PaddlingPadre

On the front of your worship aids is a quote of Pope Francis’s from Laudato Si: “When we can see God reflected in all that exists, our hearts are moved to praise the Lord for all his creatures and to worship him in union with them.” At the heart of this quote are the twin truths that all of creation comes from God and returns to him, that in coming from him it shows forth his power and brilliance, and that in returning it renders him the praise and adoration that is his due. The world itself, in other words, is caught up in the drama of salvation and redemption.

 Now this understanding of creation is particularly Christian, and indeed it is part of the good news of Christianity. In fact, even the very word creation, with its notion that the natural world is indeed a good creation of God, is theological and revolutionary. In the ancient world, creation was certainly not understood in this way. On the one hand, there was the error against which the Book of Wisdom warns: that the works of God were sometimes themselves taken to be gods, either fire or wind, or the swift air, or the circuit of the stars, or the mighty water, or the luminaries of heaven. And then there was that other type of error, which we see in the Manichees, and even, to some degree, in more elevated philosophical schools, where the material world was seen as either being evil, or else as weighing us down, with true salvation being found in escaping its limitations and entanglements.

Against this, the wisdom of scripture, even before the coming of Christ, affirms that God created the world, and that the world was good, and that he formed man from the dust of the earth and charged him with the task of tending to it. The material world, far from being evil, is the very stuff of which we are made, and moreover it constitutes the place of our encounter with God. From this, it should it be evident that the Jewish conception of creation bestowed on the natural world a greater dignity than it could have had either by being worshiped in itself or by being despised as evil – already in the Old Testament, creation reveals and expresses the infinite glory and beauty of God, and provides the conditions of possibility for God’s covenant with Israel. Creation is, in other words, a gift making possible our communion with God in worship.

Of course, in our own day, this understanding of nature is seldom remembered. We live in a world that, in the aftermath of the so-called Enlightenment, has embraced an entirely technocratic view of nature. The things of the natural world have been reduced entirely to their empirical properties, and, if they are still seen as good, they are seen as good only for the sake of what they can give us, or rather for what we can take from them. This technocratic view of the world robs creation of its character as gift, referring everything instead to an unrestrained human will. What we want (usually creaturely comforts) becomes the supreme point of reference for understanding the natural world. Everything, plants, animals, and even the earth itself, are viewed as if they were mere machines to be taken apart and exploited for our uses.

That this technocratic paradigm has been disastrous in its consequences need hardly be stated. Everywhere we look, from climate change and more frequent natural disasters, from deforestation and pollution, to the disregard of life in the womb and to the profound evils of transgender theory that treat even the human body itself as so much matter to be manipulated according to the capriciousness of an unrestrained human will, in all of this we see the devastation wrought by the rejection of the natural world (which of course includes even our very selves) as something that is a gift and good in its very self, apart from any considerations of what we might do with it.

And the difficulty of our contemporary situation is little helped by the fact that very often the most vocal defenders of the environment, horrified as they may be by environmental degradation, are themselves too impoverished in their understanding of the world to escape what is fundamentally the same technocratic world picture. For if one fails to recognize that the natural world comes to us a gift from God, on what basis can one argue for its protection? Will it not be merely on the grounds that we need a healthy planet on which to live, or that the natural world is aesthetically pleasing? Yet for the modern mind, both of these ultimately reduce to arguments from utility: a healthy world is more useful to us or more pleasant to us. And so secular environmentalists are themselves trapped in the same kind of self-referential worship of the human will as are those who are most guilty of the natural world’s destruction. The only difference is that they happen to have different preferences, but the environmentalists are too alike to their opponents to mount any serious sort of critique. Both lack a correct understanding of the nature and purpose of creation.

What this means for us as Christians is that we have an urgent task in announcing the good news of creation, since it is only in the light of the gospel that the true dignity and worth of the natural world is revealed. So what is this good news?

In the first place, and this is always the thing that springs most readily to our minds, is the truth that the natural world reveals God. For from the greatness and the beauty of created things their author, by analogy, is seen¸ as we heard from the Book of Wisdom. And it is this idea, in fact, that lies behind so many scientific endeavors in these last centuries, since, in studying the order and sublimity of nature and nature’s laws, many scientists explicitly understood themselves (and many still do) to be uncovering with greater clarity the splendor of nature’s author and lawgiver.

And yet, this is perhaps the least of nature’s wonders. For the created world is not merely a signpost that points to God, as if he remained distant from his creation. Rather, the created order, being good, is, again, a gift from God, a gift given in love by God who is love, and so the Christian can look on creation with a contemplative gaze of love and gratitude. To see God in creation, then, is not merely to see a signpost, but is to see both the gift of creation and to see the giver in the gift, each creature being a contracted presentation of the infinite being of God, analogously showing forth his qualities of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty insofar as each is itself true, good, and beautiful. And love and gratitude, to which we are moved by this gift, as we everywhere experience, are not realities that are closed in on themselves, but rather seek to give testimony to the beloved and form a communion of gratitude, which, with respect to God, is expressed above all in worship.

