Season of Creation Continued
Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
What do we mean when we say ‘creation’? It’s easy to pass over the word, or treat it as a Christian synonym for ‘nature’. It’s also easy to romanticise it, and think of ‘creation’ as animals going into the ark, sunsets that put us in a prayerful mood, and so on.
In fact, the word ‘creation’ makes serious theological claims. The first, in the Christian tradition, is that creation is ex nihilo or ‘out of nothing’. Aware of Platonic ideas of the world being created by lesser deities out of pre-existing stuff, earliest Christianity wanted to claim something different: that the one true God is the author of all that exists.
This results in an important theological truth: if you’re not God, you’re a creature. This seems obvious, but according to Pope Francis in Laudato si, it bears repeating: ‘We are not God.’ (§67) Adam and Eve are tempted to eat the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden because it will make them ‘like gods’ (Gen 3:5). This action, reaching out to take the place of God, ruptures our relationship with God: Adam and Eve must leave the garden, and are ashamed before God. It also ruptures our human relationships, introducing domination and inequality: Eve is told that ‘your husband will lord it over you.’ (Gen 3:16). Lastly, it ruptures our relationship with creation: cultivating the land will be arduous, and snakes and humans will be enemies (Gen 3:15).
Ecology is the study of dynamic webs of relationships, of organisms with one another and with their environments. We know that if we impact one relationship in an ecosystem -when fertiliser leaches from fields into rivers for example- that all the relationships in the web are affected: weed grows too fast and chokes the river, fish decline, and with them, predators like birds and otters. As well as drawing our attention to the state of our natural ecologies, Laudato si draws our attention to theological or spiritual ecologies. Pope Francis is asking us to recognise that, just as in a natural ecosystem, a distorted relationship with the earth can distort our relationship with God.
The temptation to be ‘lords’ in our relationships with God, with one another and over creation, is perennial. When we live in domineering and exploitative relationships with one another, and when we dominate and exploit nature, behaving as though we are above our outside it and unaffected by its limits, we are being little ‘lords’ and despots, refusing to take our place as the creatures God desires us to be.
Laudato si invites us to notice the brokenness of all these ecologies, spiritual, human and natural, and to begin the work of restoring them through prayer, gratitude and practical action. In the Season of Creation, we are being invited discover again what it means to be creatures, in relation to all the other created things of the universe, and in relation to God.
Dr Theodora Hawksley
Dr Hawksley is the lead for social and environmental justice programming at the London Jesuit Centre.