Wealth, Power and the Cry of the Earth
Wealth and power are inextricably linked in today’s world. When Donald Trump attended the National Cathedral service in Washington DC, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde delivered an unexpected message of truth to power. She advocated for vulnerable populations, particularly LGBTQ individuals and undocumented immigrants, urging Trump to show mercy. Bishop Budde’s prophetic words stemmed from her Gospel commitment. Though gentle in delivery, her firm message to America’s most powerful figure seemed to slide off like Teflon. When pressured to apologize, she stood resolute in her convictions. The contrast is stark—had tech titans like Musk or Zuckerberg made similar remarks, it is doubtful Trump would have demanded an apology.
How did we fall into the trap of monetary wealth at the expense of the human person, no less the earth itself? How come human life and creaturely life have so little worth and are as disposable as candy wrappers? The twin forces of wealth and power have always shaped human civilization, intertwined and self-reinforcing. In our modern era, this relationship has become even more pronounced, however, creating a system where financial wealth often overshadows moral authority. The contrast between Bishop Budde’s treatment and that of tech billionaires illustrates this reality. Corporate leaders like Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos—whose combined wealth rivals nations’ GDPs—rarely face demands for apologies. Their financial power provides immunity that moral authority no longer commands. This shift extends beyond individual incidents to shape policy, social structures, and our relationship with Earth itself.
The postmodern view that “truth is no longer meaningful” reflects a fundamental shift from belief in objective reality to an emphasis on individual perspectives and power dynamics. In this framework, truth becomes relative and constructed—shaped more by those with power and wealth than by moral or empirical foundations. If you think it is true, then it is true. There is no other norm to assess truth other than one’s own experience. This connects directly to the Bishop Budde incident: her moral truth, though grounded in religious tradition and ethical principles, held less weight than the financial truth wielded by tech billionaires. When truth becomes subjective, wealth and power become the dominant arbiters of what society accepts as true, leading to concerning implications for human dignity, environmental protection, and social justice. The devaluation of objective truth particularly impacts vulnerable populations and environmental concerns, as their realities can be dismissed or reframed by those with financial influence. This explains why corporate leaders face less scrutiny than religious figures challenging power structures—their wealth effectively shapes what society considers true or important.
While Gospel preaching can illuminate moral truths, it rarely disrupts established power structures on its own. Financial and political systems remain largely impervious to purely spiritual challenges, requiring broader systemic action for meaningful change. Bishop Budde’s experience demonstrates this—her moral authority, despite its religious foundation, proved insufficient against entrenched power dynamics. Real transformation demands both prophetic voice and practical reform of wealth-concentrating institutions. But even this type of reform will not be entirely effective unless we ourselves become a different people. The Canadian historian Lynn White noted in his 1967 article on “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis” that technological and policy reforms alone cannot solve our environmental and social crises. Our fundamental challenges—concentrated wealth and unaccountable power—stem from distorted spiritual values. As White argued, these are religious issues at their core, requiring spiritual rather than merely political or economic solutions. True transformation demands reconnecting with sacred principles about humanity’s role and responsibilities within creation. The root of our problems is religious, he said, and the remedy must be religious as well. We must re-think and re-feel our destiny.
Despite the prophetic stance of the Gospel, our political system has weaponized religion, transforming Christianity into an arena of conflict. The fracture runs deep—from nostalgic Catholic medievalism to Protestant reductionism—reflecting more than denominational divides. We have severed the incarnation from its earthly roots, eviscerating God from the flow of evolution. The incarnation has become “de-carnated” and many Christians have become Gnostic.
