One afternoon in mid-August, Bishop Wells generously opened her office and shared her time to reflect with the Diocesan Creation Care Team about how we might better meet the needs of the broader diocese.
The Creation Care team is particularly excited about one of the outcomes of the meeting. We will be writing a quarterly article for TME.
In this inaugural article, I want to tell you a few things about what to expect from us in the months ahead in the hope that you will become a regular reader.
This column won’t be a litany of things you should or ought to do. The truth is that as a committee, we have a wide variety of practices through which we live into our care for creation. Some of us are diligent in our recycling. Others avoid long-distance travel. Some of us compost, and some of us don’t. I am not sure we could all agree on a “must-do” list of creation care practices. Instead of telling you what to do or instilling fear and overwhelm you about what you haven’t done, we will be sharing scripture and science-based information to give you the media with which to paint your own hopes for creation.
As Episcopalians, we offer prayers we hold in common with one another. I understand prayer as being aspirational. In other words, when we pray, we are naming to God our commitment to make our prayers a reality. Listen to the words of our liturgies and the scriptures, and you will find that care of creation is not some “optional add-on” to our concerns as Christians.
That truth is made evident time and time again in our Book of Common Prayer and in scripture. From proclaiming, “The Earth is the Lord’s for he made it: Come let us adore him” at the beginning of Morning Prayer, through every Form of the Prayers of the People, and the Eucharistic Prayers, we give thanks and pray for God to empower us to respect and love all our neighbors, including life in all of its various and wonderful forms.
Through caring for creation, we open our hearts to receiving God’s abundant gifts and we offer ourselves to become the hands and feet of the living God. We want to empower you to become the prayers we pray every Sunday by inviting you into new ways of experiencing and participating in God’s deep love for Creation.
The abundant life God yearns to give us is about being faithful to our truth and then committing to learn the truth of others’ ideas. We hope this column is about what matters and the reasons it matters to you, to us, and to Creation.
The Episcopal Church has designated September as Care of Creation month. The Church says it is important to mark this time in the year to give special attention to creation “…because of our Gospel call to grow in faith as we affirm that God in Christ loves, redeems, and sustains the whole of Creation, not only human beings” and “because of the urgency of the climate and ecological crisis and the need for a bold, prophetic response.”
Myriad resources, including meditations, scripture reflections, and intergenerational activities, are available for parish-wide and personal celebrations of this month. You might want to begin with episcopalchurch.org/season-of-creation-and-st-francis-day-resources and buildfaith.org/creation-care.
Many parishes honor creation with a St. Francis of Assisi blessing of the Animals. Bishop Wells has suggestions for a service to share with anyone who is interested.
We want to invite you…your concerns, your interests, your passions, and your expertise…into this conversation. As we sat around the table with the bishop, it occurred to me how important and how healing community can be. We need to hear other voices and perspectives so that our views can grow. And, we need the comfort of shared perspectives to help us understand who and where we are.
Even though the words of our common prayers are all the same, we don’t all agree on how to live into God’s dream for reality. God loves all of creation and equips those of us with memory, reason, skill, and voices to have hard conversations around how best to love our neighbors. The Creation Care Committee hopes this column will plant seeds for grace-filled conversations and transformational actions..