The initial step for a soul to come to knowledge of God is contemplation of nature.
By choosing to create, fill and sustain all things, our God is a God who is intimately connected to God’s creatures.
-    St. Irenaeus of Lyons (120-202 AD)

One of the fundamental things that we claim about God is that God is the Maker, the Creator.
Because of this, we believe that God can be known through creation – an ancient idea. We believe that God reveals God’s self through the natural world in the same way an artist leaves their fingerprints, their mark, a little bit of themselves in each of their creative works.

Today marks the beginning of the Season of Creation, an ecumenical time set aside to focus on the responsibility we have as followers of Jesus to take action to respond to the environmental crises we face. However, also, perhaps even more fundamentally, it is a time to acknowledge and experience the sacredness and centrality of the natural world to our faith, knowledge and experience of God.

And so, as we begin this season, I invite you into the spiritual practice, the prayer practice of contemplation. Contemplate your fellow creatures: the mountains, the rivers, the trees, the weeds, the mosses, the bugs, the birds… It is worth it, for each of these creatures, in the words of Irenaeus, are ‘intimately connected’ to God.

Thanks be to God!

 


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