Page 24 - Salesian Bulletin 2016 [01] January-March

Songs for the Slow Lane
Recently I bought a new bed which arrived one morning clad in a double layer of heavy plastic which took ages to strip away. Printed in large letters front and back, the warning read ‘this is a dangerous product for children’.
whole islands of plastic junk have been created, swept up by gyres of ocean currents, how sea creatures are ingesting tiny fragments of it, how it has entered the food chain. Perhaps the child warning should be re- phrased to read: ‘in human hands plastic will suffocate the earth’.
unnatural to separate the two. And nobody wants the party to end even when the party is over.
I am told that we are now living in the age of the Plasticene. With 300,000 tons of plastic manufactured each year, we already have more than enough to wrap the entire planet in cling film.
Maybe this all sounds too cheerless for the time of year when the Kingdom of God is at hand. The kingdom of God, did you say? Still it is not easy to drag a shopper away from an imminent purchase. It seems almost
The question is apt; ‘and what have you done with the garden I entrusted to you?’ Today a child is born to a degraded and suffocating planet, short of topsoil and clean water and leaching its wondrous diversity; a child who may never see the stars.
And it’s not going away. I note how dangerously long-lived it is, how
— Fr Hugh O’Donnell 72 Sean McDermott Street, Dublin 1.
Shutterstock/Maciej Bledowski