REFLECTION: Season of Creation

By Rev Dr Clive Ayre

The Season of Creation begins on 1^st September, and thus coincides with start of Spring. The theme this year is “Peace with Creation”. It is an opportunity to reflect on what we believe about God’s gift of Creation. But it is more than that. It is a reminder to be aware of the gap that sometimes opens up between our rhetoric and our action. We will not save the planet by good intentions, and the gap becomes a matter of the integrity of faith. Mind the gap!

Gerald Manley Hopkins has a poem in which he declares:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out like shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reek his rod?

After generations of human treading, the earth is “seared with trade” and “smeared with toil”. It “wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell”. The soil “is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod”.

Traditional Aboriginal people walked the earth barefoot, and they were at one with the earth, their Mother. There was a natural spirituality at work. Because their bare feet touched the earth, and they were connected with it, it was important that they cared for it; and they did that. But what about us? Our feet are shod, and we are separated from the earth. We live in cities in which all too often the earth is covered with concrete as if we were ashamed of it. In this sanitised world, food comes from the supermarket, out of artificial packaging, and we are scarcely aware that it comes from the earth. In our urbanised world we don’t even have Harvest Festivals anymore, at least in Australia, I suspect because we hardly know how to make the connection. We are separated from the earth because our feet are shod – our spiritual feet if you like – and shoes easily turn into boots made for tramping on the earth.

Remember Moses at the burning bush? Before that amazing spectacle Moses felt constrained to take off his shoes. “Moses, take off your shoes, for the ground on which you are standing is holy ground”, he heard God say. It was holy because here was an encounter with the living God. Here was a holy moment, and we might well ask ourselves, in the presence of God, if the eco-crisis of our time has not the makings of a holy moment, a kairos moment of encounter, in which we need to take off our shoes, to let our bare feet feel the earth, and hear what amounts to a divine call, not to free the Hebrew slaves this time, but to free the earth from the oppression of human activity which would presume to enslave it. We need to stand barefoot on the earth and realise that we are on the wrong side of this new burning bush drama!

The Hebrew slaves cried out for freedom, and Moses demanded of the Pharaoh, “let my people go!” But now, it might seem, we have become Pharaoh, and a new Moses is crying out for a new respect for the earth, for God’s creation, as he stands barefoot upon it. The ultimate irony may be that in the end it is we who are freed after all, as once again we are able to perceive the world “charged with the grandeur of God.”