Jacob Hooker's Full Reflection for September 29, 2024

Jacob Hooker, a 9th grader who was confirmed at St. John XXIII Parish this past April, wrote the bulletin reflection for the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time. While we couldn't fit the whole reflection in the bulletin, we thought the parish deserved access to the full thing! Thank you so much, Jacob!

A Reflection
by Jacob Hooker, Parishioner
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Some of my favorite memories are spending time outdoors with family and friends. Every year, my family and I visit national parks and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, places that make me feel connected to myself, others, and even God (our natural world is, as The Gospel by Gen Z would say, “a W for the Top G”).
 
This week’s reading reminds us of our baptismal call to be prophets, which means living a life of service. A kind of service that is important to me is care for the environment. Our faith calls us to be stewards of the earth. To me, that looks like limiting our fossil fuel emissions, but it also means being educated about what’s happening around us and what we can do about it. I have learned about an ethic called “leave no trace”, which teaches the importance of reducing your impact upon the natural world. Applied to everyday things, like picking up litter, these actions leave a place better than we found it. There is joy in this service. I have done a few beach sweeps with my friends and it was fun because we got to hang out while also cleaning up nature. We’d had competitions about who could find the weirdest object or pick up the most trash in the shortest amount of time. Although these were few and far between, these outings helped deepen my connection to both them and the environment.
 
“Leave no trace” makes me think of other ways human beings can take greater responsibility for our common home. Much of our day-to-day life revolves around technology, which is developing so rapidly that we can’t keep up with the energy demand. For example, artificial intelligence data centers need a lot of energy to operate which, in most cases , still comes from burning fossil fuels. According to a study recently done by the UN, a request made through ChatGPT consumes as much as 10 times the electricity of a typical internet search. And, as the prevalence of AI increases, these centers could account for nearly 35 percent of the US’ energy use by 2026 (The UN Environment Programme, Sep 21 2024). Now technology alone isn’t the problem here. The problem is the copious amounts of fossil fuel energy they consume, which pollutes the air we breathe. And, in our country and around the world, often it is the most economically and politically vulnerable communities who are disproportionately affected by the highest levels of pollution created by these systems. As Pope Francis so finely put it in his second encyclical Laudato Si': “There is an urgent need to develop policies so that, in the next few years, the emission of carbon dioxide and other highly polluting gasses can be drastically reduced, for example, substituting for fossil fuels and developing sources of renewable energy” (Laudato Si', para. 26).
 
As this week’s reading states, “Would that all the people of the Lord were prophets! Would that the Lord might bestow his spirit on them all!”. Moses reminds the Israelites, who are lost and complaining in the wilderness, that we all are prophets (Nm 11:25-29). We are all called to a new way of living. In our world today, that means to live our faith in such a way that shows responsibility and care for the vulnerable, which includes the environment. This week, I encourage you to make time to be in the natural world and reflect on ways you can care for our common home. Then, do something.

Jacob is a 9th grader at Latin School of Chicago. In addition to camping, hiking, and canoeing, Jacob enjoys drawing, acting, coding, and playing bagpipes.