Where Have All the Poinsettias Gone?

Most Reverend Richard J. Sklba
Auxiliary Bishop of Milwaukee

One of the searing beauties of Christmas time each year can be found in the flowers which decorate our church sanctuaries and homes. We purchase them in great numbers for the parish or office reception areas and give them generously as holiday gifts to relatives and home-bound friends.   

With stunning scarlet brilliance or soft white stillness, they decorate our lives wonderfully each year. We ought to pause for a prayer of gratitude for the Mexican sunshine which first contributed these beauties to our world this time of the year. We also ought to pause for a prolonged minute to appreciate their beauty!

Precisely because of their manner of blessing us each Christmas, I think they deserve better treatment than they receive, namely to be causally dumped out and cast aside as soon as their leaves thin and petals drop because of over heating or under watering!

Without becoming pathologically scrupulous about protecting the least forms of life, as, for example, a compulsive preoccupation to avoid stepping on any ant in creation, there still seems something wrong about casually discarding any living thing as soon as it no longer has interest or usefulness. Who gave any of us the right to be the sole and final arbiter of any bit of creation’s value?

These days our society seems to be caught in arguing about issues of massive global warming, and such questions need to be pursued vigorously if we are truly called to care for our planet as the command of God in the book of Genesis would request (1:28). My point, however, is that care for creation comes in large and smaller packages.

It is interesting and perhaps even instructive that Pope Benedict XVI’s message for this year’s World Day of Peace (January 1, 2010) bears the theme, “If you want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation.” In selecting that topic for his major New Year’s reflection the Pope joins his religious counterpart, Istanbul’s Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I who has been named the “Green Patriarch.” They both speak of all the ramifications of care for creation, and the need to protect the resources of our world.   Not to do so, they insist, demeans and diminishes our own human dignity too.

I know that compost piles have a role in sustaining creation too, but even they deserve some respect and care.

So, I return to my question: what happens to all the poinsettias this time of the year?  Does anyone at all care? I’ll ask the same question come Easter when the fragrant lilies of that season will be tossed out with equal disdain or disregard. Is there anything at all wrong with this picture?