Season of Creation and Rosh Hashanah

Every few days I have to visit and find them. Yes, there is the green and brown frog blinking at me until I get too close and she cannot stand it and bolts into the water. Ah, over there, thank heavens, is the turtle basking in afternoon sun; don’t let the others know, but he’s my favorite so I sidle around him quietly to keep him drowsing in the sun where I can see him. Oh, and there under the water are the fish, colorful koi and speckled – could they be? – trout and the little brown fish, some with iridescent tails that bring their school mates along to follow me as I circle the pond and face me squarely whenever I stop. There’s the water snake stretched out on the bank, asleep – or is he? – and as I walk further around, there are the baby frogs seen only from the corner of my eye so swiftly do they arch away and disappear in the murky bottoms as I roam along their territory. Sorry, black birds with red bellies and striped wings, I know I startle you into flight but, despite your color, you’re hard to spot in the massive tree I sit under.

Several times a week, I walk up the long hill to the pond I share with the local feathered, finned, and footed animal community (including the human variety). It seems important, sometimes critically so on especially difficult days, to “attend” to them, to count, and count on, their numbers, their stability in the midst of change and, yes, their change in the midst of stability. (The goslings I watched being raised from toddlers to teens when I could no longer tell them from their parents – are gone. So are the myriad of insects, water bugs, dragonflies, moths, and bees. There are no more tadpoles and tiny turtles on moms’ backs; the birds are leaving as I write.) Plenty is transitioning into scarcity as it does, hopefully, for only a while.

There are other endings for this year, too: “Season of Creation” the month long (September 1 – October 4) ecumenical call to over 2 billion of the world’s Christians – and all others – to pray and care for all of God’s creation as well as the ending of Rosh Hashanah’s Days of Awe. Together they call us to reflect on our relationships with the earth, each other, and ourselves. They call us to look critically at the worlds closest to us and to examine just how we inhabit those worlds.

Jesuit Father James E. Hug (great name!) in NCR’s “Earth Beat” series reminded me, for example, that: “The glory of God is not words of praise expressing what is glorious about God. It is the person herself or himself being as fully human as possible. The glory of God is us being ourselves fully. How well we do it is a measure of the glory we give God.” More significantly for me, he adds: “That insight resonates in this age of evolutionary consciousness and awareness of the interconnectedness of everything….If humans give glory to God by being fully alive humans, doesn’t it make sense that rivers glorify God by being fully alive as rivers? Every creature and creation glorifies God by being most fully itself.”

Once we include rivers and ponds and fish and turtles and birds and all other living creatures as expressions of glory in worship with us, however, we need a Rosh Hashanah kind of personal and communal reckoning with our faults and failings this past year. Suppose we’ve contributed to the poisoning of the river or pond or ocean or bird or fish or turtle with our consumptive lifestyles and through that poisoning have done the same to ourselves? Are we blocking not only the expression of God’s glory in the earth and its creatures but also dimming that same glory in our now less healthy, less vibrant selves?

Put in these terms, the diminishment of any past, present, or future expression of glory seems a particularly grievous – old word here – sin. And we suffer its consequences everywhere, as others and I have noted so often here, certainly with prohibitions within our Church in regard to the full glory women can bring.

It’s New Year 5781 and it’s always a new “Season of Creation”. We can all go back to our “ponds” whatever they may be and renew our focus on preserving and protecting all possibilities for expressing glory every day.

I especially appreciated what Rabbi Shawn Zevit said in a newsletter put out by The New Sanctuary Movement. He invited the community to enter the New Year 5781 with this:

“And so, as we lean into the ancient call of the Days of Awe to explore with determination amid the fires burning literally and figuratively in our world – who will we be? What will you let go of or take on in your life? How can we as a sacred community realize our collective potential linking together our individual journeys with those of all our community and country?”

I, for one, will go up to the pond and think that through for a while. Luckily, I will not be there alone.