Yet a deeper power of reality persists; we remain bound to nature’s laws despite our denial. Every person depends on Earth’s integrity for survival. Yet we continue to treat Earth as mere backdrop for human drama, with science and technology becoming esoteric knowledge for the few. The artificial divide between religion and science lies at the heart of our contemporary moral confusion. We have forgotten our roots as Earth’s children. As Saint Francis of Assisi reminded us, earth is our mother. The ecologically dissociated self has created a world stripped of soul, giving rise to planetary dysfunction on social, moral and political levels. Like any family system under stress, nature will ultimately rebel against this dysfunction. This is what Teilhard realized in 1948 when he wrote:
Mark my word: though (hu)man stands on great stacks of wheat, on mountains of uranium and coal, on oceans of oil, (s)he will cease to develop his unity, and (s)he will perish. If (s)he does not watch over and foster in the first place the source of psychic energy which maintains… the passion for action and knowledge—which means for growing greater and evolving—from which comes unity of mind (p. 173).
Our moral disorientation stems from divorcing religion from nature—like extracting a beating heart from a living body. This crisis extends beyond politics to implicate all who speak in the name of God. Departments of theology are responsible for failing to include nature as the starting point of theology and philosophical reflection; pastors and priests are responsible for delivering outdated homilies born from the ignorance of modern science. The faithful choose comfortable ignorance over scientific engagement. A fractured Christianity is at the heart of a planet in crisis.
While Bishop Budde’s courage merits praise, we confront an evolutionary precipice. Science shows climate change’s role in mass extinctions, yet science also reveals life’s strength through interconnection. Jesus’s question “Who are my sisters and brothers?” points to the profound truth that every creature participates in the emergence of divine love, from stars to wetlands to humanity in all its diversity. True divinity doesn’t intervene from outside but rises up through evolution itself. God needs every single creature to become fully alive. If we push God out of the world, as Nietzsche wrote, then we are left with human hubris. The dangerous fallacy of human self-deification emerges when we forget our place within nature’s web. This hubris—declaring ourselves gods—reflects the very mindset that has led to our ecological crisis and social fragmentation.
We have limited time to integrate science and religion into a new framework of understanding ourselves in this vast cosmos of unfolding life. Without uniting mind, matter, and spirit through conscious evolution, terrestrial life faces catastrophe. Teilhard’s prescient question—“Who will give evolution its own God?”—remains urgent. Until we engage this challenge, we bear Bonaventure’s warning:
Therefore, any person who is not illumined by such great splendor in created things is blind. Anyone who is not awakened by such great outcries is deaf. Anyone who is not led by such effects to give praise to God is mute. Anyone who does not turn to the First Principle as a result of such signs is a fool. Therefore, open your eyes; alert your spiritual ears; unlock your lips, and apply your heart so that in all creatures you may see, hear, praise, love, and adore, magnify, and honor your God lest, the entire world rise up against you. (Bonaventure, Soul’s Journey into God. 1.15)
View print-friendly version
27 Comments
Leave a Comment
Related Posts
Celebrating a New Year: On the Cusp of the New
We are on the cusp of a New Year. Our earth has made a complete revolution around the sun. While we mark the New Year as a temporal milestone, it fundamentally…
Someone once asked me if I believed that matter had consciousness. I don’t remember how I answered then but I know what I believe now. If wrong, I am prepared to be enlightened. As body, as matter that rises from mass and will return to the larger mass, we render consciousness to matter, we render self-consciousness to those elements of the material world that grow, that live, that sustain and even claim life. In a sense, like the Creator, we are ‘birthing’ and as with parents our essential role is to nourish, to foster, to protect, to offer creation the opportunity towards equality, sustainability, in mutuality and reciprocity. That is the essence of human love. Aristotle taught that love ‘is a mutual benevolence mutually known” (ironically, it is the essence of his text on Ethics and of his Politics). Three hundred years later Jesus, as teacher, taught the same, but He dropped the conditions of his mentor – there are no slaves, women are not a demi-persons, by returning to the earthly mass He ‘raised it up’. In that perspective, I can believe that the Creator is fathering. The incarnation of the Word, the becoming into matter of Jesus renders the mothering and birthing a kind of mystical, beyond understanding, kind of equivalence in relationship; that raises the now divinity infused creation to worthiness of relationship of benevolence and knowing mutuality within the Creator and created). That is the essential being of ‘love”.
