Thursday 1 September is the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation.
The annual event is an ecumenical initiative called for by Pope Francis marking the start of Creation Time, a tradition of the Orthodox Church started in 1989, which sees churches hold special reflections on creation for five weeks each year.
Rev Dr Susan Durber has written the following reflection.
Reflection for World Day of Prayer for Creation
Among all the voices calling us to change the way we live in creation are those who say we need a new kind of ‘spirit’, a different kind of wisdom.
Christians from all kinds of churches now recognise that we may find it among indigenous people. Nowadays, if you take part in a World Council of Churches consultation, you will find that indigenous people are part of the conversation. They might belong to the Sami people (Norway), the Ojibwe first nation tribe (Canada) or the Quechua people (Peru). They have an identity older than our present day nation states whose names they put in brackets after their primary name. They have a particularly close relationship to the land, and to the earth itself. When we are all beginning to see how patterns of industrialisation and consuming have devastated the earth, they carry a particular gift. And, as they interpret the Christian story, they reveal what many, over centuries, have missed about the heart of our faith. They show the rest of us how badly we have mis-shaped the faith, just as we have plundered and devastated the earth. And they offer us hope.
The Native American Iroquois people have a ‘great law’, which says that we should always ask, of anything we do today, what impact it will have on the seventh generation to come. Will the decisions we make and the actions we take now benefit our children, unto the seventh generation? They encourage us not to listen to today’s voices, but to listen for the voices of those not yet born.
Indigenous peoples throughout the world have been marginalised, exploited and ridiculed. Many have been reduced to poverty. Their patterns of life have been threatened and their thinking often ignored. But it is time to listen properly to their witness, not to idealise or sentimentalise them, or to treat them like interest for tourists The colonising peoples and the industrialists have made a mess of this precious earth, but there are those who can speak a different wisdom.
It would be empty vanity to think that we can all go back to a kind of original ‘innocence’ in relation to the earth. We cannot undo everything that has lifted many to a better life. But we do need to reconnect with the world we have been given from the generous hands of God, and change our ways so that earth can be healed. In a sense we all need to become ‘indigenous’ people; knowing our origin as part of nature, and really belonging to the places where we live. In the British isles, it’s hard to point to those who are indigenous and those who came later as invaders or migrants. But whatever our story, there is an urgency that we all ‘become’ indigenous in a new sense and that we learn a way of living that honours the earth beneath our feet.
There’s a hymn by the astonishing poet Christopher Smart in which he describes the God who, in Jesus, is incarnate and becomes ‘a native of the very world he made’. This is our calling too, to become newly ‘native’ of the world we have been given, to learn once more to live as we were meant to live, the truly indigenous people of earth. May we learn this wisdom and this joy, in God’s good (quick) time.
Prayer
O God of earth,
give us courage
to set our feet upon the ground
in ways that teach again
that we are made from dust
and belong in creation.
O God of water,
give us thirst
for cool, clean streams,
and a strong desire
that all your creatures
may have fresh water
and all that makes for life.
O God of air,
give us breath
to fill our lungs,
and a pure voice,
that we will find the words
to pray and protest
for a just sharing
and a faithful caring
for the world you made.
O God of all creation,
renew our lives
and change our ways,
for a joyful today
for a hope-filled future
and a Christ-like commitment
to the inheritance of earth.
Amen.
Rev Dr Susan Durber is a URC Minister who previously worked as Christian Aid’s Theology Co-ordinator.
The President and Vice-President of the Methodist Conference have written this prayer. It follows a decision by Conference, which met in London last month, where it agreed that the Methodist Church would join with other Christian Churches in observing the special day.