Celebrate Creation Season

O Lord, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
                                                            Psalm 104:24

By Deacon Emily Holman

From hot air balloon heights over the Masai Mara in Kenya and the Serengeti in Tanzania, I felt as if I could see all of God’s creation. The African plains stretched out unendingly. Thousands of migrating wildebeests and zebras moved along in determined lines and bunches. No where else have I seen such abundance and interdependence.

Wildebeests and zebras rely on each other’s senses to escape lions, hyenas, and other predators. Graceful giraffes eat the high thorny acacia twigs which other grazing animals can’t reach. We saw many gazelles of different patterns, Thompson’s and Grant’s gazelles, impalas and elands, tiny graceful dikdiks. The largest birds we saw were the five feet tall Mariboo stork, the funny secretary bird at four and a half feet, and the ostriches at seven feet. There are dozens of smaller birds of beautiful colors, like the lilac-breasted rollers. Even the starlings were beautifully tinted.

All this grandeur reminded me to look for the beauty of creation in my own backyard. I love our trees, with their spring blooms and fall oranges and yellows. Our flower gardens, rivers and waterfalls, fields and mountains, and our great national parks, are also examples of creation and our conservation of our natural resources.

September is the Episcopal Church’s Season of Creation. This year’s theme is “to Hope and Act with Creation”. It is a time to review and renew our relationships with nature, ourselves, and God, and to hope and act for climate justice. The World Day of Prayer asks us to pray, “In this Season of Creation, we pray that the breath of your creative Word would move our hearts, as in the waters of our birth and baptism.”