Thursday, May 27th
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Created For Relationships
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Hebrews 11:1
Our Creation Care Team is joining a book study called, Hope Matters: Why Changing the way we think is critical to solving the environmental Crisis.
What caught our eye was this write up by A Rocha Canada:
“And yet so often the narratives and messages that dominate public conversation on the environment focus on the threat and doom of inaction as a way of trying to motivate human behaviour. Kelsey draws on a rich interdisciplinary tapestry of research to show how this has failed to create change. She goes on to demonstrate how hope can offer a viable alternative to empower humans to care for the world they know and love.
We will bring this book into conversation with Christian theology - asking how a faith perspective can motivate change. Not the simplistic hope of a supernatural cure, but rather the hope that comes through patiently living the kind of life God has called human beings to. What one might call, 'the ecosystem of God.' "
When I first read this, I went off on a tangent of reflecting on living a life of hope grounded in patiently living the kind of life God has called us to live. My focus was on my relationship with God, faith, scripture. Then I tuned into the phrase ‘the ecosystem of God’ and I realized I was missing the point. It is about relationship. We humans, our faith, our religion, scripture has been interpreted to just focus on us, but we are only one part of a vast creation. Everything is in relationship. My journey over the past year with St. Stephen’s has opened my eyes to re-examining the Gospel of reconciliation through Jesus.
I’d like to share excerpts from Ruth Valerio’s A Rocha blog, God of All Ecosystems:
“To be a follower of Jesus is to live in a three-fold relational schema and caring for the wider natural world is an essential part of that. Human beings are created for relationships: with God, with each other, and with the wider creation; that the Fall broke those relationships, and that Jesus came to restore them on every level (ie his life, death and resurrection was about more than reconciling human beings to God, as important as that is). We are called to join in this Gospel of reconciliation in our own lives, as individuals and as churches, to work for the restoration of relationships – peace – on all levels.
These relationships stem from the fact that we have been created by, and we reflect, a God who has relationships at his heart who is a Trinity. Human beings, therefore, are fundamentally relational: we don’t exist in splendid independent isolation from what and who is around us, we find our identity through the relationships that make up our lives – with God, with others, and with the natural world – and when any of those are missing or disordered then our personhood/our humanity suffers. This relates more broadly than to humans alone, because the fact is that the whole natural world is built on relationships. We are used to calling them ecosystems and so miss what they reveal to us, but theologically they are simply relationships.
Think about it: everywhere you look, everything you see (and don’t see) is in relationship with something else. There is not a single thing that exists in this world that is not linked to something else. Our whole world is permeated with, and predicated upon, ecosystems: thousands and thousands of them, interlinking and weaving in and out of each other.
And I suddenly thought, ‘A-ha, of course!’. Of course we live in a world where nothing is on its own and everything is in relation to other things. This world exists because the Trinitarian God, who has relationships at the core of who he is, has poured himself out and created something that expresses himself. Of course, then, this world is made up of ecosystems, because it reflects a God who is utterly relational.”
We need relationships. God is relational. As Valerio says relationships form our identity. Our relationship to God, to other humans, to creation. Including creation in my relationship with God makes me more whole, more human, more of who I was created to be. This is the life God calls us to.
From Celtic Prayers from Iona by John Philip Newell:
“There is no plant in the ground
but tells of your beauty, O Christ.
There is no life in the sea
but proclaims your goodness.
There is no bird on the wing, there is no star in the sky,
there is nothing beneath the sun
but is full of your blessing.
Lighten my understanding of your presence all around, O Christ.
Kindle my will to be caring for Creation.”