Psalm 104: 24-25
How varied are your works, Lord!
In wisdom you made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
There is the sea, vast and spacious,
teeming with creatures beyond number—
living things both large and small.
There the ships go to and fro,
and Leviathan,
and Leviathan,
which you formed to frolic there.
All creatures look to you to give them their food at the proper time.
When you give it to them,
they gather it up;
when you open your hand,
they are satisfied with good things.
When you hide your face,
they are terrified;
when you take away their breath,
they die and return to the dust.
When you send your Spirit,
they are created,
and you renew the face of the ground.
May the glory of the Lord endure forever;
may the Lord rejoice in his works—
he who looks at the earth, and it trembles,
who touches the mountains, and they smoke.
I will sing to the Lord all my life;
I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.
“A World to Care For”
(Excerpts from Fr. Ed Ciuba’s
“Creation at the Crossroads”)
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“Creation at the Crossroads”)
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To begin, we must understand what our faith teaches us about God, the Creator. When Christians celebrate Eucharist on Sunday, they profess the Nicene Creed, which begins “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible…”
These words are based on the accounts of creation in the Book of Genesis: God divides his work into three days of separation (light/darkness, heaven/earth, waters above/waters below). This is followed by three days of decoration (sun, moon, stars, birds, fish and living creatures). After each stage, the harmony, order, and beauty of the earth is punctuated by the words “God saw how good it was!”
On the sixth day of creation, Scripture tells us in a symbolic narrative, “God created man in his image; in divine image he created him; male and female he created them. And God looked at everything he had made and he found it very good.”
In the ancient world, “image” was used to represent the king’s presence where he could not be in person. When applied to the Genesis text that means that to be created in the “image of God” is to be God’s representative on the earth.
Every human being, created out of love, made in God’s image, has an immense dignity. We are capable of self-knowledge, self-giving, and of entering into communion with other persons. Each of us is the result of the thought of God; each of us is willed and loved by God; each of us is necessary. We have been chosen to be partners in the dialogue of creation, worthy caretakers of that which is meant by God to exist in harmony, good order, and right relationships. We’ve been fashioned as relational beings who can’t exist without other relational beings. We share a world of nature on which we depend for air, water, and food – life itself. The wisdom of the Scriptures suggests that human life is grounded in three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships: with God, with our neighbor, and with the earth itself. And, we are part of a larger community of life which God recognized as “very good” at the end of the first creation story (Gen 1:31).
- Scripture teaches over and over that Creation is good. Reflect about an experience in your life that has taught this to you. Share in the comments below.
- Research about a local community that is experiencing environmental degradation. For example, a community near a power plant, industrial wast site, or landfill. What can you do to help protect the habitats of the wild life species in your area?
