Creation Spirituality
by Jay Rochelle

The original blessing is that God, having created all things, proclaims them good. "All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful: the Lord God made them all." So sang we in the hymn and so it is. There is a logic built into the household of God's creation: all things interrelate. Creation contains a harmony of being which is ordered by God.

The ongoing blessing is that God out of infinite wisdom and tenderness continually cares and provides for the creation. That the creation continues at all, according to Jewish and Christian belief, is due to the creative action of God in upholding all things. The Word is the creative power and should that Word be withdrawn, all things that are must cease to exist. All things co-inhere toward mutual sustenance.

The Eternal One brings into being all that is. But our is-ness is like that of the grass, which one day grows up and the next fades and dies. This is true of the is-ness of all the created order. God the Eternal One creates all the many temporally-bound things.

Part of human self-consciousness is our awareness of our temporal boundedness. There was a time when we were not and there is a time when we shall not be, as we understand being-in-time. We cannot imagine being outside of time once we attain self-consciousness. This is our glory as human beings and it also sows the seeds of our defeat.

We were created out of God's love, out of God's freedom, and as such we can stand apart from God's love and freedom to try to make a place of our own over against God and the creation. But this move leads us to search endlessly for the home we have left, which we hope or plan to create on our own apart from our center in God. Marxist and capitalist utopias alike are attempts to make a heaven on earth. Both attempts set us against creation and not in it. Today we pay heavy dues in East and West because we set ourselves apart from the creation.

We are created and called to be stewards of the garden. Much ink has been spilled since the early sixties on how stewardly Christians have been or not been. Some writers claim that domination is the more likely sign of Christian ecological response. If so, we must confess this sin and seek to act responsibly toward the future. Cynicism and despair are not acceptable responses.

The spiritual dilemma from which all others unfold is that we must use the creation in order to survive. But the temporal order requires balanced, harmonious, just usage of the resources we have been given. This is what we mean by the term "stewardship." We can be stewards only if we listen to the created order carefully, to discern the limits to growth and the boundaries of consumption and waste. Participation and harmony are key words. We live in a harmonious system of mutually interactive supplies and demands, of which we are a part.

In the twentieth century, we have learned that we participate in natural processes which we human agents describe and regulate and alter. The myth of objectivity is gone. We know that we cannot observe a process without changing it by the very presence of our observation. We have, in other words, become planted in the creation by the very scientific tools we devised to pull us out of creation for the purpose of control. We know that we will destroy ourselves when we destroy the creation.

The only choice is appropriate technology. This is the one choice we can make which focuses steadily on the principles of stewardship; namely, reasonable use, limits to growth, and human participation in earth's ecology.

Christians are called to the eucharistic life. We are called to a spirit of thanksgiving for the created order; we are the animals who render praise and thanks. Other species may be able so to do, but we don't know how they render praise and thanks. Humans may agree that responsible use of creation, paying attention to the limits to growth, and understanding that our participation in earth's ecology are all factors in thanksgiving. We offer back to our Creator that which was given, of what we are given and of what we have made.

To give thanks is the original form and method of recycling. What was given is offered back; it is recycled in prayer and praise. At the heart of recycling might be this sense of prayer and praise, of wanting to pay attention to the created order and not to use it or abuse it, but to be grateful for it. When we recycle, we make a statement that receives it s final meaning and sanctification in the church's liturgy. Recycling tin, paper, plastic and glass receive their meaning and hallowing because they are an offering. Offering the creation to its Creator receives its ultimate hallowing in the eucharistic prayer and festival of the church.

Lutherans and other Christians hold common faith about creation. The special circumstances that made us a confessing movement in Western catholocism made us emphasize aspects of faith other than the creation. The Reformers had not argument with Rome over God as Creator, Preserver and Sustainer of the natural world. On this matter they were in agreement, though Lutherans might speak of orders of creation and Rome of natural law.

The reform was initially concerned with two major issues: one was the alleged submersion of the Gospel under a host of accretions which had grown with the centuries. The second was the church's authority in teaching and ecclesial matters.

