Life Within the Creation

One of the things slowly revealed here in the days on the farm is that the Creation cares for and sustains me.  I have also realized that even though I might live to be a hundred years old, I am still the short timer here.  Some of the pecan trees here have been providing pecans for several generations of folks like me who have walked and worked the land we have all known as home.  The land, its power to provide life, the trees which tower over me to provide food, beauty, and shade, and the flowing creeks and rivers all have blessed me and will be here long after I am gone.  

The least we owe the Creation is to return the blessing in some measure.  In the book of Genesis when the story of Creation is mostly done, the writer reveals to us the Voice of God saying to the newly created humankind,  "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over it..." (Genesis 1:28).  We do the fruitful and multiply part of that word very well!  However, we have not done so well in providing responsible care for the Creation.  We have taken the part about taking dominion toward exploitation instead of caring for the Creation in such a way that it become an act of blessing upon it instead of an act of violence against it.  

What is lost in our present attitudes toward the Creation is that every part of it bears the imprint of the holy upon it as surely as such an imprint of the holy rests upon each one of us.  Our culture has forgotten how to handle the holy.  Even more unfortunate is our culture's ability to see the holy in the ordinary taken for granted things around us. We have lost that sense of being connected to the whole of Creation which results in our life and the life of the Creation being diminished.  As we offer rituals of corporate repentance, it is surely true that we have much to confess for we have wandered far away from the intentions of the Creator God.