There are corollaries to this notion of love. “Charity” is not conditional, in fact it is quite the opposite. Real Jesus charity acknowledges other as peer, raises up those who are poor in body or spirit to become peers and the test is that they are able to challenge equally as to serve.
Women and men are fully peers and partners. Where women or men are deprived of the capacity of mutuality and mutual benevolence and reciprocity they are nurtured, they together are essential to the ‘nurturing’ of that capacity for freedom and to the freedom itself.
In this sense, evolution is the journey of the capacity to love ever outward, inward, upward.
Jesus Christ was the epochal stage in the evolutionary process.
A failure to stand for and protect that evolution within the small sphere of society, governmental and intergovernmental spiral of creation within our ambit, our community and community of communities is a travesty. So too with the venture into the rest of the universe.
Trump, Musk and their ilk, acolytes and ‘servants’ are among the threats to both the earthly and the fully human and sacred evolution of ‘love’.
Ilia,
Thank you for emphasizing the importance of developing a greater sense of our interconnection. At a time when we experience fragmentation and disconnection from our neighbors, we need to be reminded that our connectedness transcends tribal, philosophical, and religious differences. The quantum sciences show that we are entangled with each other, all of nature, and even the cosmos. A deep sense of connection and wholeness helps us to cope with stress and become more compassionate and forgiving.
Ed
Edwin E. Olson, Ph.D.
In the earthly sense, wealth and power have little to do with the gospel message. Those whose god they are, remain opaque to that message, as pearls before swine, and always have. Sometimes those who share the gospel message can commiserate with each other before the frustrating densities of the unredeemed, and even pray for them, but tend to underestimate their resistances to truth, particularly when it comes to evil geniuses hell bent on doing their thing. Pilate had his role to play, as Caiaphas and C Judas. In fact, truth tends to harden such people in their error even more, when unreceptive to it. When sun shines on wax it softens it, but when it shines on mud it hardens it. Their wrongdoings also praise God, in that they form the backdrop of the good and true, say, the way a diamond necklace looks all the more brilliant on a black velvet backdrop.
Recall, the disciples understood little of Jesus’ mission. In the three years they were with Jesus, although they had almost daily contact with him and with his thought and work, there were few who gave evidence of being deeply touched by his message, until the Holy Spirit came upon them — but only as a result of being called as followers, and later servants of his gospel message. He was not able to bring about much spirituality in Judas, and he did not have too great success with Peter, and even less with most of the other disciples, including the 70 who were not in his inner circle, nor were they called as were the twelve. John, of course, caught the full and complete message.
Peter said it best; “If the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear” (1 Peter 4:18).
Human wills are naturally bent in the direction opposite divinity, stubbornly so, even among the mature in Christ who must constantly practice in order to train their wills toward the righteousness, as an Olympic athlete trains and hones his body for the heat of competition. Likewise, others have little chance to be salt and light in a dead and darkened world, whose darkness worldwide is on the increase and will be until he comes again in the Parousia. Such is not an invitation to hopelessness or spiritual complacency, but a reminder of how and where one might best invest their spiritual words and energies.
I long to hear this message from the pulpit of our churches. But that doesn’t happen because, I am told, speaking out would cause half the parish to walk out. So the church would lose both power (smaller congregations) and money (smaller collections.) Jesus weeps.
The TED Talk by Ruha Benjamin, “Is technology our savior – or our slayer?” (link below), presents examples of communities that are using technology in imaginative, life-giving ways to counteract the use of technology to centralize wealth and power.
https://www.ted.com/talks/ruha_benjamin_is_technology_our_savior_or_our_slayer?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare
Sr. Ilia, thank you for such wisdom – articulated in a manner that is clear and compelling. We need greater awakening to the mysteries of our existence. From there, action may then be possible.
How deeply this truth vibrates in my heart, my mind, my soul. I am enraged at the oligarchy we see playing out in Washington, and your words are urgent, Ms Delios, but how — realistically— do we make this happen in time to save Mother Earth? I struggle with despair,