The dividing issues were under justification and sanctification, and responsibility and authority in the magisterium of the church. In common with the Western church, we received a legacy of the scholastic age which tended to identify the persons of the Holy Trinity with specific functions. This tendency seems to have been exacerbated by the Reformation, which centered on Christ and God's redemption and not on creation and sanctification. Then again, the reformers thought theirs was a short-lived mission to correct a few errors; they did not expect to become a "denomination."

The Reformation was accompanied by the rise of entrepreneurs and colonialism in northern Europe, which put great emphasis on the rights and the faith of individuals, put less stress on community, and was primarily attentive to the natural world for its wealth and goods.

With redemption as the central issue, and one which was dislodged from its setting in a common household of faith, the church lacked the spiritual insight and theological grounding to speak out early against the tide of environmental destruction that accelerated with the rise of the machine age. With redemption as a cosmic drama played upon the stage of history and focused on individual decision for or against Chris, the created order became stage backdrop. The church was unable or unwilling to extend its understanding of redemption into the created order. In these last days of the twentieth century we have no choice but to make up this deficit by rethinking our spirituality in terms of the whole creation.

God is in the world even as the world is in God. God is not equal to the world, but God indwells the world and the analogy would be the indwelling(perichoresis) of the persons of the Holy Trinity with one another. The Father is not the Son is not the Holy Spirit, but each indwells the other. So God and world indwell one another. God is both hidden and revealed in the natural world, which Luther called a mask of God, even as God is hidden and revealed in Jesus Christ. Ambiguity is not, cannot be overcome, or we would live by sight and not by faith.

The natural world is icon of the Invisible God; so is Christ. The difference is that the natural world offers a blessing, whereas Christ is the bringer of salvation. The Holy Spirit gathers the community so that we might live unto holiness. The working of the One God known in Three Persons is dynamic, not static or sequential. We are in the world, but not of it: that is to say, we are located in nature, but we are saved by grace. Yet we cannot have one without the other. The gift of grace inaugurates our rebirth to our proper place in the natural world as kings and queens of creation who are called to rule by service, eucharist and stewardship.

"And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home." -- Wendell Berry

A spirituality for creation is characterized by our ability to pay attention. This is step one toward discerning the Presence beyond the image. We do not worship the creation; we venerate it, much as we would venerate an icon of Christ. To venerate is to pay attention.

We know, in the Spirit, by participation. Because God is the hidden God, buried deep within the creation and in the life of Christ, we can only know God by incorporation or, as I call it, participation. As we learn to deny dualism between the human and the natural realms, we see that we are part of our process of knowing. Knowing becomes a form of intimate participation, as in the biblical understanding. We do not deny the role of intellectual analysis, but we participate by beholding, by paying attention. Then reason becomes our guide to understand and not to judge our experience.

We know our place in creation by participation, not by standing apart; just as we can only know salvation by living in the realm where it is proclaimed and celebrated. We are called to participate in nature and grace in and by the Spirit, who reveals to us the truth of God the Holy Trinity, which truth compromises creation, redemption and sanctification.

"I wish you could come here and rest a year in these... pines and waters and deep singing winds, and you would find that they all sing of fountain love just as did Jesus Christ and all of pure God manifest in whatever form." -- John Muir

Prayer leads us into participation. Prayer unites us as persons both within ourselves and with one another. True prayer unites the mind and the heart. Understanding and affection become one; this is the beginning of participatory knowledge. Mental prayer alone can become sterile and arid, focusing only on intellectual awareness. By the same token, prayer of the heart alone can become sentimental and so all-encompassing that we cannot discriminate the Presence of God from warm religious feelings. The mind is to be fused with the heart, which means that intellect must be tempered by feeling. As the church needs theology and spirituality, so does each of us need the prayer of the mind and the prayer of the heart.

The eucharist is the center of our corporate prayer life, but each of us individually is called to prayer in order that we might find our place in the creation once again, in common with others and in harmony with the created order. In Christ we have been restored to our proper place in the economy of God in creation as stewards and caretakers; let us therefore act on this gift in awareness and hope.

Jay C. Rochelle, M.Div., Th.M., is Associate Professor of Worship and Dean of the Chapel at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.

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