Click here to read Pope Francis’ encyclical, released last week. Let’s start with my frank admission that I have not had time to read it in its entirety… yet. But the parts I have read are blowing my mind. It’s what the hippies were saying in the 60s, basically, but it’s coming from the Pope.

His points about climate change are getting all the attention, but really this is a stunning critique of modern society and its completely wrongheaded values — consumerism, capitalism, over-reliance on science and technology, social injustice, violence and war, and the destruction of the Earth.

And he shows how those wrong values all spring from the same source. He knits everything together, showing how all of the major troubles of the world can be traced back to us… to individuals… to people like you and me, who have lost (or never had) a basic attitude of humility, of wonder, of gratitude. People who view the world as something to be used and discarded. He brings it all down to selfishness, basically, and shows the irony of how placing yourself above everything else destroys not only you, but others.

This is a deeply spiritual document, and a lodestar of wisdom and guidance. Personally, I’m not a Catholic, or a Christian, but so what? No human being really knows the nature of God (as the Pope has admitted), so we’re all making guesses in the dark there. In the meantime, we live in a physical world, and we’re fucking it up and we all know it, and he shows just how we’re doing it. And why we feel so lost, so alienated, so afflicted.

What’s wrong with humanity and society is what’s wrong with us. The global crisis is our crisis. The answer isn’t even that complicated. It’s love, for ourselves and others and our planet and everything on it. Not conceptual love. Love in action… which is actually not easy. If you don’t find it painful and difficult, you’re not doing it right. Because love in action means subjugating your ego, and recognizing that you’re one among many, no less no more.

I’ll be reading the whole thing. I’ll be thinking about it. I’ll be trying, again, only harder this time, to live it. I hope you will too.