Gathering Love and Light by Guerzon Mills
A Blessed Creation Day to you.
One of my favorite scripture passages is Acts 17: 28 where it affirms that it is in God that “we live and move and have our being.” Today is a great day to remember not only that the resplendent universe is a gift of divine creativity, generosity, and hospitality but also that it is through the generosity of the universe and the earth that we live and move and have our being. How we humans have taken for granted and abused this generosity.
With important but rare exceptions in every generation, Christians on the whole have been sadly neglectful of, if not sinfully abusive toward our planet. In modern and post-modern times, Christians have for the most part been late to the party that reverences, protects, celebrates, and cultivates kinship with the earth and all its life forms from a conscious, intentional theological conviction and spiritual perspective. How far we have moved from our earlier Christian understanding, not just that creation is good and blessed, but that it is the first book of revelation given to us to read for edification.
The message that the world is neither our plaything to do with what we want nor a garbage heap where we discard whatever we no longer deem important or necessary, but rather an interdependent and sacred community of life forms of which humans are just one species, is only now starting to be taught and preached in Christian communities as an essential component of authentic and responsible faith. If the universe and the earth within it are merely someplace we visit on our way to heaven, if the world and the earth within it are something we must be saved from, if salvation is understood only as something we “get” in the after life rather than a reality we participate in before death, then we catch a glimpse at some of the reasons Christians have been so cavalier about the planet and been contributing culprits in the human desecration of the very earth that nourishes and sustains us.
In light of this shameful track record rooted in ignorance and arrogance, how fortunate that Pope Francis, one of the chief religious leaders in the world today, has made care of creation one of his most ardent commitments. How fortunate that he seems to comprehend the gravity of the situation. How important that Laudato Si, his encyclical on the environment, offers a theological argument for why cultivating a mutually enhancing relationship with the earth is not an addendum to faith nor a cause of a few tree-huggers but a constitutive dimension of what it means to be a faithful Christian and a responsible human being. So important and urgent is this awakened sensitivity, change of lifestyle, and respect for creation that Pope Francis has encouraged us to add “care of our common home” to the double lists of spiritual and corporal works of mercy so treasured in Catholic spirituality.
In our lifetime there has been an increased awareness that the Christ-life calls us to more than a little private me ‘n Jesus relationship, that, in fact, it has far reaching social and economic implications that call us to expose, prevent, and heal dehumanization wherever it occurs, to work for social justice in all spheres of life. And now, in the hope that it is not too late for our children and children’s children, we are waking up to what prophetic earth-lovers have been telling us for decades, that “the earth is the Lord’s” and not our private possession and that to desecrate the earth is to blaspheme the extravagantly gracious Source and Giver of all life. We cannot undo the past, but together we can begin anew. We can see the beautiful universe as a sacrament, both a gift and manifestation of the divine, and do our part to reverence and enter into kinship with the earth that so generously makes our life possible and pleasurable.
I invite us all to pray the prayer Pope Francis penned for this day in which we re-member ourselves to God’s creation.
A Prayer for our Earth
All-powerful God, You are present in the whole universe
and in the smallest of your creatures.
You embrace with your tenderness all that exists.
Pour out upon us the power of your love,
that we may protect life and beauty.
Fill us with peace, that we may live
as brothers and sisters, harming no one.
O God of the poor,
help us to rescue the abandoned and forgotten of this earth,
so precious in your eyes.
Bring healing to our lives,
that we may protect the world and not prey on it,
that we may sow beauty, not pollution and destruction.
Touch the hearts
of those who look only for gain
at the expense of the poor and the earth.
Teach us to discover the worth of each thing,
to be filled with awe and contemplation,
to recognize that we are profoundly united
with every creature
as we journey towards your infinite light.
We thank you for being with us each day.
Encourage us, we pray, in our struggle
for justice, love and peace.
Amen.