Creation Time 1 Year B

We are, many of us, familiar with the seasons of the church: Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, and ‘Ordinary’ Time. But perhaps we are less familiar with this more recent arrival, Creation Time.

The celebration of this Season has its foundation in 1989 when the Orthodox Church established September 1 as a Day of Prayer for Creation. In 2008, the World Council of Churches extended the celebration from September 1st to October 4th, the Feast Day of St. Francis of Assisi. Since then, the Season has been adopted by churches of many denominations across the world, and is now a major ecumenical celebration that recognises our common humanity and our shared heritage as part of God’s good creation.

The theme for the Season of Creation 2024 is ‘To hope and act, with Creation’. This season invites us to: treasure the beauty of Creation of which all humanity is a part; to celebrate it; to hope; alongside the attendant obligation to recognise our human capacity to harm Creation, offering an opportunity for us to repent, and to take action.

On this the first Sunday of Creation Time, I would like to focus on one particular clause of this year’s theme; with Creation

St Augustine, with whom I frequently find myself disagreeing, and yet whose writings hold within them beautiful insights and gifts to the church, wrote,

Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Read it.

God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead, God set before your eyes the things that had been created. Can you ask for a louder voice than that?

City of God, Book XVI

I love Augustine’s exhortation to recognise God’s revelation in Creation, and yet even here, Augustine puts us at one remove from creation, suggesting a separation, that we can somehow look at creation rather than being, enjoying and reflecting from our place within creation.

I am increasingly convinced that the harm we inflict on Creation through the ways we choose to live are a result of a broken relationship between humanity and the created world:

that we have lost our sense of deep connection;

that we actually consider ourselves to be separate and distinct from the rest of Creation;

that the world is somehow ‘out there’, and we are set apart, other.

The consequence and danger of humanity being other is that Creation can be regarded as something we have the right to exploit, without a recognition that this exploitation is actually an act of self-harm. For we too are created beings, are a part of Creation, and harm to Creation harms us.

The book, Song of Solomon, from which our first reading came this morning, is filled with images relating to the natural world. This most beautiful love song is one of the two books in the Bible which do not mention God and yet this book is run through with God, because the song is all about love. It is unashamedly about the passionate love between two people, the desire and longing they have for each other – and this is God’s very nature. God is love and those who abide in love abide in God and God in them (1 John 4:16).

The whole text of this book is creation-rich, with plentiful vineyards, fields, gardens and animals. Specific plants are named throughout, wildflowers, spices, pomegranates, aloes, figs ... and we are invited to enter, in our imaginations, this lush and fertile land, full of the colours, scents, seasons, and fertility of Creation.

The separation of humanity from Creation disintegrates as we enter into the extended metaphor of this book. Today we had an image of the beloved as a gazelle, or young stag, calling to their loved one who is later drawn as a dove. Through this metaphorical language, boundaries become blurred, and people become Creation, just as the animals, plants and land are Creation. Humanity is set within the landscape, is a part of it, and all is caught up in the greatest love of all – the love of the Creator for this beautiful blue-green marble floating in the equally loved universe, and all that it contains.

Many writers, novelists, and poets seek to explore our intimate relationship with all of Creation. One Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd, who died in 1981, went largely unrecognised during her lifetime, but has recently been discovered as a writer of extraordinary insight. Perhaps now her best-known book, The Living Mountain, takes the reader on a journey of discovery into the complexity and depth of Creation.

She writes:

I have wanted to come to the living things through the forces that create them, for the mountain is one and indivisible, and rock, soil, water and air are no more integral to it than what grows from the soil and breathes the air. All are aspects of one entity, the living mountain.

Although she travelled widely and read richly, she lived her whole life in West Cults, Aberdeenshire, spending days walking in the Cairngorms in all seasons, not seeking to reach the peaks, but rather to be in the mountain, with Creation.

Again in her words:

There I lie, between the fire of the rock, and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain, and snow, the total mountain. Slowly I have found my way in. I have walked out of the body and into the mountain.

A bit closer to home, there is a woman who regularly comes to the Cathedral North lawn, walking with her sticks across the grass behind the trees that I look out to as I sit at my desk. Walking is clearly not easy, but she comes, and once under the trees she throws down her sticks and falls along the edge of the long grass. Though I have seen her often, I still always get a fright, but then I remember. She has come to lie in the grass ... perhaps to be at one with the earth. I have wondered whether she is walking out of her body and into creation.

Seeing this woman, and reading Nan Shepherd, I am aware of my own separation from Creation. I pass through, walking on stone or tarmac pavements, and yet frequently feeling a deep inner desire to be in it. So, sometimes, I stop and gaze through the leaves of a tree to the sky above; or pause to feel the warmth of the sun, or the cold of the rain, on my face; sometimes I feel the scales fall from my eyes, the stoppers from my ears as a blackbird sings from the tree I’m passing. These moments are grace filled, God calling to me. Notice! Come and be here! Here I am, and here you are, and it is very good.

So at the beginning of this Creation Season, let's listen for God’s constant invitation and call, let’s seek out ways to be in Creation, to give time to letting go of destinations, instead discovering the profundity of who and where we are. And when we manage, even if only for a short time, to walk into Creation, may we rejoice and pray perhaps with words similar to these attributed to St Columba:

You are the calm of the sea, in that peace I stay.

You are the deep waves of the shining ocean, with their eternal sound I sing.

You are the song of the birds, in that tune is my joy.

You are the smooth white strand of the shore, in you is no gloom.

You are the breaking of the waves on the rock, your praise is echoed in the swell.

You are the Lord of my life, in you I live. Amen!