Tag: creationtide

Posted on

Creationtide 2023

This fennel is definitely giving me mustard seed vibes. It’s now gone to seed, but has provided sustenance for insects and then birds.

This is a reflection I wrote a couple of years ago for Creationtide.

When I was asked to prepare this reflection, I have to tell you my heart sank. It sank because caring for creation is a painful subject for me, and I knew it would be a struggle to find the right words. In the end, I decided to simply share with you where I am up to on the journey. These are not fully formed thoughts, and you may find me unnecessarily pessimistic, so please bear with me as you join me in this process of coming to terms with what is happening to our beautiful home planet.

The home I grew up in had a big garden that my father cultivated, and nearly all the vegetables and fruit that we ate were home-grown. We kept hens and ducks for eggs and had two geese named ‘Easter’ and ‘Christmas’. We foraged for firewood and picked hedgerow blackberries to make jam. I spent a lot of my time outside, although not always willingly, on the swing under the weeping willow, raking leaves, and growing radishes in my own little patch of earth.

Fast-forward several decades, and now I have my own garden. If anything, my love of nature has grown, and it is in nature that I perceive God most clearly. The breath of God that gives life to us also permeates the rest of creation. The earth and everything in it is sacred, because God inhabits it. I find our destruction of nature distressing because I love it for its own sake and because it reveals God to me.

Things have come to a head this summer [2023], with the wildfires and the flooding, and with the heatwaves and drought that have affected us here, with crops dying in the fields in my own village. I have had to find a way to cope with this and with the multiple other existential threats we are facing.

I suggest that each of us stands somewhere on the spectrum between denial and despair when it comes to the future that probably awaits us, or if not us, then certainly our children and grandchildren.

I’m left asking where God is in all this? How can God stand by and let us destroy everything, surely he’s going to intervene? But where was God during the recent floods in Pakistan? Or during the holocaust? Or during the Black Death? Or during numerous other catastrophes in human history? Many civilizations have even collapsed, because something in the human psyche means that we are unwilling to live within the sustainable bounds that God has set for us. But this time, it’s happening on a global scale.

We can’t assume that God will lift us out of our current crisis, and, given the way we have responded up to now, I don’t think that we can assume our governments or scientists will be able to save us either. At this point, I turn to the cross: faith needs to connect with the wounds of Christ as the beauty of the world fades.

Through Christ’s death on the cross, God identified with our suffering, with the suffering of all people and of all creation. In the death of Christ, human sin killed the incarnate God; in destroying creation, our sin is killing another revelation of God. But just as Christ rose to new life, so there is hope for the resurrection not just of humanity, but of all creation.

Our second reading today gives us an image of what that will look like, a new heaven and a new earth, the new Jerusalem, where God will make things whole again. Of course, this is symbolic language, but it gives us profound hope for the ultimate future of creation.

In the meantime, we have some choices to make. For those of us in denial, will we face reality, or will we continue to pretend it isn’t happening? And if we aren’t in denial, will we choose to trust God anyway or will we succumb to despair?

These times call for a deep, deep trust in God for who he is, not because of what he might do. We cannot expect God to save us from the consequences of the mess that we have created, but we can trust that God is good.

We cannot expect that our offspring will be saved from suffering, think of all those millions across the globe who are already suffering and whom God cares about just as much as about our children, but we can trust that God loves them with an eternal love.

We cannot assume that there will be a happy ending for planet earth as we know it, but we can trust that God holds its future in his hands. Christ is the alpha, the omega, the beginning and the end, all things have been created through him and in him all things hold together. (Colossians 1, Revelation 21). Let us step out of denial and out of despair and step into trust.

The writer of our psalm today speaks of this sort of trust in God, he wrote:

we will not fear, though the earth should change,
though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;
though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble with its tumult.

And the psalmist encourages us to Be still, and know that I am God! And keeps repeating the refrain:

The LORD of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our refuge

Student of Thomas Merton and clinical psychologist James Finley put it well when he said, ‘If we are absolutely grounded in the absolute love of God that protects us from nothing even as it sustains us in all things, then we can face all things with courage and tenderness and touch the hurting places in others and in ourselves with love.’’

Where God is in all this? God chooses to work through his people, those who live according to the values of the kingdom that Jesus preached.

