The Season of Creation is upon us. During the Season of Creation, we join with Christians around the world to celebrate in prayer and action. Our Gospel calling is to participate with God in the flourishing of all creation. Our Sunday liturgies from Sep 7-Oct 5 are comprised of prayers, readings, hymns, and liturgies created all over the global Anglican Communion and beyond. These resources have been gathered by Episcopalians, for Episcopalians, and approved for use during this season by Bishops across our church, and our Bishop, Phil LaBelle.
In addition to our shifted liturgical focus, our Spiritual Formation classes will engage the book Creation and the Cross by Elizabeth A. Johnson. We will have the opportunity to converse with a Master Gardener about pollinators on Sep 21, and we will celebrate the Feast of St. Francis with food and a Blessing of the Animals on Oct 5th.
The Creation of a Season
The celebration of this Season began in 1989 when Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I established September 1, a day long associated with the earth in Byzantine culture, as a Day of Prayer for Creation for the Orthodox Church. In 2015, Pope Francis declared it a World Day of Prayer for Creation, and published his encyclical Laudato Si’. The World Council of Churches extended the celebration to October 4th, the Feast Day of St. Francis of Assisi. This ecumenical effort is now directed towards establishing a worldwide Feast of Creation on September 1 to draw attention to the plight of creation and foster collaboration, remediation, and repentance.
Our Liturgy for the Season
Our liturgies in September will open with a penitential order adapted from the “Universal Prayer” in Only One Earth: United Nations Environmental Sabbath/Earth Rest Day (1990, UNEP, 41). By opening with communal confession we acknowledge our responsibility for, and participation in, climate injustice up front and enter into our worship knowing we are already forgiven by God. The subsequent liturgical call to practice climate justice then does not arise from a need to earn God’s forgiveness, but is a way of living our common life together, undergirded by the joy and beauty of worshipping with and alongside all of God’s creation.
The Prayers of the People are from liturgical materials presented at the 78th General Convention; the Eucharistic Prayer is from Salal + Cedar, a ministry of the Anglican Diocese of New Westminster in Vancouver Canada; the Lord’s Prayer is an alternative version found in the Night Prayer of the New Zealand Prayer Book (181); the Post-Communion Prayer is from “Prayers of Intercession for Creation Time 2012,” prepared by Sister Catherine Brennan SSL and Sister Ann Concannon SSL for Churches Together in Britain and Ireland (CTBI) (2012).
A Liturgy for Our Common, Creaturely Life
The liturgy this season is intended to reflect that we humans are creatures living alongside all the other creatures created by God. It is by participating with creation, as a part of creation, that we best rectify the ways we have misused and mistreated God’s beautiful gift of creation.
The words and rhythms may, in many cases, be unfamiliar and perhaps uncomfortable for you. As you pray, allow yourself to pause when an image or phrase strikes you and take the time to reflect on what new thing the Spirit might be stirring in you. Who is the Spirit calling you to be? How is the Spirit calling you to pray? What action might the Spirit be calling you towards?
As a communal practice, liturgy is not only (or even primarily) about our individual life in the Spirit, but shaping our common life as disciples of Jesus in whose incarnation all of creation rejoices. Who is the Spirit calling us to be? How is the Spirit calling us to pray? What action is the Spirit calling us towards, as a community?
May this time of common worship shape us more fully into the beautiful creatures God has called us to be.
–Mother Maria
