June 20, 2025

It is waning June. Up and down the long valleys of time, Earth moves toward Solstice, a word taken from the Latin “sistere” – to stop, as in “desist”.

In Southern lands, winter begins its slow climb through the cold. In the North, summer rolls lazily through the heat toward autumn respite. Through multiple millennia, Earth has made this resolute journey, assuring us of God’s infinite stability. It is an assurance we sorely need in our current times, so threatened by the destabilizing greed and evil self-interests of immoral leaders and their irresponsible partisans..

About this time ten years ago, our beloved Pope Francis placed this beautiful, magical earth in our hands with the publication of his magnificent encyclical Laudato Si’.

Timothy O’Malley, Director of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy, says :

The greatest challenge of Laudato Si’
is the invitation it offers
for us to avoid the hopelessness
that too often infects the human condition.
Pope Francis invites us as Catholics to participate
in the re-creation of a culture of love.
This ecological culture, attentive to the whole human family,
offers the potential for not simply the renewal of nature
but of humanity itself.

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Attentive to the challenge Francis offered, I hold the Earth this Solstice Morning like a rosary, drawing its broken surface between the fingers of my prayer. Every bead is a country, a culture, a people, a species, an environment – a life – riddled with a corresponding suffering. My fingertips ache with the pain of war, greed, violence, discrimination, and hate weeping from every bead.

We see this hate in attempts:

• to demonize cultures other than our own
• to destabilize democracies and militarize nations
• to erase the people of Gaza
• to steal Ukraine from its own people
• to refuse humanitarian aid to struggling nations
• to assault the Earth for the sole sake of profit
• to suppress human rights based on uninformed prejudice

This hate is born of the same sin Pope Francis placed squarely before us. It is the sin of believing that we are separate from one another. It is the sin of acting from the false superiority and moral indifference such pretense allows. People who carry this hate to our hearts and homes have found an evil nurture in the diseased moral culture for which we all have some responsibility.

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As I pray this morning to be enlightened toward my own response, I ask Earth itself to teach me. I hear the wisdom of Solstice suggest itself to my soul:

“Solstice” = Sol + Sistere: (Sun + Stop)

If the earth did not “stop” each June and each December, the world would careen into a devastation of heat or cold. But, by an exquisite self-awareness, our Earth chooses its perfect balance. She enlists me to do the same.

Might that be enough to continue this journey into the fullness of “Laudato Si” – just to stop those tendencies and choices in my life which place me in domination of any other creature? Might this be enough to confront today’s moral ugliness – just to stop the rhetoric and behaviors which feed separatism and prejudice?

Just to stop. With the Solstice, it is at least enough to try.

Julian Lennon is the son of Beatles great John Lennon.

John Lennon was murdered in 1980.