In our first reading this morning, the Roman Christians are told to love their neighbours as themselves. And Jesus upped the ante by challenging us to love our enemies. So, by our words and by our deeds we are to love those who are suffering the effects of the climate crisis, and to love those who are actively making it worse, and that includes ourselves.

We aren’t given a list of rules about how to behave (although there are lists of ways to tread more lightly on the earth, which can be a good way to start); this command to love is about metanoia, that deep conversion of our hearts, minds and lives. Let me give you a simple example.

When I had my first child, I was determined to use cloth nappies for the sake of the environment. I was doing that quite happily, when a friend pointed out that perhaps I didn’t need to throw out disposable nappy liners that weren’t soiled, but that I could wash them and use them again – that conversation started me on a journey of questioning every disposable paper product that I used. For a start, I cut up old t-shirts to make baby wipes and have continued making changes ever since.

Our small actions might not avert environmental collapse, but we are to do our best to live lightly on the earth in response to Christ’s call to love our neighbours – both the neighbours that we come into direct contact with and those neighbours that we will never see and are barely aware of. However, the effects of our actions on our neighbours are not always immediately obvious. For example, when I buy a t-shirt, can I be sure that it hasn’t been dyed with toxic chemicals by an underpaid worker without protective equipment halfway across the world? How do I know whether my pension fund is invested in profitable, yet earth-killing, industries?

These sorts of questions can get so big and so numerous that they rapidly become overwhelming, tipping us back towards denial or despair. I deal with this by dividing up my worries into two lists – those that are rightly my responsibility and those that I leave to God. The things that stay on my list are the ones that I have some sort of power over. I can choose to eat less meat and dairy products, I can choose not to put insecticides on my struggling brassicas, I can choose to take the train instead of driving and so on. Of course I often fail, but God knows my heart and his grace is more than enough. But the fate of creation is most definitely on God’s list.

I am left holding the question of how to deal with the grief I feel. With great love comes with great pain – isn’t that the message of the cross? In the words of the hymn ‘did ere such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown?’ I can’t help feeling that it is right that I feel this sadness, that I confess my part in causing it and ask for God’s grace to change my way of thinking and behaving – to ‘repent’. That I learn the language of lament. You might not be in that place right now, but I invite you to consider stepping into it – and to trust that God will meet you there.

Posted on

Sister Water

This is a reflection written for the start of Creationtide with the theme of water, based on the following passages: Job 37:1-13, Revelation 22:1-7 and John 19:31-37.

I love the book of Job, or at least parts of it. Interspersed between long speeches about Job’s suffering, and the possible reasons for it, are radiantly beautiful passages about the glory of God as revealed in the natural world. The passage I chose for our reading today is a beautiful reminder of the majesty of God’s gift of water in the form of snow, rain, ice, and moisture.

It was in the water that God ignited the first spark of life at least 3.5 billion years ago, bringing single-celled microbes into being near hydrothermal vents. By about 1.2 billion years later, a bacterium had emerged that could convert sunlight into chemical energy, releasing oxygen into the atmosphere as a by-product, and preparing the way for complex life to thrive in the millennia to come.

We humans, along with fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and other mammals, have retained something of that primordial ocean within bodies, in the form of the fluid that surrounds our cells. Nearly two-thirds of our bodies are composed of water, and we are entirely dependent on it for our survival. Our blood, sweat and salt tears are another reminder of our origins in the primordial seas.

Human life still begins in salt water: the foetus grows and plays in the amniotic fluid of its mother’s womb, and we speak of waters breaking when the time comes to deliver.

Water is a remarkable molecule, quite unlike any other. It is made up of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, which gives it a particular shape and electronic configuration that lead to specific properties. It is these properties that make water a blessing that sustains life like no other molecule could.

Its chemistry means that lakes don’t freeze completely solid in winter, nutrients are transported to the top of trees against the force of gravity, sweat cools us down, and the temperature of ponds stays relatively constant from day to night.

Water cycles continuously throughout the planet; liquid water evaporates into water vapor, condenses to form clouds, and precipitates back to earth in the form of rain and snow. This dynamic flow is essential for the wellbeing of every living thing on the planet.

But our relationship with water is distorted. We have forgotten our oceanic origins and severed our connection with the water that birthed us. We treat water as a commodity, something to be used and abused to the point that rivers are being polluted by industrial farms and contaminated once again with untreated sewage. What is happening with water on a planetary scale exemplifies our alienation from the rest of the non-human world. The increasingly erratic weather patterns we are experiencing in this ecological crisis often feature water: too much when there is flooding and too little in times of drought, and the weakening gulf stream that warms western Europe is carried in the Atlantic ocean.

