World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation

Creation is crying. Weeping. Flooding tears as powerful as ever so strong hurricanes.
Creation is crying. Screaming. Blazing fires that burn the California land.
Creation is crying. Dying. Killings of Black and Brown and Indigenous people.
Creation is crying.

Creation is mourning. Grieving. Once clean air filled with toxin and smoke.
Creation is mourning. Lamenting. Creatures and fauna gone.
Creation is mourning. Groaning. Your people lost in self-gain.
Creation is mourning.

Through the crying and the mourning, O God, we feel the absence of a world that once was.
We experience a creation that has been painfully broken with lack of stewardship.
Forgive us, God of the waters.
Forgive us, God of the soil.
Forgives us, God of the harvest, of the wind, of the flesh.
Forgive us, O God.

Spark a fire within us that softens our hearts to heal this world.
Give us empathetic souls that foster wholeness and transformation.
Trouble our minds so that we may undo our wrongs.

Creation is crying.
Creation is mourning.
Creation is GOD’s.
Creation is WE.
Creation is HOLY.

Amen.

Welcoming the Season of Creation

The environmental work of the Presbyterian Hunger Program is grounded in Scripture, Reformed theology, General Assembly policies that call us to care for creation, including the 1990 foundational policy “Restoring Creation for Ecology and Justice,” and prayer.

September 1 is the World Day of Prayer for Creation and the start of the Season of Creation. This day of prayer was established by Patriarch Dimitrios I for the Orthodox in 1989, and was  then embraced by major Christian European churches in 2001 and by Pope Francis for the Roman Catholic Church in 2015 when he issued a new statement for the day of prayer, calling for a “renewed and sound relationship between humanity and creation”.

The Season of Creation ends on October 4, the Feast of St. Francis and the traditional day for the Blessing of the Animals.

Today, Christians around the world unite to pray as one. On World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, the Hunger Program offers the prayer from Laudato Si’ below.

A Prayer for Our Earth

All-powerful God, you are present in the whole universe

and in the smallest of your creatures.

You embrace with your tenderness all that exists.

Pour out upon us the power of your love,

that we may protect life and beauty.

Fill us with peace, that we may live

as brothers and sisters, harming no one.

O God…

Bring healing to our lives,

that we may protect the world and not prey on it,

that we may sow beauty, not pollution and destruction.

Touch the hearts

of those who look only for gain

at the expense of the poor and the earth.

Teach us to discover the worth of each thing,

to be filled with awe and contemplation,

to recognize that we are profoundly united

with every creature.

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Download a 2-page Season of Creation 2020 Calendar from the Green Churches Network.