Season of Creation
From September 1 to October 4, Christians around the world are praying and caring for creation. It’s the Season of Creation celebrated by Christian churches around the globe. The theme for 2021 Is: A home for all? Renewing the Oikos of God.
In an etymological sense, the root of the word Oikos comes from ancient Greek and can be attributed to two meanings: “house” or “family.” In this way, both concepts are integrated in a very meaningful way since the word house refers to the physical inhabited place, our common home, the planet Earth, and the family are those who inhabit the home, all the species that inhabit our common home.
Our family is made up of the whole of humanity and each of the species that inhabit this planet form our home, our common home, a home for all.
Our home is in danger. The climate crisis is causing the loss of habitats and ecosystems that are home to millions of species. This also includes us, humans: our home is endangered by climate disasters and conflicts, so it must be renewed.
Our baptismal call urges us to renew the whole Earth, so that life can flourish.
Guadalupe López Aguilar
During the Season of Creation, we join in prayer and action for our common home. The Season of Creation unites the world’s 2.2 billion Christians around one shared purpose our care for this earth. This year, amid crises that have shaken our world, we’re awakened to the urgent need to heal our relationships with creation and each other. We enter a time of restoration and hope that requires radically new ways of living with creation.
Reflection
We are living in what must surely be the most daunting and arresting moment we have ever faced as a species. We face a developing reality that can either condemn human beings to oblivion or inspire us to wake up to our lives in a dramatically more interesting way. A way that begins in living soberly and creatively towards the crisis of our planet– not as a problem to be solved by engineering an ever better, safer human “bubble”, but as a constantly unfolding obligation to begin considering the remaking of ourselves as ecologically awake human beings.
Susan Murphy, The Koan of the Earth
Prayer
May we have the grace to respect and care for creation.
May all creatures be blessed as a sign of wondrous love.
May we end the suffering of the poor and bring healing to all creation.
May we use our technological inventiveness to undo the damage we have done to creation and to sustain the gift of nature.
May our hearts be inspired with a holy imagination, to rise, freed from the demands to produce and consume, to imagine a just, sustainable way of living, where all have enough, and all may be restored.
Amen
Action
Organize a Creation Walk or Pilgrimage
Encourage sustainable living
Make a concrete lifestyle change in transportation, diet, or energy use.
Participate in campaigns that call for restoration
Reduce use of plastic, especially plastic water bottles and plastic bags.
Reread and discuss Laudato Si
Suggested Reading
Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years.
Pope Francis, Laudato Si (53)
We believe that all is one and that our call is to an active inclusive love that seeks this union with God and the sacred community of life that includes all of creation – air, soil, water, plants, and animals. We see ourselves in union with this community that we hold as the neighbor through whom God continues to be revealed.
Land Ethic Statement, Sisters of Saint Joseph
Let ours be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life.
Earth Charter
You cannot solve a problem with the thinking that created it.
Albert Einstein
Anything else you’re interested in is not going to happen if you can’t breathe the air and drink the water. Don’t sit this one out. Do something.
Carl Sagan
I feel very passionately that we need to take care of the planet and everything on it. Whether it’s saving the Amazon or just being kind to those around you, we need to take care of each other and Mother Earth.
Olivia Newton-John
While the problem can sometimes seem overwhelming, we can turn things around – but we must move beyond climate talk to climate action.
Ted Turner
We are living on this planet as if we had another one to go to.
Terri Swearingen
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
Aldo Leopold
I feel more confident than ever that the power to save the planet rests with the individual consumer.
Denis Hayes
A planet being pushed to the edge will eventually turn on us.
Marco Lambertini
Since our leaders are behaving like children, we will have to take the responsibility they should have taken long ago.
Greta Thunberg