A civilisation of love is everyone’s dream. It is also the dream of God. It was the dream of Jesus, who commanded us to love one another as he loves us. It is the task of the Holy Spirit – with our participation – to bring about this civilisation of love. God’s dream cannot be otherwise, since God is love, and all relationships emanating from God are relationships of love.

We are invited to enter into the divine vision of a world in harmony, where everyone is at home with one another, where all feel wanted and included, where everything is shared and each rejoices in the uniqueness of those around them. This vision would transfigure economics, politics, social life. But it demands that we move way beyond personal concerns.  ‘This pool of private charity must flow as a world-embracing sea.’ Like God , we are to be committed to the common good, we are to be resolutely for our neighbours and our planet, even at personal cost. We live as one family in a common home, of which both the members and the contents are entrusted to us by God. This is Laudato Si’s mystical way of seeing the world. There is a generosity all around us: we are caught into ‘a universal fraternity that inspires us to love and accept the wind, the sun and the clouds’ (228 Laudato Si’). Nature herself is filled with words of love’. We are to reciprocate that love.

Excerpted from Finding God in a Leaf – The Mysticism of Laudato Si’ by Brian Grogan SJ
(p 47)