SL 38 (2008) 64-80 Liturgy for the "Uncreators" by Cynthia Moe-Lobeda* We live in a world of beauty beyond comprehension: a glorious bit of earth and water resplendent with sight, sound, smell, and touch; a shimmering sphere created and destined to provide abundant life for all. And this world is tormented. Economically-privileged people in the Global North today face a twofold moral crisis--economic and ecological-of unprece- dented scope. We are, in the words of John Cobb and Herman Daly, living toward "a dead end," destroying Earth's life systems, and building a soul-searing gap between the rich and the impoverished.' We have organized economic life such that 225 people own wealth equal to 47% of the human family- For many, "poverty means death."> Each day approximately 30,000 children are killed by poverty. Yet humankind today has the resources to feed all. The second dimension of the moral crisis is new. The last third of the 20th cen- tury witnessed a shift in Earth-human relations. The human species, living in the manner in which many of us live, threatens life on Earth. Our numbers and exces- sive consumption jeopardize Earth's capacity to regenerate life. If we continue in this direction, our "likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell."4 God created a planet that spawns and supports life with a complexity and generosity beyond human ken. In creating the Earth, God said, "It is good" -in Hebrew, "tob," which means "life-furthering." It is that very "tob," life-generating capac- ity that we are destroying. We have become the "uncreators." * Dr. Cynthia Moe-Lobeda is on the faculty of Seattle University's Department of Theology and Religious Studies and the graduate School of Theology and Ministry. She has served as a theological consultant to the Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, as Director of the Washington, D.C. office of Augsburg College's Center for Global Education, and as a missionary/ health worker in Honduras. She may be contacted at moe-lobc@seattleu.edu. 1 John Cobb, Jr. and Herman Daly, For the Common Good (Boston: Beacon, 1994) 21. 2 United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report, 1998 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 29-30. 3 From a 1989 conversation with Jesuit priest Jon Sobrino at the University of Central America in San Salvador. 4 To use the words of anthropologist Gregory Bateson; see Steps to an Ecology ofMind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) 404. 64