A Voice for the Animals

Wonderful Speaking of Faith interview with wildlife conservations Allen Rabinowitz

Gift of Good Land, reading for 5 Creation

We cannot live harmlessly or strictly at our own expense; we depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of creation. The point is, when we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently it is a sacrament; when we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration . . . in such desecration, we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.
--Wendell Berry

Rain, Thomas Merton

I came up here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield, said Vespers, and put some oatmeal on the Coleman stove for supper. It boiled over while I was listening to the rain and toasting a piece of bread at the log fire. The night became very dark. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!

Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.

From Rain and the Rhinoceros

Reading for 3 Creation

In this evolving universe, God does not dictate the outcome of nature’s activities, but allows the world to become what it is able to become in all of its diversity: one could say that God has a purpose rather than a fixed plan, a goal rather than a blueprint. As the nineteenth-century Anglican minister Charles Kingsley put it, God has made a world that is able to make itself. John Polkinghorne states that God has given the world a free process, just as God has given human beings free choice. Divine Love frees the universe and life to develop as they are able to by using all of their divinely given powers and capacities. The universe, as Augustine of Hippo said in the fourth century, is “God’s love song.” Because God’s Love is poured out within the creation, theologian Denis Edwards asserts that “the Trinitarian God is present to every creature in its being and becoming.” These are but some of the concepts that contemporary theologians are offering to account for God’s relationship to an evolving creation.

--from the Episcopal Church's Catechism of Creation

1 Creation Homily Podcast

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2 Creation

In his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) wrote, “The whole universe in its wholeness more perfectly shares in and represents the divine goodness than any one creature by itself” (47:1). Now what we humans did was quite selfish and self-centered. The human ego took over and we thought our species was the only one God really cared about, and we extracted the soul from everything else! We ended up living in a cold and dis-enchanted universe. We had to build churches, temples, and synagogues to try to capture the sacred that was already there. And soon we could not even see soul in other humans outside of our group! Creation and even other humans were simply here for our utilitarian purposes. It was all here for our consumption.
At that moment, we entered into a state of alienation that is really the state of “sin.” We no longer belonged to this world. Maybe now (we can begin) to walk outside barefoot, like Francis did, experiencing no disconnect between ourselves and “Sister Earth, our Mother”—and in reparation for centuries of Christian blindness.