I keep wondering if caring for creation has become something I just try to do – recycle, be a mindful consumer, and especially support local water and air pollution issues – because it’s a matter of justice, of our common humanity. But where is the heart of this? What catches my spirit? It’s almost certainly in two words: ‘presence’ and ‘relationship.’
Photo Credit: Erik Mclean
If I think of the words of scripture that move me most, that somehow are truly foundational for what being in the world means to me, then I begin with Genesis. God speaks creation into being. The wonderful understanding of contemporary science seems to blend with the poetry of Genesis. God’s spirit moves on the face of the waters – God immanent in his creation, present and presence. Then with the story of the burning bush – we stand on holy ground, in the presence of YHWH ‘I am’. And St Paul who brings this together with the whole of creation as becoming, coming to a fullness in Christ.
If ‘the world is charged with the grandeur of God’ then everything in being, all that lives, is in relationship. And relationship is community, a binding together by mutual care.
Photo Credit: Remi Walle
For me, Benedict brings this to a grounded reality, nothing of daily life is forgotten: how we use the gifts of creation – and how every part of life is a holy space and blessed community. All of it, including our frailties. I don’t know how it is for others, but I think I’ve grown into this, as anyone does on this journey.
From being fortunate enough to grow up with parents who enjoyed gardening, growing pretty much everything that came to our table, to later encountering environmental activism for the first time whilst interning with Richard Rohr’s community in the late 1980s. I was really challenged by those months in an environment where nuclear waste had damaged not only the natural world but also the human world, not least the indigenous community. In a later time of reflection, Teilhard de Chardin especially drew me back into a sense of living and praying as part of an incarnational and damaged world.
Teaching in urban schools gave me a real understanding of what deprivation can mean. But none of this comes loudly, with grand themes and thoughts, it comes quietly…I like Benedict’s injunction to ‘listen.’ And, as someone told me, listen is also an anagram of ‘silent’.
Photo Credit: Eric Mok
So any response to creation, any response to living and responding to this gift of life, can only begin in me with a faithful and quiet attentiveness to the presence of the Holy that enfolds us all.
Carmela Hinckley
2024
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