Commit to protect and preserve all God’s creation

I am currently reading Octavia Butler’s 1993 dystopic science fiction novel, “The Parable of the Sower.” Set in southern California, it covers a three-year period beginning in 2024, a future uncomfortably close to our time.

Butler depicts a society suffering under the duress of apocalyptic climate extremes, food and water shortages and increasing anarchy. The social order has collapsed. Walled communities and guns offer only an illusion of protection from the violence of marauding vagabonds.

It’s a terrifying world and its resonances with our current reality are haunting: Destructive weather patterns, droughts, raging wildfires, the ravages of a pandemic, gross wealth disparities, hordes of climate and economic refugees and more.

Butler is prescient, imagining the trajectory of trends projected to their logical consequences, if they persist unabated and undeterred. The consequences are truly terrifying. A descent into chaos. A kind of reverse engineering of the creation story. Out of the void, God created a world more beautiful, magnificent and miraculous than our telling of it. And now we human beings are in effect engineering its undoing, and our own. It’s heartbreaking.

I hear Butler’s novel as a wake-up call, much like the wake-up call that Rachel Carson gave the world as early as 1962 with her book, “Silent Spring.” Few listened then and, despite global climate summit after global climate summit since, still not enough are listening now. Too many politicians are dragging their feet, in thrall to the interests of fossil fuels. It is as if, to quote the poet Mary Oliver in her poem “The Sun,” they “have gone crazy for power, for things.”

Meanwhile, time is running out. The existential threat to all sentient beings is not only real; it is now. This is not just a political issue; it is also, and preeminently, a matter of faith. Human kind’s abuse and exploitation of our planet — extracting, consuming, polluting without regard to sustainability — is nothing less than a sacrilege. We are desecrating that which God has consecrated, that which God has created holy and called good. We need to change our ways, or, to use religious language, we need to repent.

It has been said that, “If we do not see God in all, we cannot see God at all.” As people of faith what we can bring to the table is this recognition of the sacredness of all that is. All life is a sacrament, a visible sign of God’s invisible presence. Survival, indeed salvation, dictates that we have the eyes to see, as the singer/songwriter Peter Meyer says, that “everything is holy now.” And then, it is imperative that we act accordingly, committing ourselves to protect, preserve, cherish and reverence all God’s creation.

Celtic spirituality promotes theconcept of panentheism, the awareness that the divine is in all. Indigenous peoples have known this. Poets and mystics, as well. As Gerard Manley Hopkins observed, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Or as Lauren Olamina, the 15 yearold main character of “The Parable of the Sower,” said, “The universe is God’s selfportrait.” Steeped in this awareness, let these words by Philip Newell from “Praying With the Earth” become a prayer on our hearts:

For everything that emerges from the earth thanks be to you, O God, Holy Root of being Sacred Sap that rises Full-bodied Fragrance of earth’s unfolding form.

May we know that we are of You

may we know that we are in You

may we know that we are one with You together one.

Guide us as nations to what is deepest

open us as peoples to what is first

lead us as a world to what is dearest

that we may know the holiness of wholeness

that we may learn the strength of humility

that together we may live close to the earth

and grow in grounded glory.

The Rev. Allie Perry is the worship coordinator of Shalom UCC, New Haven. Her email address is: allie.perry@gmail.com.

The Rev. Allie Perry