The consequences of our alienation from the rest of creation are increasingly dire for people in particularly climate-sensitive countries. Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia, for example, have been badly affected by drought this year, with 68 million people needing urgent food aid.

For the sake of our brothers and sisters in these countries, and for many other good reasons, we urgently need to establish a healthy relationship with the non-human world, including the holy gift of Sister water, recognising, as St Francis did, our deep connection with her. In his Canticle to the Sun, he wrote “Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Water, which is very useful and humble and precious and chaste.”

The imagery of water flows through the Bible, sometimes as a symbol of judgement, as in the story of the flood or of the drought announced by Elijah, and sometimes as a symbol of grace, like the dew on Gideon’s fleece or when Jesus offered the water of life to the woman at the well.

We meet it again in our second reading from the book of Revelation. This apocalyptic text is full of strange images, and we aren’t meant to take them literally, but they are useful because pictures and images help us to make sense of our world.

This reading comes just after a description of the New Jerusalem, the perfect city in which God makes his home with mortals, where there will be no more death, mourning, crying or pain. It is a vision of future wholeness where the union between humans and God is so complete that there will be no need for the light of a lamp or of the sun. In this hopeful image of a restored creation, we read of a pristine, unpolluted river flowing straight from the throne of God and of the Lamb. This river bears the water of life, which sustains the tree of life. This tree produces a different fruit each month and its leaves are for the healing of the nations: this living water brings fruitfulness to the earth and peace to humanity.

Here, Sister Water is freed from her bondage to the consequences of our sin, free to fully be the gift from God that she is. In the new Jerusalem we also will be the people that God intended us to be. This is an image of shalom – of wholeness, health, peace, safety, fullness, rest and harmony. This shalom is a restored relationship between us and the rest of creation, and between us and God. The world desperately needs to experience this; our times are marked by people alienated from each other, from God and from the rest of creation, with increasingly catastrophic consequences.

So how do we get from the reality of where we are today, with our polluted rivers, floods, and droughts, to experiencing life in shalom, sustained by the metaphorical river of life that flows from God’s throne?

There is one last water image in our third reading that bridges this gap. In John’s account of the crucifixion, we read that soldiers pierced Jesus’s side to make sure that he was dead. Water then flowed from this wound – it is a rather gory image, but it can be understood as a symbol of Christ releasing his divine life into the world.

Think of it like this: when a seed falls to the ground and is buried, in time it breaks open to release the new life of a seedling. Jesus on the cross is like a seed that is buried, dies and then releases his life into the world through the holy spirit. This divine life heals the ruptures within humanity, between humanity and creation, and between humanity and God.

This healing of ruptures, this all-encompassing shalom, is something we hope for in the fullness of time, but it also something we are called to live out in the present. This includes being at peace with water and with the rest of creation; but we can’t manage this in our own strength, as if the future of the planet rests entirely on our shoulders. Christ is the one who has broken the power of death and decay – he is the source of the water of life – and it is through him that shalom is coming. And yet, at the same time, we are his body now, and in the unfathomable mystery of God’s wisdom, he doesn’t do much, if anything, without our cooperation, and so we need to be radically open to whatever part he is calling us to play.

Returning to where we began, in the water, I encourage us to develop a deeper respect for Sister water, to conserve her rather than waste her. But there is more to this than switching the tap off when we brush our teeth; we need to look a little deeper and to use our imaginations. You’re probably quite familiar with the concept of the carbon footprint, but there is also our water footprint to consider. Everything we buy, use and throw away takes water to process and transport, we can use less water by making thoughtful purchases and reusing and recycling more. The same goes for food and, in this case, we can save water by eating lower on the food chain – so more plants and less meat and dairy products – by eating more whole foods and, very importantly, by not wasting food.

This is a call to live wisely, which brings me back to the image of the tree of life flourishing on the banks of the river in the New Jerusalem. It reminds me of Psalm 1, where we learn that a wise person who seeks God is like a tree planted by a river, whose leaves do not wither when the dry times come. By sinking our roots deep down into God, we can find our way to wisdom. There we can drink from the living water, which will make us fruitful and grow us into peacemakers, shalom-builders, in this world that is crying out for wholeness, peace and restoration.