Season of Creation 2025 Reflections

Peace with Creation: Deep Connection 

“The fruit of righteousness will be peace, 

    and the outcome of righteousness, 

    calm and security...”  Isaiah 32. 

This year’s Season of Creation theme – Peace with Creation – is rooted in the prophetic words of Isaiah 32. The prophet speaks about the importance of ‘righteousness’ or right relationship, and the peace and justice that result from that relationship.  

We are living in what scientists call the “Anthropocene Era”, an age in which humans have centered themselves, prioritizing consumption and convenience, often to the detriment of the rest of creation. In this framework humanity is a force of destruction, negatively impacting the earth, the climate, and marginalized human communities.  

Theologian Thomas Berry suggests an “Ecozoic Era” instead, to describe a future in which humanity lives in harmony with nature, committed to mutual flourishing.  In this future, humans act with purpose on behalf of the more than human world, as members of an Earth community. To be “earthlings” in the best sense, is to know ourselves part of the whole of Creation, to be a participant in mutual flourishing and live in right relationship with all other beings. Cultivating deep connection with creation - our place, our ecosystem, our food sources, our seasons – nurture peace within us, and peace throughout the web of creation.  

"To be “earthlings” in the best sense, is to know ourselves part of the whole of Creation, to be a participant in mutual flourishing and live in right relationship with all other beings."

Prayer with Creation; Act, pray, change, reconcile 

Prayer with creation is an opening to being different. When I send my voice to spirit, am I ready for the answer? Am I listening? Am I ready to be different, to follow through with instructions coming to me, from the holy spirit, because I asked?  

When I am called to pray, I connect with a quiet space, in nature, and pause. There may be something nearby to focus my attention, a tree cone, a leaf, a flower. Noticing their intricacies helps quiet my body, mind and spirit, to remember all life in nature is a prayer. Prayer with creation is hope and promise, a covenant between myself and spirit, that when I send my voice out in prayer, spirit will send a voice back to me.  

I include the green, the waters, the wind, the soil, the fire in my prayers and am filled with tenderness, care and wonder for the mother of creation who demonstrates abundance and generosity as a way of living. I leave an offering, a promise to return, to care for her and love her always, an offering of gratitude. Sometimes, simply a strand of my hair, to say thank you, spirit of all that lives. 

Prayer illuminates a way forward, generates vision for daily living, reveals next steps aligning self with spirit. Revealing hope for creation, hope for humanity. 

Sitting in the quiet of prayer, holding nature in my hands, peace settles in, beneath my calming breath and heartbeat, I exhale, making an opening for spirit to enter, to join with me in an act of peace.  

"Prayer with creation is hope and promise, a covenant between myself and spirit, that when I send my voice out in prayer, spirit will send a voice back to me."

Walking Toward Peace and Sustainability 

Each year since 2012 I have set out to walk one hundred miles within 5 to 7 days. What began as a personal challenge and tribute to the thousands of volunteers of Church World Service’s CROP Hunger Walks has become a pilgrimage of listening—to my own body, to those who walk alongside me, and to the world around me. Mile after mile, I rediscover a rhythm that is not the world’s frantic pace but life’s deeper cadence: the heartbeat, the breath, the rising and setting sun. 

When the pandemic made walking together impossible, I began a virtual walk through the Walk Talk Listen podcast. What started as a way to keep the spirit of the 100-mile walk alive has grown into something much bigger. A friend recently told me: “The way you’ve transformed your 100-mile walk into a global space for dialogue, reflection, and action is extraordinary… exactly the kind of connective energy the world needs right now.” 

I carried that affirmation with me when I visited the Desmond Tutu Museum, where his life and words reminded me that, “We are made for goodness…for togetherness.” Tutu’s legacy of Ubuntu - “My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together” - resonated deeply. The walk, like Ubuntu, has become a practice of togetherness with people and with the earth. 

I was also reminded of this by the board chair of Growing Hope Globally, who reflected on how seeds carry both vulnerability and promise. To tend them faithfully is to practice hope and patience, trusting in God’s abundance. Walking is much the same—each step a seed of trust, each mile an act of faith in what can grow when we move together. 

Although I am not a religious scholar Isaiah’s wisdom resonates with me: “The effect of righteousness will be peace.” That truth is echoed in the Qur’an’s call to balance, Sikh scripture’s reverence for air, water, and earth, and Indigenous prayers of gratitude. This year’s Season of Creation theme, Peace with Creation, captures it well. I think of it as walking toward peace and sustainability - step by step, learning to live in balance with one another and with the earth. 

This year I will walk one hundred miles again. I invite you to join me, step by step, throughout the Season of Creation. Walk in your own way in your own place. What matters most is that we walk, listen, and learn together—toward peace and sustainability. 

"Peace with Creation,...[is] walking toward peace and sustainability - step by step, learning to live in balance with one another and with the earth."

Season of Creation 2025 Reflection

Every so often I venture down to Boeing Creek Park near my house. Over the years I’ve noticed changes to the forest due to windfall, growth, decay, and human engineering. Amidst all the changes, three things remain: the sisters, a trio of towering Douglas fir trees on the north side of dry bed creek. At first my visits to the sisters were arbitrary, dependent upon which direction I happened to take at a fork in the path. Eventually, I found myself seeking out their company. Beneath their towering canopy I often now pause to listen and to make contact. If it’s true that we cannot grieve what we do not love, touching the deeply calloused bark of each of the sisters is one way I attempt to learn to love them—as kin, as fellow creatures, as sages.   

I know that I am a transplant on this land, progeny of an invasive species. The sisters are a glimpse into recent history—recent for a forest. Logging and deforestation by humans have altered landscapes across the planet for millennia. The grand forests many of us commune with are slim shadows of their ancestors. And we humans continue to rupture lines of connectivity across species, across generations, whether it’s a careless act of cutting down the perfect Christmas tree from the local arboretum or the systematic clearing of timber parcels. In light of all this, how could I possibly approach the towering trio of sisters, hoping for something akin to reconciliation?   

In the Christian tradition, the sacrament of baptism is not only an initiation into the body of Christ on the earth—the church universal—but it is also the threshold we cross, through water and Spirit, into the whole cosmic community of (new) creation. Baptism offers an induction to practices, rites and rituals of reconciliation that traditionally includes a renunciation of evil, and receiving new spiritual life, with water often playing a vital role. How might our approach to the rest of creation shift were we to take seriously the presence and participation of water as creation’s representative in the baptismal ritual? How might our moral vision of justice and righteousness become contoured by water?   

During this Season of Creation, we are invited to acknowledge those places made barren by human greed, and to engage in practices of reconciliation that begin to reconstitute our connection with the surrounding community of creation.   

"How might our approach to the rest of creation shift were we to take seriously the presence and participation of water as creation’s representative in the baptismal ritual?"