationship in which creatures are received as gifts, their integrity respected, and human dominion held accountable to God. “The land is mine” (Lev 25:23). Man’s dominion is never absolute, for it exists only as a participation in the sovereign lordship of the Creator. All of our actions bear covenantal weight, either honoring or violating the order of gift.

This is a vision in which death is neither denied nor trivialized but gathered into thanksgiving. This same framework allows us to distinguish forms of sacrifice that correspond with the logic of gift from killing born from a disordered desire for domination at the expense of communion. Even as covenant in Scripture is not synonymous with equality or perpetual nonviolence, our tradition draws a sharp line between killing marked by waste and cruelty and killing undertaken in reverence, gratitude, and the acceptance of limits.

Conclusion: Co-workers in the Lord’s renewal of creation

During our recent stop at Cottonwood Springs in Joshua Tree National Park, we came across some ancient Native American artifacts and a placard describing how the Cahuilla people would offer a prayer of thanksgiving after taking the life of an edible plant, harvesting only what was needed, and leaving enough for the plant to regenerate.

But you do not have to belong to a primal religious tradition or espouse pantheism to affirm this moral order. This same posture of reverent restraint is reflected in the witness of Catholic convert and Servant of God Nicholas Black Elk, who in his catecheses explained that this same worldview traditionally guided the Native American approach to hunting.

Contrary to persistent caricatures propagated by those distant from any real intimacy with the land, this same reverence is also commonplace today among fishermen, hunters, ranchers, gardeners, and others whose lives are bound to the rhythms of the land. While they are unlikely to pray to the spirit of the animal whose life they have taken, those who engage in these practices often approach their work in a spirit of thanksgiving. That gratitude, in turn, is expressed in a resolve to honor the creature through responsible use of its body and the refusal to waste what has been received as gift.

It may run against the grain of prevailing environmental tropes, but responsible environmental stewardship does not mean sitting by idly and letting nature return to an alleged state of purity. As Joseph Ratzinger stressed decades ago, the notion that man is a parasite upon the earth is a “no less ruinous view” than the presumption that we who bear God’s image are entitled to absolute domination over creation. As John Paul II taught, our vocation is one of “knowing and transforming created reality,” yet this sacred task is “not the mission of an absolute and unquestionable master, but of a steward of God’s kingdom who is called to continue the Creator’s work.”

In our present moment, Pope Leo has carried forward this teaching of his venerable predecessors, affirming that we are called to be “co-workers in the work of creation” and that human work represents “a participation in God’s work of creation that continues every day.” In this way, together with the Catholic tradition at large, he affirms that cultivating a contemplative vision toward God’s good earth opens us to the profound interior transfiguration. Participating in the Son’s return of all things to the Father, we are honored with the vocation of gathering creation into our chorus of praise and directing it toward its final fulfillment in Christ.

And thus, the desert becomes a locus in which we who bear the image of God astonishingly add something to the iconic Joshua tree and yucca moth that neither enjoyed before. In being contemplated with love, they assume a new and higher mode of being within the contemplative life of the knower, elevated into a transcendent register of existence that they could never achieve on their own.

For some, this vision of man’s priestly role in creation will sound overly anthropocentric, even presumptuous. Still, fidelity to the gospel of creation requires that we speak its full truth, even if it unsettles modern sensibilities. Yet Catholic teaching is clear: those who bear the divine image are charged with the noble vocation of leading all creation to God by receiving it in love and returning it in thanksgiving.

And so, with Pope Leo and St. John, we stand in reverent awe before the sacred commission entrusted to us: to share in the work of Jesus Christ, who declares, “Behold, I make all things new” (Rev 21:5).

Read original article