Prayers for Earth Day

Earth Day

Though I occasionally take exception to something said from the pulpit – as is perhaps inevitable and maybe even right, as we wrestle with Holy Scripture, the life of faith, and the strife of our time – it’s not often that I am asked to pray for something that I cannot. The possibility of this latter is part of the problem with homemade forms of Prayers of the People (and, analogously, unfamiliar forms of ‘Affirmation of Faith’ which may replace the historic Creeds in the Church of England and some American Liberal Protestant groups: I don’t know whether I can affirm the contents of such texts if I have never seen them before).

The prayers (source unknown) selected in my place of work in observance of Earth Day were a case in point. The use of these prayers in the first place seemed to me a blatant instance of virtue-signalling. But their specific content was more problematic still. They (more than once) referred to parts of the Earth as ‘resources’ that we might ‘use’; prayed for the chimaera of ‘sustainable consumption’; floated the hope that the Earth would prosper ‘alongside human activity’, separating ‘humans’ from ‘creatures’ and ‘human activity’ from the life of the rest of the world. This language is, I fear, nothing but a greenwashing of the status quo, i.e. ‘human activity’ that has no place for repentance, that feels no need to learn a fundamentally different relationship (or indeed a relationship at all) with the Earth, to see itself as part of the natural world with a duty of exquisite care. I cannot pray for ‘human activity’ that continues essentially on the present course, which has brought us to the brink of destroying this precious place.

Can you?


This excerpt from a piece written during the days of the Standing Rock encampment lays out, better than I could, what I mean:

On one side is the unquestioned assumption that land is merely a warehouse of lifeless materials that have been given to (some of ) us by God or conquest, to use without constraint. On this view, human happiness is best served by whatever economy most efficiently transforms water, soils, minerals, wild lives, and human yearning into corporate wealth. And so it is possible to love the bottom line on a quarterly report so fiercely that you will call out the National Guard to protect it.

On the other side of the concrete barriers is a story that is so ancient it seems revolutionary. On this view, the land is a great and nourishing gift to all beings... These gifts are not commodities, like scrap iron and sneakers. The land is sacred, a living breathing entity, for whom we must care, as she cares for us. And so it is possible to love land and water so fiercely you will live in a tent in a North Dakota winter to protect them.

     Robin Wall Kimmerer and Kathleen Dean Moore
    YES! Magazine

The following from an old piece on the Rector’s Corner blog touches on these points in the context of the Rogation Days (a more appropriate time in Christian tradition for celebrating the Earth), specifically the first Collect for that occasion:

Can we actually accept that the sea is not just a pool of resources we may use as we wish, but a magnificent, complex, and mysterious cosmos having a life and value apart from us? Do we truly view the land as responding to God’s initiative, providing us the good things we and other creatures need, or do we still believe... that we are the owners of it all, and make the earth do our bidding?

But, the prayer goes on. It asks that God will prosper those who gather the gifts God gives; notice, they are not mere ‘products’ as we would likely call them today, but gifts that we receive from our God. The prayer ties together a right belief about God, Creation, and neighbor in justice, humility, and gratitude. It connects the dots between the food we eat and the hands through which it has passed; between the God who gives life, and the earth that responds to this gift and brings forth what we must have.

The just treatment of those who bring us our food – constantly being lost and rediscovered in our industrialized, de-personalized food empires – is central to this prayer’s understanding of stewardship. You cannot have proper stewardship of the earth if you aren’t being a faithful steward of the people. Rogationtide knows this. The Church knows this – if it but uses its own prayers and traditions.

...this prayer proposes that it only when we are living as priests – all of us – that we are fully ourselves in the Christian faith. The prayer notes that we ‘are constantly receiving good things’ from God’s hand, and are always to give God thanks for these blessings. In its most elemental form, this is what a priest does: receive from God in reverence, and offer thanks in humility.

The good Rector goes on, rightly, to connect these points to Christ’s priesthood and the eucharistic act of thanksgiving, offering – and then going forth and working for justice.

If these Prayers of the People served any purpose, it was perhaps to highlight, by the baldness of their content (as well as the verbiage-clad poverty of their style), the places in which the attitude in question, flagged by the use of the words ‘use’ and ‘resources’, appears in the Prayer Book itself, obscured there perhaps by a more familiar style of language (Form IV of the Prayers of the People, the problematic Prayer for the Conservation of Natural Resources, the exceedingly poor Thanksgiving for the Nation).

A different search of the Prayer Book, on the other hand, reveals another understanding of our place in creation, one based not in human ‘dominion’, but in human wonder: that of certain Psalms, of the Benedicite, of the third Rogation Day Collect, of the Prayer for the Whole State of Christ’s Church, of the General Thanksgiving [836], of the Thanksgiving for the Beauty of the Earth, of the Catechism – of even, this organist notes, the Dedication of an Instrument of Music. This is a lived theology of praise, of joy, of gratitude, of stewardship, of openness to goodness, of ‘harmony with God, within ourselves, with our neighbors, and with all creation’ – and of repentance (cf. the Litany of Penitence) when we fail to live up to it.

If we and our earthly home are to survive, it will only be together; if Christians need something more than common sense, innate wonder, and human decency to inspire true repentance regarding our place in the world, it will come from something like these texts, not from the Prayers of the People for Earth Day.