The prayer I share today is from the Catholic Church in Australia.
Prayer for Ecological Conversion
God of the sun and the moon, of the
mountains, deserts and plains,
God of the mighty oceans, of rivers, lakes and streams,
God all creatures that live in the seas and fly in the air, of every living thing that grows and moves on this sacred Earth....
Help us to love and respect it, to repair what we have damaged, to care for what you have made good and holy.
Give us the wisdom and the passion to change our minds and hearts and our ways.
Let us be mustard seeds in our world, bringing about ecological conversion, which grows and spreads to every corner of the earth,
For our sake now and for every generation which is to come.
We ask this prayer through Christ Jesus, Amen.
Brisbane Catholic Education, published 2021.
The prayer begins by orienting us to the God to whom the prayer is addressed. This God is a very big God. In order to take in the scope of this God, we will need to take a few steps backwards and crane our necks so that we are able to see beyond our own personal emotions, situations, and agendas which can often dominate our landscape. We need to understand that the world and the God who created and sustains it are far, far, larger than our individual minds, hearts, and souls.
In your imagination, put yourself within a place that awed you with its magnificence. For me, this might be the lake I stood by this morning at sunrise. I marveled as the sky and the lake seemed to be singing back and forth to each other through depths and light and reflection. This is the God who created that place.
Think of one bit of the world’s ecosystem, and the variety and abundance of the creatures who inhabit it. I, for instance, think of a particular spot on a Puget Sound beach where I like to sit and listen to the varied chorus of clicks and chirps and tweets and whirrs that enfold me within their early morning chorus. This is the God who created and cares for every single one of those creatures.
This God created the earth and thereby imbued it with purpose, holiness, and beauty. This God made the earth sacred and beloved. This God cares how we treat this world—expecting and requiring it to be treated as the greatest of cherished gifts, not a resource to be used up and then discarded.
How, then, do we approach our place and purpose within that creation? We come with humility toward this God who rules over all. We come with respect and love toward this creation God has made. We come willing to see the ways in which we personally, and humankind in general, have not treated God's world kindly. We look honestly at how, through attitude and action, the earth has been damaged, distorted, and dismissed as unimportant for anything beyond self-centered purposes.
Once we have come to that place in our prayer, we realize that we are small and the world is very large. And this is where mustard seeds comes in. Jesus made clear that the smallest of sprouting seeds can be the source of the most significant changes in the world. This gives us hope that change can come and that our actions are not meaningless.
If this God enlivens our imaginations, strengthens our resolve, and blesses our efforts as we seek to repair the damage done to the world, this change—this ecological conversion—might grow beyond anything we have the right to expect. Through God's grace, the world and all of its inhabitants in every corner of the earth, may even yet find their share of joy and health.
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Louise