A Time for Creation. Группа авторов
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‘And he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, on the palm of my hand, round like a ball. I looked at it thoughtfully and wondered, ‘What is this?’ And the answer came, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marvelled that it continued to exist and did not suddenly disintegrate; it was so small. And again my mind supplied the answer, ‘It exists, both now and for ever, because God loves it.’ In short, everything owes its existence to the love of God. In this ‘little thing’ I saw three truths. The first is that God made it; the second is that God loves it; and the third is that God sustains it.’1
In one of the most famous passages of Revelations of Divine Love, the medieval English writer, Julian of Norwich, distils the heart of Christian belief about the all-encompassing love of God our creator. Her words echo the theme of God’s loving sovereignty proclaimed in Scripture: ‘The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the compass of the world and all who live therein’ (Psalm 24.1). They constitute a foundational truth for all Christians. We believe that God has created the world and sustains it in being. We also believe that God has uniquely entrusted the care of creation to human beings (Genesis 1.26–30) and that to God we must render an account of our stewardship. And not simply to God, but to our children and grandchildren, who are increasingly clamouring to know what will be their global inheritance.
As members of the global Anglican Communion, we are aware of those around the world who face losing their homes and livelihoods as a result of the effects of climate change. Across the world, people of different nationalities and faiths, and those who profess no faith at all, are using the language of climate emergency and environmental crisis to express their profound concern about the impact of humankind’s wilful indifference to the state of the planet. Pictures of oceans clogged with discarded plastic, the desertification of productive farmland, extreme weather conditions, rising sea levels and the catastrophic decline of biodiversity in some parts of the world have introduced an urgency in public and private discourse.
For too long humankind has taken the environment for granted. Now that we see it threatened, we are at last waking up to the challenge of caring better for God’s earth. ‘To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation, and sustain and renew the life of the earth,’ is one of the Five Marks of Mission.2 If it is not embraced wholeheartedly and with determination, the other four marks of mission lack credibility. The care of creation is integral to our evangelism and mission.
Praying with creation
The contemplation of the universe should lead us not only to the adoration of our creator, but also to take better responsibility for our actions and repent of our misuse of natural resources. Sadly, as St Augustine observes, in our self-obsession we often fail to make the connection:
Is there anyone who, contemplating the works of God by which the entire universe is governed and ordered, is not amazed and overwhelmed by a sense of the miraculous? The power and strength of a single grain of seed is itself an amazing thing, inspiring awe in its contemplation. But humanity, preoccupied with its own petty agenda, has lost the capacity to contemplate the works of God by which it should daily render praise to God as creator.3
This volume of liturgical resources endeavours to help us re-forge these connections and enliven our praise of God’s gifts to us in creation. It is designed to provide the parishes, schools and chaplaincies of the Church of England with a rich selection of liturgical resources with which to worship and pray, mindful of the fact that, as St Paul teaches, creation itself ‘is groaning in travail’ (Romans 8.22). Our prayer needs to attend to the voice of creation itself. The sense of the whole creation praying to God finds expression in the spirituality of many early Christian teachers. Tertullian, for example, in his treatise On Prayer, says,
All creation prays. Cattle and wild beasts pray, and bend their knees. As they come from their barns and caves they invariably look up to heaven and call out, lifting up their spirit in their own fashion. The birds too rise and lift themselves up to heaven: instead of hands, they open out their wings in the form of a cross, and give voice to what seems to be a prayer.4
Gregory of Nazianzus, writing in the fourth century, says,
All creatures praise you,
both those who speak and those that are dumb.
All creatures bow down before you,
both those that can think and those that cannot.
The longing of the universe,
the groaning of creation reaches out to you.
Everything that exists prays to you,
and every creature that can read your universe
directs to you a hymn of silence.5
The idea of creation reaching out to God in prayer is reflected in the liturgy of the Orthodox Church. For example, the Office Hymn for the Sunday before Lent has this verse:
O Paradise,
share in the sorrow of Adam who is brought to poverty,
and with the sound of your leaves pray to the Creator
that we may not find your gates closed for ever.
We are fallen;
in your compassion, have mercy on us.
Francis of Assisi also had a keen sense of creation voicing its praise to our Creator, and the repeated phrase ‘praised be you’ in his Canticle of Creation suggests that each element of creation finds a voice to praise God: “Praised be you, my Lord, by our sister, mother earth, who sustains and governs us and produces various fruits and coloured flowers and grasses.”6
Season of Creation
In some parts of the worldwide Church, the month of September is becoming a focus of prayer and environmental action, often climaxing with a celebration of creation on 4 October, the Feast of St Francis of Assisi, or in England with the annual Harvest Festival. The Feast of the Holy Cross, coming midway through September, also presents an opportunity to reflect on the cosmic significance of the cross and to give some welcome Christological grounding to the season.
These developments originated from a proposal of the Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I in 1989. He suggested that the Churches observe 1 September (for the Orthodox the first day of the ecclesiastical year) as a day ‘of the protection of the natural environment’ and to