creation

Rose Marie Berger 8-02-2023
A painting of a white person's hands carefully molding cyclical contours into tan-colored clay.

LazingBee / iStock

“CENTER THE CLAY.” I had one task for class and three hours to complete it.

Take two pounds of raw potential. Place it on the potter’s wheel. Use the strength of your hands and forearms to force the clay into balance.

For the full three hours, I failed. Unable to find the calm point of pressure to rest my human musculature between the universe’s centrifugal and centripetal forces. The clay fought back. It bucked and shimmied, slid and skidded. I pushed and pulled.

The teacher said, finally, “This clay does not yet want to be a bowl. You have not shown it how.” A gentle correction that expertly undermined my fixation with “the primacy of the real,” as French philosopher Gaston Bachelard calls it. Really, shouldn’t I be able to subdue this clay?

Olivia Bardo 7-26-2023

‘Barbie,’  Warner Bros. Pictures 

In the beginning, Ruth Handler created Barbieland. And Ruth said, “Let there be pink,” and there was pink.

An illustration of a open light green hand with leaved branches sprouting upwards and tangling along the fingers. Larger and abstracted olive-colored silhouettes of leaves are intermingled with the branches.

Illustration by Cat O'Neil

WE HAVE SEVERAL readings this month where God creates something out of nothing — or at least out of pretty limited materials. In the opening chapters of Genesis, we see creation birthed from God’s imagination and curiosity. In the story of Sarah and Abraham, a child is conceived in a womb so postmenopausal that the now-pregnant woman can’t help but laugh (Genesis 18). A well appears from nowhere to quench the thirst of a dying woman and her child (Genesis 21:19). God “calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17). And God turns death to life through the mysteries of resurrection (Romans 6:1-11).

This month’s lectionary readings make God’s continuous creation — as well as God’s continual renewal of creation — explicit. But the fact is, once we’re looking for it, all of scripture tells these stories of renewal. God is always creating, re-creating, and reimagining our world. God is always making a way where there was no way before. God continually turns death to life. And, just as importantly, we are called to participate in God’s divine practices of continuous creation, in God’s own divine practice of everyday resurrection.

As we exit a series of some of the higher holy seasons in the liturgical year — Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost — June quiets down from such intensity. The slower pace to which (in some places) the warm summer sun calls us can inspire us to seek out everyday resurrection wherever God hides it. How is the Spirit calling you to partner with divine practices of renewal, with everyday resurrections?

Sarah James 3-20-2023
A black-and-white lithograph of rippling ocean waves, meticulously drawn by Vija Celmins so as to appear like a black-and-white photo.

“Ocean” (1975) by ©️ Vija Celmins / courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

THERE'S A REFORM JEWISH Sabbath prayer that reads, “Days pass and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles. Lord, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing; let there be moments when Your Presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns unconsumed. And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness, and exclaim in wonder: ‘How filled with awe is this place, and we did not know it!’”

If we want to experience awe or wonder, we need to reach for inputs of wisdom that enliven our ways of seeing. As a person who struggles with overthinking and anxiety, I find visual art, like the work of Latvian American artist Vija Celmins, to be instructive. “The thing I like about painting, of course,” Celmins said in an interview with the Tate museum, “is that it takes just a second for the information to go ‘bam,’ all the way in, and then you can explore it later.” Engaging with Celmins’ work teaches me how to pay close attention to the life in front of me, noticing the beauty that pervades everything.

Christina Colón 10-31-2022
A headshot of Vanessa Nakate looking into the distance with leaves behind her.

Illustration by Cássia Roriz.

THE IMAGE THAT first brought Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate to many people’s attention is one that doesn’t even include her.

In January 2020, Nakate was invited to join five other young activists in a climate demonstration during the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. An Associated Press photographer snapped a photo of Nakate standing with European climate activists Luisa Neubauer, Greta Thunberg, Isabelle Axelsson, and Loukina Tille. But when the AP published the photo that afternoon, Nakate wasn’t in it.

“Even now, well over a year after being cropped out of that photograph, it’s hard for me to talk about what happened,” wrote Nakate in her 2021 book A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis. “By cutting me out of the photo they’d originally sent to global media organizations, the AP had denied an African activist a chance to be seen and, possibly, her message to be acknowledged.”

While the AP did some “soul-searching” following the incident, Nakate used the moment to ignite an overdue conversation about the whiteness that has long plagued the global environmental justice movement. “Being cropped out of the photo changed me,” she wrote. “I decided, from my perspective as a young African woman, that I would dedicate as much of my time as possible to addressing the many interlocking facets of the climate crisis, environmental justice, and gender discrimination — and to do so without apology or fear of erasure.”

Nakate founded the Rise Up Movement to amplify the voices of climate activists from Africa and launched a fundraising campaign for the Vash Green Schools Project to bring solar panels and cookstoves to schools across Uganda. At 25, she’s busy. And faced with a global climate emergency, it makes sense. “I don’t often get asked what recharges me,” Nakate told me when we spoke in early August. “But for me, it’s my relationship with the Holy Spirit.”

Raised in an Anglican family, Nakate became a born-again Christian as a teenager. “Activism can be very hard and prayer and attending services (or, in Covid times, watching online) have been extremely important sources of love, grace, and support,” she wrote in the acknowledgments of A Bigger Picture.

