FAITH MATTERS

Each year from September 1 to October 4, Christians unite for this worldwide celebration of prayer and action to protect our common home. As followers of Christ from around the globe, we share a common call to care for Creation. 

This year’s theme is “To hope and act with Creation”. As Christians, we are called to lift the hope inspired by our faith, the hope of the resurrection. Hope is not without action. We cannot ignore the effects of climate change - weather phenomena, unusual heat, drought, and floods. Caring for our common home is not just an environmental issue, it is a holistic, integral, human, spiritual vision and a matter of integral ecology. 

There are ways we can enact our commitment to caring for our common home such as:

• Spend time outside and reconnect with nature
• Plant a vegetable garden
• Compost food waste
• Always use a reusable water bottle
• Avoid single-use plastics

These are small, practical ways in which we can care for our common home. 

In St Francis of Assisi’s ‘Canticle of Creation’ he refers to our Earth as our sister and mother.

How can Mother Earth look after us if we do not look after her? Creation is groaning because of our selfishness and unsustainable actions that harm her. 

Prayer for the Season of Creation

Triune God, Creator of all,

We praise you for your goodness, visible in all the diversity that you have created, making us a cosmic family living in a common home. Through the Earth you created, we experience love and nourishment, home and

protection.

We confess that we do not relate to the Earth as a Mothering gift from you, our Creator. Our selfishness, greed, neglect, and abuse have caused the climate crisis, loss of biodiversity, human suffering as well as the suffering of all our fellow creatures.  We confess that we have failed to listen to the groans of the Earth, the groans of all creatures, and the groans of the Spirit of hope and justice that lives within us.

May your Creator Spirit help us in our weakness, so that we may know the redeeming power of Christ and the hope found in him. May the groans of the Spirit birth in us a willingness to serve you faithfully, so that we may hear and heal Creation, to hope and act together with her, so that the first fruits of hope may blossom.

Loving and Creator God, we pray that you will make us sensitive to these groans and enable us to have the same compassion as that of Jesus, the redeeming Lord. Grant us a fresh vision of our relationship with Earth, and with one another, as creatures that are made in your image.

In the name of the one who came to proclaim the good news to all Creation, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Jesus, light of the world, guide us.

St. Joseph, journey with us.

St. Mary of the Cross MacKillop, pray for us.

Alison Wright

Director of Faith and Mission