Five Propositions on Day of Prayer for Creation

The crisis is not simply one of climate but of nihilism

Following the Orthodox Church, in 2015 Pope Francis announced that the Roman Catholic Church would recognize today as the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation. If we creatures of the sixth day are bidden to pray for our fellow creatures— every winged bird of every kind and every fish with which the waters swarm— then certainly the same faith invites us to pray for the stage, the earth itself, on which God has determined to make a Story with us all.

Words matter— always.

Words matter especially when it comes to matters that matter.

In this case— you’ve got to start somewhere— the church likely stands in need of more than a single day on the calendar to remember that the scriptures call it not nature or the environment but creation.

The name itself makes a claim.

It posits an Other.

As II Maccabees puts it: “Look at the heavens and the earth…and acknowledge that God made them.” The proposition became a rule of faith for Israel and so for the church. For Israel, creation is good as the arena for God to make his covenant with her. The church deviated from this proposition only by putting it more precisely. Thus, creation is done for the sake of Jesus Christ, who also, because Jesus preexists creation, works it.

Words matter when it comes to matters that matter.

In this case, it makes all the difference the newly hallowed day is Prayer for Creation and not Prayer to Creation. The distinction makes all the difference because, as the Bible attests quite clearly, the question before us is never, “Is there God?” but “Which god is God?” As creation, the earth is no more worthy of our worship than my neighbor who answers her calls in the driveway at two in the morning.

Since the sheer fact of creation itself became a rule of faith for Israel, following Robert Jenson, I offer a few propositions regarding the implications of God’s loquaciousness:

1. It’s Creation not Nature: That God creates means there is other reality than God and that it is really other than he. In other words, creation is not in any way an emanation from deity. It is gift not god, not more holy than the aforementioned neighbor and less so, actually, than water, wine, and bread. Put another way, there is no “Mother Earth” because Mary of Nazareth in Galilee bore God in the ark of her belly.