My Mother's World

This is My Mother’s World

By Alonzo Johnson

Coming from a bustling, densely populated city in the Northeast, seeing pollution everywhere was a regular aspect of everyday life. Smoke bellowed out of the landscape of industrial factories; there were mountains of trash in the streets. Growing up, my mother was very clear about my sisters and I being responsible for putting litter in its proper place and, as she would say “taking pride” where we lived. The instinct to be tidy and care for the earth started very early for me. I realized that a large part of my mother’s concern about taking care of where we live was probably related to her faith. She felt that it was disrespectful to treat “God’s earth” capriciously. For my mother “how we lived” reflected who we were and what we believed in. In this way, my mother’s words served as a form of resistance from carelessness and laziness. My mother also believed that the earth blessed us – it gave us food and air, even though we lived in the context of urban blight and industrial waste, earth care was still important.

Very recently, through my work with The Self Development of People, we, through the West African Initiative (in collaboration with Presbyterian Disaster Assistance and the Presbyterian Hunger Program), helped farmers improve food security and produce food to sell and use to create incomes to support families and individuals. When we were travelling to visit our community partners in one of the remote villages in Sierra Leone, a woman with passion stood up and tearfully expressed her thankfulness for the seeds and training for farming skills desperately needed to grow food for the village.  Even in the aftermath of a brutal eleven-year civil war and the Ebola epidemic that took the lives of many men in the village, she lifted up the importance of the work of the women, and their access to seeds and training that allowed them to care for the village. She pointed to the young people who were also gathered together and expressed jubilance for the food they could produce to help them grow. This gathering had an incredibly profound effect on me, and I could hear the echo of my mother’s words about the way the earth takes care of us when we take care of it. Inspired by this visit, I, for the first time in my life, started growing a garden in homage to the profound power and beauty of the earth and how it sustains us. I think about the hymn This is my Father’s (or in this case Mother’s) World which reminds us of God’s gift of the blessings of the earth and our very important call to be stewards of it.

 Rev. Alonzo Johnson is Coordinator for the Self-Development of People Program (SDOP) of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Rev. Johnson has 25 years of experience in urban, youth, education, creative arts, and social justice ministries.