A few weeks ago a friend introduced me to the poem, Postscript, by Seamus Heaney. In it he urges the reader to make time to visit Flaggy Shore on the Atlantic coast of County Clare. Heaney relates a sequence of fleeting images and sensations – the wind and light, and the ocean ‘wild with foam and glitter’; the surface of a slate-grey lake, ‘lit by the earthed lightning of a flock of swans.’ The poem is about those moments we experience in the natural world that are fleeting and impossible to capture, yet leave a deep impression. The poem ends like this:
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
more thoroughly. You are neither here nor there.
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
as big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
and catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
We all have our own examples of fleeting moments in life or nature which provoked a profoundly emotional response and blew our heart open. In our liturgical calendar we have just entered the season of Creationtide which started on September 1 and ends on October 4 when we remember St Francis. This season encourages us both to celebrate that wonder of creation, but also leads us into prayer, response and action. This year, after these weeks of extreme heat, terrible floods and wildfires that prayer, response and action feels even more urgent.
This Sunday at the 10.00 Eucharist, we will celebrate a new festival at the Cathedral – the Festival of Creation in Christ. Approved by General Synod in May, it has been introduced to the liturgical calendar for the first time this year and is the fruit of worldwide ecumenical conversations. In communion with our sisters and brothers across the planet we will give thanks for our shared and precious home. We will remember our responsibility one to another, rooted in our faith in the Trinitarian nature of God, creator, redeemer and sustainer. And we will reflect on how that faith and hope impels us to live, speak and act as we seek to walk more lightly on the earth.
I know that I am not alone in struggling to discern how to live, speak and act in these days. And yet we have hope in the God who loves the world that God created and who longs for us to have our hearts blown open as we too respond in love.