The Humble Now: A Season of Creation Reflection
A Reflection for Season of Creation Healing Eucharist
“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. ... We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. . . We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.” (Wendell Berry)
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In recent years there’s been renewed interest in popular culture in immersion in nature as a healing experience. Dozens of books have been written on the therapeutic value of things like forest bathing, star gazing, and nature walks. Wild church gatherings, pilgrimage trails, and yoga retreats in exotic locations have all experienced a resurgence and secular medicine has been recommending what the mystics and Indigenous peoples have always known: that green space and wild places are medicine for the soul. A walk among the trees lowers stress, improves mood, and slows the racing of our hearts. The natural world soothes, comforts, and restores in ways our technological, hurried culture cannot replicate.
As people of faith it is no surprise to us that many report experiences of the divine in nature. Something about the sky at dawn, the silence of a forest, the song of a bird, draws us toward transcendence. The wilderness has always been a kind of school for prophets and seekers: Moses on Sinai, Elijah listening for the still small voice, Jesus fasting in the desert. These are the places where distractions fall away, where we are stripped back to essentials, and where, as Wendell Berry writes, “the natural and the supernatural, the heavenly and the earthly, the soul and the body, the wondrous and the ordinary, all appear to occur together in the one fabric of creation.”
In such places, we remember how things are meant to be. If, for example, we take a walk by the creek behind the church, our attention shifts to the humble now: the sound of water trickling, sunlight softened by the canopy overhead, the unevenness of soil and stone beneath our feet. When we silence our phones, the world beyond can make no demands on us, and we find ourselves amid an ecology of flora and fauna that knows what it is to live with humility.
Reflecting on this, Wendell Berry once wrote: “As for ‘wild,’ I think the word is misused. The longer I have lived here among the noncommercial creatures of the woods and fields, the less I have been able to conceive of them as ‘wild.’ They plainly are going about their own domestic lives… They are far better at domesticity than we industrial humans are. It became clear to me also that they think of us as wild, and that they are right. We are the ones who are… unrestrained, disorderly, extravagant, and out of control. They are our natural teachers, and we have learned too little from them.”
In the quiet company of trees and rivers, we see how creation models the steadiness and balance we too often forget. Nature teaches us how to live within limits, how to rest and renew, and the patience to trust that healing happens over time.
In nature we see abandoned, eroded fields slowly re-clothed in forest, rivers cleansing themselves when given space, and soil recovering when natural processes resume. Sabbath, Berry suggests, is not just a human commandment but a principle written into the very fabric of creation: when given appropriate time and respect, life knows how to repair itself. And in the liturgical Season of Creation, we are invited to see how our healing is tied to the healing of the Earth.
Jesus says that all the law and the prophets hang on love of God and neighbour, but this love does not stop at the boundaries of our species. If we love God, we must also honour the gifts and limits of God’s earth. If we love our neighbour, we must ensure clean air, fertile soil, and safe water. And if we are to love ourselves, we must stop driving our bodies beyond their limits. Too often, however, we do the opposite: we ignore hunger and fatigue, push through illness, skip sabbath rest, fuel our days with caffeine, scroll late into the night, and measure our worth by constant productivity. We try to live as though we have no limits, but our bodies always tell the truth. Anxiety rises, sleep falters, illness spreads, and relationships fray when we behave as machines rather than creatures.
We live in a culture addicted to work, productivity, and busyness. We equate rest with laziness and stillness with guilt. And when rest disappears, so too does reverence — for our bodies, for one another, and for creation itself. The result is that our restlessness gets pushed onto the Earth. We demand that she too work without pause. Forests are logged faster than they can regrow. Soils are forced to yield crop after crop until stripped of nutrients. Rivers are dammed and diverted, frustrating their cleansing cycles. Just as we run on borrowed energy, we demand from rivers, forests, and atmosphere more than they can give. The Earth is exhausted because we are exhausted. The refusal to rest becomes the refusal to let creation rest.
The Eucharist provokes a counter approach. The bread and wine we place upon the altar are gifts of God, expressed through soil, water, sun, and human labour. Here each week we practice the principles of sabbath: we leave the wider world and enter this sanctuary to reflect, receive, and be nourished. Here we let go of constant striving, we trust in what God has already given and simply open our hands. This is not just spiritual comfort but an act of realignment — bringing our bodies and intentions back into a more humble, sustainable rhythm with God’s creation. We leave this table remembering our vocation to be co-healers with Christ — people through whom the healing love of God is called to flow: to neighbour, yes, but also to flora and fauna, to soil, river, and sky
In this Season of “Peace with Creation”, we bring before God not only our own weariness but also the groaning of the Earth. We pray for bodies restored, for communities reconciled, for ecosystems renewed knowing there can be no enduring peace for us if we are not living in peace with creation.
For the state of our bodies and the body of the earth are not separate stories but one great creative narrative – interwoven and still precariously unfurling as we learn to better cherish this fragile flesh and this precious earth-island of life.