The Season of Creation is the annual worldwide celebration, an opportunity to pray and respond together to the cry of Creation. During this season, the ecumenical family around the world unites to contemplate and care for our common home. The Season begins on September 1st the World Day of Prayer the Care of Creation, and ends on October 4th, the Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi.
This year, we will unite around the theme “Living Water” inspired by Ezekiel 47:9 and 12. Faith leaders from across the world, including Pope Leo, are inviting us to prayer and act during this special season. Here is Pope Leo’s message to us for this Season of Creation, with the exhortation to “seek peace and care for creation”. As always, Pope Leo addresses the whole of the human condition, the intertwining impacts of war and discord, and the need for all of us to become collaborators in God’s work of renewal.
Join us in reading, reflecting, and praying for our common home each week.
“They shall beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks” (Isaiah 2:4)
WEEK 5 - Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A
Life is God’s Gift – How do we understand the life we have and how does this affect the ways in which we act? It seems that for much of the history of the human family has been focussed on sarcity rather than abundance. There is a fear that shows itself in our behaviour over and over again, and this fear is that we will not have enough and this leads us to grasp at what we can get. It is difficult to know which came first – the fear of missing out or the tendency to grasp. Whichever way around it is does not really matter, the consequence of this pattern of thinking and behaving is more pressing.
The many crises our family faces in our time are directly caused by this, limited energy, global climate changes, food shortage, water scarcity, political upheaval, escalating conflicts – these all have their root cause in the way in which we view life, ourselves, and the earth. In today’s Gospel we are challenged to see life from a different perspective. The vineyard is created by someone else and is therefore a gift. There are dues to be paid and ultimately what the tenants have is not theirs.
The parable echoes in many ways the story of Creation in Genesis. God creates the universe, he creates the Earth, he gives life to animals and plants, and he then creates us, the human family, to tend and keep this Garden. Maybe, the human frailty that we see in the actions of Adam and Eve in this story is this same frailty that has caused us to do so much harm to our common home – the tendency to take because we lack the trust to be happy to wait to be given what we need.
The ways in which we receive this gift: How do we receive the gift of life and the goodness of God? How are we given what we need? Again, we must overcome our tendency towards a certain way of thinking to open ourselves to the truth. We can see that throughout history that the human family has fallen into a misguided way of thinking about the true nature of reality. I would suggest that we are often regrettably acting from a misapprehension that God works only through the unseen spiritual world and that God’s goodness is not mediated to us through the material world.
It is true that God does direct our hearts and minds, that we are beings with a spiritual dimension that cannot be located in the world that we can touch, see, or smell. It would be a mistake, however, to exclude God from acting through matter – matter is not neutral in our relationship with God. Think of how we receive the energy that enables us to be present here today. How do we receive this? We receive it in our food. Sunlight is received by grass, leaves, algae, seaweed, and transformed into sugars through a process called Photosynthesis. This plant life is received by animals and the energy stored in the sugars (that began in the sun!!) is released. We then receive this energy by eating our veggies and roast dinners. The energy from sunlight is passed on to you and that is how you are able to move. Now, if you struggle to believe in miracles take a closer look at this process, I think it could change your mind. All of this is also possible because of the presence of water in the atmosphere, seas and oceans, rivers and streams, plants, animals, and us. Without the presence of water none of this could happen.
Now, St Paul tells us that God keeps the whole universe in being, the writers of Genesis tell us that God creates all life, God’s goodness is given to us through what is material as well as the spiritual. It is all given out of love, and the return God wants? To be loved and known. God – Human – Earth - Relationship and Covenant: What does this mean for us? What does tell us about the situation we find ourselves in? How does this change us? What can we do? In the Old Testament our attention is drawn to something quite profound that flows out of this interconnectedness – creation is a threefold relationship between God, the Human Family, and the Earth with all of her creatures. Creation is not merely the individual elements that make up the universe, it is the interconnected whole living in the freedom that comes from right relationship.
In fact, we see in many of the books of the Old Testament that when the human family forgets this and lives as if this trinity of relations did not exist then the covenant has been broken, and the human family and the earth suffer. In our time many of us have been separated from nature in such a way that we have forgotten our intimate need of each other, and this division means that we are no longer living the fulness of the covenantal life that God wants us to have. We have forgotten that life is a gift, and we have forgotten that the human family and nature are also gifts to each other.
The tenants in today’s Gospel have forgotten this and are driven by a mistaken view of themselves, the land on which they live, and the Landlord who owns that land. They have taken possession of land that is not theirs to own, and are living divided from the land. Therefore, the landlord decides to take the land from them and give it to more deserving tenants. 21 This is a parable and not meant to be taken literally. The point is that when we hold a wrong view of ourselves, we will hold a wrong view of Creation, and we will not give to God what is due – and what is this? Our very selves in complete trust. Now, this is not to say we are not meant to work to produce and to feed ourselves. As the liturgy beautifully illustrates in the consecration - fruit of the earth, and work of human hands, when given back to God is returned to us blessed. What it does mean is that we need to discover a true vision of ourselves and our brothers and sisters of Creation.
As we have seen earlier the human fear that we do not have enough or that someone might take what is ours leads to grasping; we want to own what is not ours to own and fail to return to God what is God’s and to share with the rest of creation. So, we exploit Sister Mother Earth for everything that we can get, and we build great storage barns for ourselves, and we ignore what Jesus told us about the way in which nature, in a sense, trusts in the goodness of God to be clothed and fed. The opposite of this trusting leads us to ownership of what is not ours to own, and a division of the human family which leads to suffering and causes the very scarcity that we fear.
So, how to mend the broken relationship to each other and Sister Mother Earth, and Sister Water, and the whole of creation? It is not easy; we have much unhelpful thinking to undo. We must discover over and over again the true view of the human being as God sees us and knows us, and a true view of life as a gift, given freely to us by God, who only desires that we offer love and trust in return. This way of understanding ourselves will free us to live in a deep intimacy with God and Earth, one where the fulness of life is for all.
St Francis of Assisi, whose feast day we celebrate today, was known by the many in his own day as the Poverello – the little poor man. His early brothers before adopting a name for themselves were known as the poor men of Assisi. Over the course of the last 800 years the ideal of poverty of St Francis has been much discussed and often misunderstood. The early friars did not go without – going without was not the understanding of poverty that St Francis held – what he wanted for his friars was to live without anything of their own, and what they needed they grew or tended themselves, or they worked, not for money, but for the actual things they needed. He had recognised that with ownership often came conflict, and that it was a strange idea that we human beings could own that which was created in relationship with us. We are in fact tenants, and our rent is love, trust, and a life lived together. It is going to be essential for us to move beyond our fear of scarcity and suffering – which in fact we cause because of our fear through grasping and division – into a deep trust that God will provide for us both materially and spiritually, he will give us the grace we require to tend and keep His Garden, and how do we know this? Because He sent His Son. Just like the Landlord of the parable the Son was sent.
Jesus was sent to us to remind us of the true nature of our life and the real relationship we have with God and Earth, and to fulfill the covenant God has made with the whole of Creation. Yes, it is true that human fear led to the Passion and Death of Jesus, but the Resurrection promises us that God is not going to 22 take the Vineyard away from us and give it to someone else, but He is going to continue to offer his Gifts to us so that what we have harmed can be healed. We will be, if we are open, brought back into the Covenant between God – the Human Family – Earth, and live together in the fulness of life.
From Brother Ade Green OFM Cap, Guardian of Ard Friary, Centre for the Care of Creation