Bless the Lord of all Creation

God’s Creation has long been central to the praise offered by His people. We need to rediscover a theology and a liturgy in which we respond as creatures with thanksgiving to our Creator

The pope’s encyclical Laudato si’ challenges our behaviour patterns and our ethics. It challenges the way we worship and our entire liturgy. Within this context it is quite startling to realise just how much the temple and the synagogue liturgy in the Old Testament focused on Creation. When, as a devout Jew, Jesus worshipped in the temple or in the synagogue he and his fellow Jewish worshippers were enfolded in reminders of the meaning and sanctity of Creation.

Almost every major Jewish feast, Pesach (Passover), Shavuot (Pentecost), Succoth (Tabernacles), and Hanukkah (Dedication) – to say nothing of the weekly sabbath and the jubilee, were celebrations of Creation before ever they became a celebration of God’s saving actions in history. As celebrations of Creation these feasts brought people to praise, bless and give thanks to God the Creator; they also inculcated respect for Creation in the way the Jewish people lived and in their practical day-to-day choices.

Prophetic promises about God’s salvation were invariably described and interpreted precisely through their relationship to God’s overwhelming power as the Creator of the universe. It was God’s creative power that proved that God was capable of saving his people and overcoming every evil because He was the Lord of History. The very temple where Jesus worshipped was designed to re-present Creation (a new Garden of Eden), especially the Sanctuary; while the veil of the temple itself was so crafted that its very fibres represented the four elements that God had ordered in His work of creating: fire, air/breath/spirit, earth and water.

At every one of the thrice daily acts of worship in the temple and in the synagogue, prior to the recitation of the Jewish “act of faith” (the Shema), the first prayer was the Yotser – blessing and thanksgiving for Creation. The Jewish people continually strove to rediscover the true nature of their God and of his relationship to Creation. However they had also to contend with an overpowering temptation to join in the degrading worship of pagan nature gods. It was not till the period of the Exile in Babylon they conquered this temptation; they never succumbed again.

On this spiritual journey the Jewish people used their many creation stories as a means of deepening spiritual insight. Take Psalm 104: meeting us in Creation it is as if the composer had created a love duet out of the dialogue between God’s creative love and the hymns of praise of his creatures. In Daniel (esp 3:57) Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, having, in the fiery furnace, repented for the people’s apostasy, discern their salvation in a vast choir of praise in which every aspect of Creation praises its Creator.

For the ancient Jewish people, denying their God and His Law led into barren deserts; it was the prophets who showed them that returning to their God brought them into a new lush, fertile and healing Garden of Eden (Sirach, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Joel). The early Church retained this sense of the inextricable link between the created world and salvation. It is no accident that John in his Gospel, describes the Agony, the Cross, the Tomb, and therefore the Resurrection, as all taking place in a garden. It is also no accident that the early liturgy stressed the bringing of gifts of nature for sharing with each other and especially with the many destitute poor; nor that it was from these acts of self-giving that the bread for the Eucharist was taken.

 And, it was no accident that Lent, as well as being integral to the Rite of Initiation, was concerned, in what was potentially a season of famine, with a radical recognition of the relation between the believer, his/her neighbour, God and the created world.
Somehow the sheer vibrancy of the inextricable tie between Creation and salvation has waned in our worship. Why? Greek and Roman philosophies separated matter and spirit in a way that the Hebrew mind had never done. Some spiritual movements saw the soul as enslaved by matter, while others were Manichean dualists, seeing nature and its forces as bad. Pagan nature worship, especially when allied with political power caused the Church to withdraw in on itself.

The liturgy itself became more formal and ritualised, losing the connectedness and intimacy that it had once had in a smaller Church with mutually interdependent communities and members. Mass migrations from the land and industrialisation enthroned the technological, which in turn became an instrument for the subjugation of nature – while Creation receded into being seen as a romantic idyll, and its beliefs and practices merely folklore or folk custom. Perhaps we have also pushed Creation into the background and interpreted it in a materialistic way because over the last couple of centuries we have become embarrassed by scriptural fundamentalism as it related to just two of the creation stories and we have failed to break through the over-weaning dominance of a materialist scientific method that is sometimes presented as the only instrument for interpreting reality.

For centuries country areas have held on to Rogation Days, Ember Days, Harvest Festivals, and agricultural blessings, alongside the more formal liturgical structures; but in towns and cities many of these ceremonies and celebrations have died out. In fact some of them have disappeared from the Calendar altogether. The Second Vatican Council attempted to make the liturgy more flexible, more adapted to local circumstances and more closely linked to existential issues and to nature. It tried to revive the relationship of the rite of the Offering of the Gifts to Creation, in particular by using the blessings over the bread and wine that come from the Passover Seder. However, much of this was optional and many priests seem to have felt it disruptive of a proper recollection at Mass. When the very survival of myriad species, of a balanced climate, and of an environment that sustains life is at stake, Catholic parishes, communities and dioceses cannot simply rely on a moral imperative to make environmentally sustainable decisions.

An inner conversion is needed so that we can rediscover the meaning of God and of salvation within and through a renewed theology of God understood firstly as revealing himself and meeting us in his Creation and continuous sustaining of the entire universe.

Paul Hypher is a retired priest in the diocese of East Anglia.