‘As we enter the dark time when earth begins her slumber…’
This past week we have been through the Autumn Equinox, the moment in the calendar when there are exactly 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night. One of the peculiarities of living outside of the equatorial zones of the earth is the fact of the seasonal changes throughout the year. The further north or south one goes the longer the winter nights and the longer the summer days.
Although we will notice the lack of daylight and the increase of the cold, the effects of seasonal change have been mitigated by technology. We can light and heat our homes, and lighting means we can stay up beyond the hours of sunset. As usual as this may seem, this way of living is very recent when one compares it with the way we have lived through the last 10,000 of human history. My father was brought up in house without electricity. This was not in some remote part of Britain, but in rural Kent in the 1950s. They did have artificial lighting, but it was in the form of oil lamps not electric lights. There was not therefore an endless supply of light. If the oil ran out, the light ran out until more oil could be bought. That was the 1950s and we don’t have to go back much further than that, in fact to 1881, 140 years ago for the first public electricity generator in Britain which was installed in Godalming, Surrey.
If the last 10,000 years is represented by 24 hours, then the electric lights went on at 11:40 pm and the industrial revolution began at 11.22 pm. For almost all of our history here in the north, human beings have had a lot of sleep in the winter, and humanity as a whole has lived without the excessive use of fossil fuels.
That’s perhaps an interesting bit of nostalgia but it is actually more than that, it is just one example of how we have become disconnected for the earth and its seasonal rhythms. And saying that is more just a lament for that loss of connection, as the climate warms, and degradation of natural habitats increase, that loss of connection shows why the earth is in such a perilous state. Because we have been able to move beyond the natural limitations of our ancestors we have been tempted to think that we exceptions to the rest of the created order, and that human exceptionalism means that we think the degradation of the earth will not affect us.
It has been said that salvation is cross shaped, and it is, Jesus died on a cross and the cross symbolically shows us that salvation is the renewal of our relationships, the vertical relationship between ourselves and God, and the horizontal relationship between ourselves and one another. We would nevertheless be mistaken to think that it was all about us as individuals and us as a species, ‘God so loved the cosmos that he gave his only son…’ John 3:16. It’s not just the human world, it is the whole of creation being renewed. We find this also in the teaching of St Paul in his letter to Christians in Rome.
‘For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God’.
To be a redeemed person is to ready to be a co worker with God in God’s renewal of creation. We can no longer see creation as an object out there for us to exploit and use.
At the beginning of October we celebrate the feast of St Francis of Assisi. As he neared his end, he composed his song of the creatures. Confined to a bed and almost blind he identified the sun, moon and the stars, the wind, water, fire, mother earth, those who forgive for love of you, and even the death of the body, he identified all of these, all creatures as our brothers and sisters with whom join in praising the creator.
If all creation is a brother and sister, then we owe a duty of sisterly and brotherly love towards it. We can longer see them as a set of objects for our use and abuse. We must learn to hear again the sounds of our sister, mother earth she has never ceased to speak and cry out to God, we have just stopped listening. We must learn again to live simply, so that others may simply live.
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