Last year a number of our churches celebrated receiving their bronze and silver eco awards. Others achieved or are working towards gold. There are forms to complete, targets to meet, audits to pass. Lightbulbs changed, insulation fitted, recycling carefully sorted.
All extremely good and very necessary things. This is faithful guardiandship in very practical ways.
And yet, sitting by a river this week, whilst on retreat, I found myself wondering whether something quieter and deeper is also needed.
The retreat centre was on a riverside overlooking reeds and slow water. Nothing dramatic happens there. The land has a hushed quality about it as if it is watching, waiting and somehow remembering.
I spent long stretches just sitting by the window, doing very little at all. And somehow that has felt like prayer.
There is a kind of mournful beauty in this place - deep and soulful, as though the land has been keeping vigil for centuries. The reeds bend in the wind like a small congregation. A solitary tree stands like a sentinel. The river moves with the unhurried patience of something that has seen many generations come and go.
After leading Communion on the final day of the retreat, I carried the remaining bread and wine down to the water. It felt right to return them to the earth from which they came. This was not intended to be symbolic or mystical in any way, just simple gratitude.
A crow spotted the bread almost immediately and called his companions. Within moments they were feasting.
I stood there laughing softly to myself. It struck me then that this too was Eucharist. Gift -Thanks - Sharing - Return. And I realised something. Creation care is not purely about what we measure. It is also about what we love.
No award scheme could have made me treat that place gently. No checklist could have told me to be grateful. It simply arose from belonging, from relationship. You don’t protect a landscape because you have achieved bronze status. You protect it because it has held you, fed you, prayed with you and because it feels like kin.
Perhaps that is what we need to recover alongside our policies and plans. Of course I am not suggesting replacing these but rather that we underpin them. To develop a way of seeing the world not as a resource, but as a neighbour or a companion. For when we learn to sit still long enough to feel the land in this way then our care becomes almost effortless - we protect what we love.
And sometimes loving begins simply by sitting beside a river and listening, until deep calls unto deep. Perhaps this is the kind of conversion we most need. Good policies and efficient systems are vital, but a softening of perception is transforming.
For too long we have thought of the land beneath our feet as inert matter. But it is really about relationship; God in all things and all things in God. When we begin there, we tread more lightly, waste less and give thanks more often. We also find ourselves acting differently because something in us has fallen quietly in love.
The old peoples of this earth seemed to understand this. They lived close enough to river and stone and weather that the world was never merely scenery. For them it was companion and teacher. Perhaps we have not lost that wisdom entirely. Perhaps it is only sleeping, waiting for us to slow down long enough to hear it again.
The medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen spoke of viriditas, the greening, life-giving energy of God flowing through all creation, the divine vitality that shimmers in leaf and soil and breath alike. For her, the world was living praise.
“The earth,” she wrote, “is at the same time mother. She is mother of all that is natural, mother of all that is human. She is the mother of all, for contained in her are the seeds of all.”
To care for creation then, is not simply to manage it well. It is to honour our mother. To recognise kin and to live gently within the great web of God’s life.
And perhaps loving begins exactly there,
a loaf of bread returned to the ground, a crow calling his friends to share, a river moving steadily past, and one small human being standing still long enough to say thank you.
Blessings, Jayne