we may not find your gates closed for ever.
We are fallen;
in your compassion, have mercy on us.
Francis of Assisi also had a keen sense of creation voicing its praise to our Creator, and the repeated phrase ‘praised be you’ in his Canticle of Creation suggests that each element of creation finds a voice to praise God: “Praised be you, my Lord, by our sister, mother earth, who sustains and governs us and produces various fruits and coloured flowers and grasses.”6
Season of Creation
In some parts of the worldwide Church, the month of September is becoming a focus of prayer and environmental action, often climaxing with a celebration of creation on 4 October, the Feast of St Francis of Assisi, or in England with the annual Harvest Festival. The Feast of the Holy Cross, coming midway through September, also presents an opportunity to reflect on the cosmic significance of the cross and to give some welcome Christological grounding to the season.
These developments originated from a proposal of the Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I in 1989. He suggested that the Churches observe 1 September (for the Orthodox the first day of the ecclesiastical year) as a day ‘of the protection of the natural environment’ and to offer ‘prayers and supplications to the Maker of all, both in thanksgiving for the great gift of creation and in petition for its protection and salvation’. The proposal was endorsed by a meeting of Orthodox primates held in Istanbul in 1992. More recently the Anglican Consultative Council at its meeting in Hong Kong in 2019 called for a day of penitence for our misuse of creation, and in February 2020 the General Synod of the Church of England, responding to a sense of urgency about climate change, set new targets for all parts of the Church to work to become carbon ‘net zero’ by 2030.
In the Church of England, this new ‘Season of Creation’ has been adopted by some parishes and schools as part of an ecumenical initiative to raise awareness of the urgent ecological challenges facing our generation. In supporting this initiative, rather than invent a new liturgical season, amend the Calendar or authorize a different set of readings to replace those provided in the Lectionary for any particular Sunday, this volume of resources aims to supplement existing texts with a range of liturgical material. Some of the material is newly commissioned, including an Act of Commitment for the Care of Creation. Other material has been garnered from existing texts scattered through the corpus of Common Worship which might otherwise be overlooked, such as prayers relating to the Agricultural Year from Times and Seasons.
In gathering this material into one accessible volume, it is hoped that we will grow not only in praise of our creator, but in self-understanding of our stewardship. Delighting in God and delighting in God’s creation brings us fully alive as women and men, as the seventeenth century Anglican divine, Thomas Traherne, writes:
You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars, and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world. Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels; till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all ages as with your walk and table; till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made; till you love men so as to desire their happiness with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own; till you delight in God for being good to all: you never enjoy the world.7
+ Robert Exon
March 2020
1 Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, 5.
2 The five marks of mission have been developed by the Anglican Consultative Council since 1984. They have been widely adopted as an understanding of contemporary mission and were adopted by the General Synod of the Church of England in 1996. In 2012, the ACC added wording to the fourth mark, to include the need for Christians to challenge violence and work for peace.
• To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom
• To teach, baptise and nurture new believers
• To respond to human need by loving service
• To seek to transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and to pursue peace and reconciliation
• To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation, and sustain and renew the life of the earth.
3 Augustine, Commentary on St John’s Gospel, 8, 1.
4 Tertullian, On Prayer, 29.
5 Gregory of Nazianzus, Dogmatic Poems, 29.
6 The Cross and Creation in Christian Liturgy and Art, p.202 (Christopher Irvine)
7 Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, I, 28-30.
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