A moment of reconciliation with God and with our Mother Earth in the Eco-Charity Garden
On 16 April, the volunteers of the Eco-Charity Garden held their first community penitential celebration. It was a moment of active awareness, with an invocation to the Holy Spirit, the reading of the Word of God and a short homily by Don Mario Zanotti, who presided over this special gathering.
The centrepiece of the service is collective confession, in which some of the most common sins that more or less all of us commit against the earth are read out and together we ask forgiveness for them. After absolution follows a simple activity: writing our sins and our promise to do better on a slip of paper, these are then folded and put into water, as a metaphor for sin being washed away.
At the end of the celebration the water and the notes in it are put into the earth, to nourish it and return to it part of what we take from it.
A moment of community to be treasured, an act of taking responsibility and commitment to make up for previous failures, an act not only symbolic but more than ever concrete before the earth, God and our brothers and sisters.
