By Nigel Guthrie, Priest Vicar
The General Synod has recently agreed a new ‘Festival of Creation in Christ’ which will be celebrated on the first Sunday in September as the beginning of a ‘Season of Creation’. It will be coming shortly to a Cathedral near you! The season concludes on Sunday 4 October with the Feast of St Francis of Assisi. It mirrors the Roman Catholic Season of the same name which was inaugurated by Pope Francis in 2015.
Whilst I welcome the attention being drawn to the importance of celebrating, and praying for, Creation in the Christian Church, I’m not entirely sure that we need another Festival! In my Devon parishes we found plenty of opportunity to celebrate and give thanks for the wonders of Creation on the occasions of Plough Sunday, Rogation and Harvest Festival. And I feel that regular preaching and interceding about the health of our planet, and our responsibility for it, might be better than a once-a-year splurge.
Also, there are plenty of resources in our tradition which have been neglected in recent years like the Benedicite, which we used to sing regularly at Matins in my home parish church in Bishop’s Stortford. This magnificent hymn to the creator begins ‘O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord, praise him, and magnify him for ever.’ And invokes all aspects of creation in the offering of praise. It is included in the Book of Common Prayer as an alternative to the Te Deum at Morning Prayer and is taken from an addition to the Book of Daniel. Rather confusingly it appears in modern versions of the bible (like the NRSV) in the Apocrypha as “The Prayer of Azariah and the three Jews (or three young men)”. Do have a look if you are not familiar with it.
Perhaps the closest text to the Benedicite which we use regularly in our worship is Psalm 104 which is sung on the 20th evening at Evensong. Like the Benedicite it encompasses the whole of Creation including ‘the foundations of the earth’, ‘the springs into the rivers’, the birds, trees, beasts and humans. Each aspect is understood in relation to their place in God’s created order.
We are used to thinking about ‘human rights’ and ‘animal rights’, but what are we to make of recent moves to acknowledge the legal rights of rivers and forests? I’m currently reading Robert Macfarlane’s book ‘Is a River Alive’ in which he describes his meeting with three very different river systems. His writing is sometimes rather florid, but he feels deeply about what he sees, both the beauty of healthy rivers and the tragedy of rivers that have died due to pollution. Macfarlane doesn’t (so far in my reading!) set out a specific agenda for recognising rivers as alive, but he reflects powerfully on their life-giving power and our human capacity to destroy it.
As we come to the end of the current heatwave and look ahead to what climate change will mean for us, for our agriculture and for those who come after us it is easy to feel frightened or even despairing. But using ancient texts like the Benedicite and Psalm 104 can help us to rediscover our sense of wonder at what God has caused to exist and to sharpen our resolve to do what we can to leave behind a legacy which is life-giving and hope-filled.