And so already, we see that creation mediates, that is makes possible, our communion with God, and this is heightened in a simply unimaginable way by the mystery of the Incarnation. In Jesus Christ, God himself enters into creation, becomes, in the Incarnation, a part of the created order, a man of flesh and blood. The Jewish mind could already appreciate that the world had been created for the sake of covenant, but now in the new and definitive covenant we see the fullness of God’s purpose for creation (and forgive me if I sound more Franciscan than Dominican here): the purpose of the natural world is for the sake of communion with God in the Incarnation.

Consequently, then, and this is why it is so wonderful that we have this new mass for the care of creation, creation finds its proper end in worship. It is here, in the Eucharistic sacrifice, where the purpose and fulfillment, where the perfection of the natural world, is realized. It is not for nothing that we offer here bread and wine, fruit of the earth and fruit of the vine, to be transubstantiated into Christ’s body and blood. It is not idly that we worship by means of water and oil and incense, for in worship all of these elements find their perfection. Water, it could be said, is for baptism, and oil is for anointing. In the wake of the Incarnation, the physical world is charged with the sacramental presence of God, a fact which undergirds so much of Catholic practice that might otherwise seem strange, such as the veneration of the bones of the saints, or the use of physical sacramentals such as holy water and blessed salt – for creation itself shares in our worship, and indeed, we are able to know, love and serve God not in spite of such created things, but rather because of them.

Undeniably, creation’s role in worship is less appreciated today than it ought to be. The cosmic dimension of the liturgy is too easily forgotten, though this was not always so. Here in just a few moments, for instance, during the Eucharistic Prayer, we will do something that some of you, perhaps, have never experienced before, though it used to be commonplace, and indeed it still is in many places, especially at many pilgrimage sites where the layout of chapels necessitate it, and that is that we shall all pray together facing the same direction. Now typically this practice is defended, very soundly I think, on the grounds that it better expresses the reality that all of us, in our proper capacity, priest and people, are joined together in a corporate act of prayer to the Father. But this practice of ad orientem worship, meaning “towards the east,” arose from the very earliest days of the Church because Christians saw, in the rising of the sun, a symbol of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, a sign of the new day that has dawned in Christ, and a sign of the certainty of his return. (Think of our opening hymn, which sang of this symbolism).The rising of the sun is thus, for the Christian, an instance of the cosmos speaking of Christ, and the eastward orientation of Christian worship (and notice that the very word “orientation” means to face east) was a way of incorporating the prayer of the cosmos itself into the prayer of the liturgy. Absent this sort of cosmic dimension in the liturgy, the dignity of creation cannot be properly grasped, and the import of the mass cannot be fully appreciated, for creation too waits with eager longing to be set free from its bondage to decay and to obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. Consequently, churches were built facing the east, and crosses were hung on eastern walls, in recognition of this cosmic dimension. And even in churches that did not physically face east, such as ours, which faces north, the crucifix, representing Christ and his resurrection, as that which was symbolized by the rising sun, became a “liturgical east” towards which Christians oriented their prayer.

This common orientation during prayer is, of course, but one example of the integration of the cosmic dimension into the liturgy, but it is, perhaps, the most prominent and universal example of it in Christian history, which is why we recall it today and take it up at this mass for the care of creation, not to score points in a liturgy war (I assure you), but to focus our attention on this cosmic dimension that is present in every liturgy, regardless of its orientation, and to, hopefully, remind us of the value to be found in such symbolic action, even in our own private prayer and devotion, because the implementation of such symbolism helps to transform how we see the world, militating against that kind of technocratic world picture that we discussed earlier.

Because ultimately, if there is something for us Catholics to rediscover and proclaim when it comes to the intersection of the gospel and creation, I think it is precisely that kind of sacramental vision that was expressed in such liturgical practice. The created order shows forth the splendor of God and more; in Christ creation has become his very dwelling, and it is the vocation of the human race, in fulfillment of the primordial charge of Adam, to carry out the priestly duty of presenting the gift of creation back to God in worship. Would that when we look to the rising of the sun, then, that our hearts truly would, spontaneously even, be moved to contemplate in its rising the risen Christ. Or that in looking at the moon our minds would be moved to thoughts of our Blessed Mother, who shines with an unsurpassed brilliance, yet with a brilliance that is not her own, but rather a reflection of the light of her Son. For in these and in so many ways beyond counting, the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day pours out the word to day, and night to night imparts knowledge. For our part, might we grow in our capacity to hear that word and to receive that knowledge, so that we might rightly behold and boldly defend the dignity of the created world.

[In preparing this homily, I benefited greatly from Michael Dominic Taylor’s recent article in Communio: https://www.communio-icr.com/articles/view/creation-as-a-monstrance-of-gods-real-presence-a-metaphysical-reflection]