The “Season of Creation” is an annual month-long Christian celebration of prayer and action to protect creation. It started when September 1 was proclaimed as a day of prayer for creation (World Day of Prayer for Creation, or Creation Day) by Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I for the Orthodox Church in 1989, and was embraced by the other major Christian European churches in 2001 and by Pope Francis for the Roman Catholic Church in 2015.
Since then, many Christian churches started celebrating the Season of Creation (also known as Creation Time) from September 1 to October 4, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi. St. Francis is widely associated with nature, and for Catholics, he is the patron saint of those who promotes ecology.
Several statements over the past few years have called the faithful to observe the Season of Creation, such as those of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines in 2003, the Third European Ecumenical Assembly in Sibiu, Romania in 2007 and the World Council of Churches in 2008.
For this year’s Season of Creation which has as its theme “The Web of Life: Biodiversity as a Gift from God,” Pope Francis invited everyone to pray, reflect and act to safeguard our endangered environment. In his message, the Holy Father underlined that “this is the season for letting our prayer be inspired anew by closeness to nature, which spontaneously leads us to give thanks to God the Creator.”
This is a time, the pope’s message continued, “to reflect on our lifestyles, and how our daily decisions about food, consumption, transportation, use of water, energy and many other material goods, can often be thoughtless and harmful.” Furthermore, the Pope urged the faithful to undertake prophetic actions.
“Many young people all over the world are making their voices heard and calling for courageous decisions,” he comments. Pope Francis stressed that “we owe them real answers, not empty words, actions not illusions.”
When in 2015 Pope Francis launched the encyclical Laudato Si’, he spoke about an “ecological conversion” or how we have to face the fact that much of the earth will be uninhabitable for humans in 100 years. Four years ago, in a United Nations Climate Change Summit, a loud and resounding message reached across the nations that we had 15 years to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius or we are in serious trouble.
Faced with this urgent call, what are we to do? The urgency to take action has become more real. Now is the time! Three of those fifteen years have already passed and we can no longer allow ourselves to do the countdown and wait for disasters to happen. Millions of plant and animal species are becoming extinct because of a culture of greed and excessive consumerism.
A great number of people are also dying because of the adverse effects of climate change: illnesses like heat stress and malaria, not to mention population displacement and reduced food production due to severe weather, e.g., droughts and typhoons, which in turn cause malnutrition and extreme poverty. The Season of Creation is a very timely reminder telling us that “the clock is ticking.” We must act now before it is too late.
This October-November 2019 issue, we bring you some concrete facts and experiences about how this Season of Creation can also be celebrated through our individual and collective actions, certain as we are that they will contribute to protecting our planet Earth, our common home.