“If I feel distraught or disturbed by anything, I know the Holy Spirit will remind me of the peace that surpasses all human understanding,” she later told me. I spoke with Nakate via Zoom about her Christian faith, the role social media plays in her activism, and why we can’t eradicate poverty without addressing the climate crisis. — Christina Colón

Avery Davis Lamb 8-03-2022

 A fern turning from a fiddlehead to a frond. Photo: Dawna Moore / Alamy

Despair blossomed in me; my fears of what my life and the lives of future generations could become seem to be coming true. I take my bouquet of despair to the only place big enough to embrace it: the body of Creation. I set it before the altar of the water and soil.

Avery Davis Lamb 6-16-2022

‘Prehistoric Planet,’ Apple TV+ 

The new series Prehistoric Planet offers a vision of Cretaceous life; a world filled with life completely different from our own, yet on this same planet. In a time when life is precarious and extinction all around, our prehistoric predecessors offer some comfort and not a little bit of escape.

D.S. Martin 10-19-2021
Illustration of the silhouette of a bird in the night sky with its wing surrounding the moon

Illustration by Colleen Tighe

Each word I choose
carries a different rucksack load        for each of you
like I’m the fox        slinking along rail lines
        thinking by instinct & appetite        & you’re
        the commuter passing through
like I’m the moon whose same beams call
        to a weeping child        to a prowling owl
        to shivering rodents in the grass

An illustration of a gondolier going through a Venetian canal with dolphins jumping out.

Illustration by Alex Green / Folio Art

If we believe nature will mend,
it will replenish what has been taken and,
answering the wild call of urban space,

dolphins will return to Venetian canals,
elephants will drowsy dream in Chinese tea gardens,
humans will shed their fear and guilt to hope and taste

the terror of responsibility
the terroir of ourselves
the terra ignota of a paradise where

Melody Zhang 10-22-2020

Photo by Ivan Bandura on Unsplash

The work of unlearning racism and undoing our habit of exploitation — of the earth, of other bodies, and other neighborhoods — is long.

Photo by Jaromír Kavan on Unsplash

Saint Francis praying to sister moon and brother sun has changed me. I must confess I am going through a conversion, yet another one. But this time much bigger than I could imagine. I have begun listening to the birds. I have started paying attention to the rivers. I have stopped to talk to trees. As a city boy who grew up in the dirty streets of Sao Paulo, I am becoming closer to the pulsing heart of forests, animals, rocks and skies, and it has expanded my allegiance to God.

Kat Armas 4-26-2019

Via Shutterstock

All of us have witnessed the detrimental effects of mass production and consumption that Brueggemann talks about, not only in the anxiety that fills our daily lives, but in the destruction of the very earth that sustains us. Because of this, we understand that not only tending the earth, but connecting to nature around us can also be a form of resistance, similar to that of rest.

Charles Skold 11-01-2018

Image by Dominik Martin. 

The new report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just delivered some really bad news: famine, drought, and starvation are potentially coming for millions of people around the globe. What does that mean for American Christians? The answer may partly lie in the Biblical story of Joseph.

In this story, God saves Egypt and the surrounding nations from a severe famine by using Joseph to prepare for the disaster in advance. Reading the IPCC report reminds me of Joseph interpreting Pharaoh's dream: Seven years of famine are coming, and seven years of plenty remain . Like Egypt of old, the world has famine in its future. Like Joseph, we can see it coming.

Kaitlin Curtice 8-07-2018

What could it possibly mean to us that an endangered species of orca whales hold a mourning period after losing their young? While mourning is a natural habit of many creatures, we should pay attention to Tahlequah’s process of grief. Perhaps if we observe the creatures we have been called to care for and learn from, we might learn something about what it means to be human.

Rose Marie Berger 4-25-2018

THIS WON'T HAPPEN again until 2045. On Aug. 21, the thumb of God (with a little help from the moon) will smudge out the sun. A total solar eclipse will mark the brow of the United States with a Stygian darkness so deep that stars will unmask in midday. From Lincoln City, Ore., to Charleston, S.C., “flyover” America will go dark.

In Hebrew tradition, the darkening of the sun or reddening of the moon are markers of cataclysmic political events with spiritual consequences. In Greek, eclipse means “abandonment,” in Hebrew “defect.” God’s light is in a state of hiddenness.

Image via RNS/Tijl Kindt

Twelve Catholic priests and brothers live, work, and pray at the Vatican Observatory as they explore some of the universe’s biggest scientific questions, from the Big Bang theory to the structure of meteorites and stars.

“The observatory exists to show the world that the Catholic Church supports science,” says Brother Guy Consolmagno, an astronomer from Detroit who is also the observatory’s director.

Joe Kay 4-21-2017

Divine creativity is one of the things we share with our creator. It is woven into our DNA. We’re active participants in the continuing story of creation whether we like it or not.

U.S. President Donald Trump holds up an executive order on "Energy Independence," eliminating Obama-era climate change regulations, during a signing ceremony at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters in Washington, U.S., March 28, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

The Northern Cheyenne Tribe, located in southern Montana, said the administration lifted the moratorium without hearing the tribe's concerns about the impact the coal-leasing program has on the tribe, its members, and lands.

Image via /Shutterstock.com

We are at a moment when prayer is often viewed as a cop-out for policy action. The distaste for prayer in our political arena was most visible in the New York Daily News cover story “God Isn’t Fixing This,” following the San Bernardino, Calif., shooting in December. The cover story called the politicians’ prayer tweets “meaningless platitudes” in the face of their inaction.

In light of this frustration with the political posturing of prayer, how might we see the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation as a meaningful action toward climate justice?

8-23-2016

Harper’s account of the Gospel in her new book is shalom-based. Drawing deeply from a theme that runs through the Bible but is especially strong in the Hebrew prophets, Harper tells a story of a God who acts in Jesus Christ to bring shalom, or holistic peace and justice, in every part of creation.