We are blessed to celebrate the Season of Creation in the southern hemisphere as it provides the optimum advantage to engage with creation and develop a grounding relationship with our mother earth. It is wonderful to see a world engaged in the Season of Creation providing bountiful opportunities to explore.
This past week I was fortunate to tune into a presentation titled, The Artist and the Theologian: Contemplating Creation. Angela Manno was the artist and Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ, the theologian. The presentation combined a feast of images, music, and readings that drew the audience into contemplation, compassion, and wonder at the glory, diversity, and suffering of the living world.
The presentation is now freely accessible at: The Artist and the Theologian: Contemplating Creation - YouTube
The past week has also been an opportunity to learn about particular people who like Pope Francis have an ecological heart, one such person is our Denis Edwards.
Many thanks to our Diocesan seminarian, Anton Perera who is currently completing his theological studies for allowing his research on Denis Edwards to be included in this article.
Denis Edwards (1943- 2019) was a priest, a teacher, a prolific author and one of Australia’s expert theologians who has been engaged in the dialogue between science and religion, contributing to the developing field of ecological theology.
One of the themes Denis Edwards focuses on is Trinitarian ecology and suggests the diversity of creatures is to be seen as the self-expression of the Trinity. ‘An eagle in flight, a wildflower in its delicate beauty, an ecosystem, and the biosphere of Earth can in its own be seen as a self-expression of the Creator, and thus, as an image of God.’ [1] Edwards acknowledges St. Bonaventure’s saying, that the diverse creatures are works of art reflecting divine wisdom. ‘God created the perceptible world as a means of self-revelation. Thus, each creature represents the divine wisdom, while the universe is a book reflecting, representing and describing the Maker, the Trinity.’
Edwards claims, ‘that the interrelationships that characterize creation, including the ecological relationships that characterize life on Earth, spring from the relational life of the Trinity.’[2]
In the Christian understanding of the Holy Trinity, God is relational. The fourth century theologian Basil of Caesarea (330-379A.D.), ‘developed the notion that the divine persons are with each other in a communion (‘Koinonia’ in Greek), St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 A.D.) stated that God, relation and essence are one and the same, God’s being is relational, the persons-in-relationships are what God is.’ [3] The Greek word ‘Perichoresis’ denotes the divine being in communion. According to Edwards the radical intimacy of the divine persons points unity in diversity, thus, ‘Christian theology sees the diversity of creatures as springing from the overflowing abundance of this divine Perichoresis.’ [4] All creatures exist and have their very being in the divine ‘perichoresis’ or divine communion, so no one is excluded and each one is interconnected and interdependent.
This is the advice we are given today to protect and enhance the natural world in which we live and relate to one another in and through the Blessed Trinity. Further we are called to personal and communal transformation to integral ecological conversion to reduce the consumeristic culture.
Edwards recognized the intrinsic value, dignity and utility of all creatures. In a Trinitarian theology of creation, everything that exists springs from the divine communion and will find its fulfillment in this communion. The natural world can survive without humanity, but humanity cannot survive and has no future without the natural world.
This call to live in relationship and communion with the world speaks directly to this year’s Season of Creation theme, “To hope and act with Creation” and the symbol is “The first fruits of hope”. Creation is groaning in the pains of childbirth (Romans 8:22), this biblical image pictures the Earth as a mother, groaning as in childbirth. The times we live in show that we are not relating to the Earth as a gift from our Creator, but rather as a resource to be used. How can we live in communion with our mother earth to create deep trinitarian relationships and perichoresis? How can we nurture the first fruits, so they are nourished, maintained and sustained now and into the future?
There is a need to contemplate and act.
If you would like to learn more about the work of Denis Edwards visit the DoMN Library and to access reflections with Denis Edwards, go to:
- Denis Edwards, “Ecology at the heart of Faith”: ‘Human beings within the community of life: made in the image of God’(Maryknoll:Obris, 2006), 15.
- Denis Edwards, “The Diversity of life and the Trinity”, Lutheran Theological Journal 46. No. 2. Aug 2012:93.’
- Ibid.
- Denis Edwards (ed), “For your immortal Spirit is in all things: the Role of the Spirit in Creation” Earth Revealing; Earth Healing: Ecology and Christian Theology (Collegevile: Liturgical Press, 2001), Iixv-9.
Follow mnnews.today on Facebook.