5 September

Dear friends,

On Sunday, we enter the Season of Creation in the Christian liturgical year. It runs from the 1st of September to the 4th of October. We kick things off with the Feast of Creation, also known as Creation Day. As the website of the ecumenical Feast of Creation highlights, this Sunday is rooted in an ancient liturgical tradition, but it has gained much popularity across Christian traditions since 1989. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Dimitrios I, invited “the entire Christian world to offer every year on this day prayers and supplications to the Maker of all, both as thanksgiving for the great gift of Creation and as petitions for its protection and salvation.” The shared hope is to celebrate more intentionally God’s act of Creation as a foundational mystery of faith. 

The feast invites us to contemplate the great mystery of Creation first and foremost through a Christological lens. Therefore, it is entirely fitting that our readings for this Sunday reflect that mystery: Genesis 1:1–2:3 and John 1:1–5. Both Genesis and John begin with the words “in the beginning”. Both give witness to God’s loving act of creation. John specifically invites us to understand Christ’s role in this creation drama. It is exciting stuff, to be honest, and I cannot wait to dive into the details on Sunday.

For now, I thought I might simply add to this invitation an acknowledgement of the death of one of our time’s greatest poets – Wendell Berry. Berry devoted his life to the interdependence, the wholeness, the oneness of people, land, weather, animals, and family. As the foreword to his book The Gift of the Good Land says: “To touch one is to tamper with them all. We live in one functioning organism whose separate parts are artificially isolated by our culture”. Therefore, he says, the gift of the good land has strings attached. We have the earth on loan and only for as long as we practise good stewardship. 

Berry passed away at the age of 92 on Monday. His most famous poem, “The Peace of Wild Things”, is particularly fitting for Sunday, and I encourage you to check it out. I would like to share with you another of his poems today, though, titled “I go among the trees and sit still”:

I go among trees and sit still.

All my stirring becomes quiet

around me like circles on water.

My tasks lie in their places

where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes

and lives a while in my sight.

What it fears in me leaves me,

and the fear of me leaves it.

It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.

I live for a while in its sight.

What I fear in it leaves it,

and the fear of it leaves me.

It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,

mute in my consternations,

I hear my song at last,

and I sing it. As we sing,

the day turns, the trees move.

—

Have a lovely weekend, and do take some time to go and sit among the trees.

Marius