Pastor’s Corner for the Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, by Fr. Russell Pollitt SJ
Creation is God’s gift. Are we truly grateful?
This Sunday, the Season of Creation begins. It runs from the 1st of September to the 4th of October annually. Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I proclaimed the 1st of September as a Day of Prayer for Creation for the Eastern Orthodox Church in 1989. Other major Christian European churches embraced it in 2001, and Pope Francis embraced it for the Roman Catholic Church in 2015.
During this Season, the world’s 2.2 billion Christians are invited to pray for, become aware of our impact on, and strive to change their lifestyles to care for creation. The Season of Creation unites the global Christian family around one shared purpose: the care of all that God has given us as gifts. It is an annual ecumenical season where we pray and act together as a Christian family for our common home.
The Season of Creation is also a time of renewal. We are invited to renew our relationship with our Creator and all creation through celebration, conversion, and commitment.
In Pope Francis’s words, this “time for creation” offers individual believers and communities a fitting opportunity to reaffirm their personal vocation to be stewards of creation and to thank God for the beautiful handiwork he has entrusted to our care.
As we celebrate God’s gift of creation, we are first invited to be grateful for what we have been given. We then seek conversion for how we contribute to environmental degradation (through our consumer attitudes, littering, and wastefulness), and we make a firm commitment to intentionally seek ways to change what needs to change in our lives.
We at Trinity will ask God to change our hearts of stone throughout this season into hearts that appreciate, care for, and love creation. Each week, we will include the Pope’s intention—for creation—in our prayers at Mass.
On Sunday, September 15th, we will intentionally celebrate all our liturgies to celebrate creation, pray for our wounded planet, and commit ourselves to caring for God’s gifts.
You will also notice colour-coded bins outside the church during this Season of Creation. These are an invitation and an appeal to you to bring your recyclables – paper and cardboard, plastics and glass – rather than discarding them together with household waste – to the Church on Sundays. Use this to teach people in your homes about the need to recycle and care about how we live our daily lives. You will also be helping to turn the tide on the throw-away society and to create a circular economy.
It might be helpful to begin reflecting on your own attitude to creation. Do you live a lifestyle that glorifies God’s handiwork? Are you careful with your usage of water and power, the things you choose to buy, and the way you dispose of waste in your house?