The Call to Creation

My breath puffs white against the dark morning as I stretch and then begin walking, accompanied by black boney trees against the dawn. This is my daily call to creation—to remember I am a part of God’s ongoing story. As my steps quicken, my body wakes up and I am glad to be alive. It’s a taste of shalom—harmony, healing, wholeness.

Of course I know that all is not well with the world, that threats to the environment, to the variety of living species and to human survival are dire. But just now, I am walking my prayers for the earth, and for all living things. I step into the grand sweep of God’s creation story, a tiny dot of awareness and gratitude. It reminds me of the T-shirt which shows the Milky Way with a small arrow on the outer edge that says “You are here.”

Interconnection

As we come to the season of Advent, of waiting for the Light of Christ to be born again out of the darkest time of the year, the starry night beckons us to another time when shepherds huddled against the cold on a Palestinian hillside, astounded that the message of angels included them too. Later we will see them kneeling at the crib side with kings and other creatures, a tableau of God’s call for all of us to recognize our interconnectedness. As Doug reminds us in his column,

The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. (Psalm 19)

Urban life conspires to keep us separate and “safe” from the violence that seems to be happening everywhere. TV and other technologies make “others” of what we do not like. When we lose our grounding in nature, it’s easy to forget our connection with water and air, with microbes and mussels, and to do violence to others without thinking about it. As ecotheologian, Thomas Berry, says: “We will neither love nor save what we do not experience as sacred.”

Embedded Stories

But God’s call to creation is an invitation to recognize that we are part of the whole. In her book, Resurgence of the Real, Charlene Spretnak writes:

Our great spiritual traditions, speaking in thousands of languages, have set their sacred stories of ultimate mystery within the grand epic of orbiting planets, changing seasons, eclipses, moon tides, and meteor showers. In the midst of all this action, in the unspeakable beauty of the Garden Planet, the story of every person unfolds, nestled within the embedding stories of family, clan, community, bioregion, nation, continent, planet and cosmos.

Perhaps children are closer to those embedded stories, nestled into the web of life. They consistently identify the environmental crisis as something they worry about. In this issue, Dana Smith Bagnall writes of her British school-children’s petition to Parliament in her article, Eco Mad. For adults who want to fan the flame of our connection to creation, Dan Davies reviews four books on the wonders of creation. Cathy Barsotti and Rob Johnston urge us to see Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth. Julia Dorsey Loomis, an Episcopal priest in southern Virginia, shares her graduation address for an interfaith college audience. And two members of the F@W Pilgrimage to Guatemala, Coleen Myers and Aeren Martinez, describe how their trip fosters global and faith connections for them. We hope all of the stories in this issue will remind you of your particular call to care for the spot in creation’s story that God has given you to tend.

Our theme for next year will be Four Dimensions of Call: 1. Spiritual Practices; 2. Self Knowledge; 3. Service & Learning; and 4. Sabbath Rest. If you have a story to share please let us know.

Blessings for this Christmas season, Marjory  

Marjory Bankson is editor of Faith@Work magazine, artist, relational teacher and author of Call to the Soul and a brand new version of Seasons of Friendship, and is a Steward of The Seekers Church, a faith community of Church of the Saviour in Washington DC.