Recently we named and blessed three kōhatu mauri or life-force stones in keeping with a traditional Māori practice for helping people focus and ground their intentions.

Our three kōhatu mauri, Te Whenua, Ngā Wai and Te Tuarangi, represent the land, waters and the universe and heavens. They embody the concerns and hopes of our community.

We tasked kōhatu Whenua with holding coronavirus within the context of the larger issues facing the Earth community — inequality of income, and the crises of climate, biodiversity, over-consumption and waste, race and hate, refugee and wars and housing.

We gave kōhatu Wai the task of holding coronavirus within the context of the issues facing the waters of the world. Into this stone we placed our concerns for the world’s oceans, in particular their warming and acidification. And, as well, we included the world’s lakes, rivers, streams, springs and seasonal rains.

We tasked kōhatu Tuarangi with embodying all that is sacred and the mysterious immensity of the heavens. We acknowledged the human community and all of Creation unfolding in the journey of evolution.

We honoured the shape and weight of the stones and all they represent for us and commended them into the goodness and grace of God, in the hope of their guidance as we journey into uncertain territory.

COVID-19, like everything and everyone in our world, exists in a context. The ultimate context is that everything is connected — a gift and promise of our Creator. The kōhatu mauri remind us of the wider ecosystems of life in which everything has its place. The coronavirus is with us in the steadily warming world where winters are getting shorter and milder. Warmer conditions and shorter winters create the optimal conditions for certain creatures to thrive. And warmer conditions everywhere means that wilderness areas, especially ice packs, glacial zones and tundra regions, are becoming unbalanced and breaking up. In cooler times these places had greater integrity and their ecosystems were more balanced and checked. These imbalances mean less stability and the greater likelihood of disease outbreaks.

Many affluent people are now global citizens regularly travelling seas and borders and landmasses and show the truth of a biologist’s comment that not only are human beings full of microbial life and dependent on it, the microbes invented us in order to get around. In our densely populated, urbanised and polluted world, microbes have all the ingredients and conditions to flourish.

In this pandemic the human community is hunkering down wherever possible to survive and see out the virus — a wise move given the illness and death it causes. But when the immediate threat has passed many people will want to return to business-as-usual lifestyles. They will forget the ingredients and conditions that enabled the crisis to develop. Such an attitude would mean that the opportunities opened during lockdown will be passed up.

Our experience of level 4 lockdown was a radical response and care of the community. We altered our lives willingly. We need a similar responsiveness by society to address the climate crisis and its underlying causes and calls.

This is an important moment of choice — an opportunity to pause, reflect and reset. The more our world sinks into uncertainty and fear, the greater the opportunities to be compassionate and present — the great task of reimagining our civilisation. It's the possibility of genuine reconnection to the Source of all life. We will find among us the resourcefulness to make the changes to support a genuinely life-sustaining society.

Prayer for an Emerging Future

Wellspring of compassion, container of all life,
join us as we lean into a future coming to be through our humble efforts.
Lead us into your emerging future.
Empower us as we draw down our harms.
Transfigure our despairs.
May they become the fertile fields of a world made new.
We invoke your Good Spirit to enfold everything in a bounty of blessing.
Open to us the life force of all that lives,
encourage us,
teach us the art of co-creation in your world.
Whaea nui o te Taiao katoa, inoi mō mātou.
Mother of the New Creation, pray for us.

Peter Healy is a Marist priest, environmentalist, artist and teacher.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 248 May 2010