Our common home

The important question

Everyone wants to have his or her own house. House in South Korean means not a just place to live but security, investment, speculation, so everyone is longing for one’s own house, that is, home sweet home.

Do you have your house? I mean a house that you own. I don’t have it. Sometimes it is better not to worry about my house and to satisfy and look forward to whatever house comes to me with my new assignment.

However, from time to time, I would like to have my own place, a small house designed and built just for myself, so called a resting and hiding place.

In order to make it simple, let’s presume that we all have our own house. Isn’t it wonderful?

Here is an important question. What would you do when your house is burning? If your house gets fire, you desperately do something to quench the fire.

This is our situation now in terms of our common home, that is, the earth. The earth, our home not a hotel, is hurting by our way of living. We have been using it like a guest who comes, pays, uses, and leaves without any thought or affection. Instead we are building gigantic houses of ego, pride, and greed on sand. The house on sand will collapse.

What is the point that we are trying to achieve something or even live when our home is burning?

In Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si(Praise be to you, my Lord), he asks us to discern a response to the ecological crisis. Action is needed, that is, a profound act of care for our common home.

What would you do when your home is burning?

Simply put it, we have to do something to reduce waste, pollution, and emission gas by listening to the cry of the earth. It is one of the most important justices we have to take at the moment.

As Jesus says, rain will fall, the floods come, and the winds blow and buffet. Without action, we all are going to be exterminated on the earth. 

Let’s protect our common home before it is not too late!