Season of Creation reflection – Day 1

The signs of our time propel the living tradition forward. The biosphere of our blue marble of a planet is under severe duress. The atmosphere is heating up. Populations of song birds, pollinators and amphibians, mammals from bats to moose, and many aquatic species are plummeting. Every year multiple species go extinct at an alarming rate due to human actions.

This raises a new question about the will of God for the world, or more explicitly, abuo the merciful intent of God for all creatures and their ecosystems. Since salvation means making life whole, liberating, healing, forgiving, restoring, cleansing, opening up new possibilities, belief in a God who saves is obviously relevant to the polluted, ravaged, depleted natural world.

A theology of accompaniment sees God’s redeeming action always present and active in service of the flourishing of a world that is currently suffering reversals and death in a horrific way. The living God, gracious and merciful, always was, is and will be accompanying the world with saving grace, including humans in their sinfulness, and humans and all creatures in their unique beauty, evolutionary struggle and inevitable dying…

In Jesus Christ crucified we are gifted with an historical sacrament of encounter with the mercy of God, which points us toward conversion to the suffering earth, sustained by hope for the resurrection of us all.