The Season of Creation

Friend Xerxes alerts us that in the month of September, “Christians around the world join in the Season of Creation.”

“For far too long, Christian churches have ignored the environment we live in. Indeed, we have used the words in Genesis as excuses to ‘multiply’ and to ‘subdue the earth.’”

            “The Season of Creation challenges us to recognize that we are part of this earth, not separate from it.”

Good of Xerxes to let me know. This “Season of Creation” does not appear in the Catholic liturgical calendar, and it has never been mentioned at a parish I attend. 

Indeed, it is hard to see how it fits in: the liturgical calendar traces the process of salvation, from anticipation of Christmas to the Feast of Christ the King. It is not about creation and the time before the Fall. Nor is celebrating rivers and rocks the concern of religion in general. That is more the purview of empirical science.

Which our culture is perhaps inordinately concerned with, on the whole. It is the ethics and the salvation and the next life we tend to forget.

Which I guess justifies Xerxes’s assertion that Christian churches have ignored the environment. Indeed, the Bible tells us to be “in this world, but not of it,” and the Church warns against the temptations of “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” 

Moreover, Exodus tells us “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.” One ought not, in sum, to worship nature. This is the great temptation, the great idolatry.

In Genesis 1, as Xerxes admits, God’s prime directive to mankind is “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” God, apparently, is making “excuses.” For yeah, what we really all want is the guilty pleasure of working hard, raising a family, and bettering the world, instead of lying back and admiring the sunsets.

The point of man is to take the clay and breathe spirit into it: to spiritualize the raw material of creation to build the New Jerusalem. Moreover, the essence of morality is the struggle against our natural instincts.  That is what raises us above weasels and wolverines.

So it seems we have a choice: either follow God, the good, the wisdom of the ages, the reason for our existence, and the spiritual universe of art and culture; or follow Xerxes, Mother Nature, and the World Council of Churches.

We have come to the crossroads.