The burning bush
(Ex, 3:1-12)
ARCORES International participates in the annual celebration of the Season of Creation 2022 with the theme: “Listen to the Voice of Creation”. In a special way, we invite our ARCORES Network to align programs and activities within the period of the celebration (from 1 September 2022 to 4 October 2022) in observing acts of prayer and encounters promoting the care for creation. Pope Francis in his Message for the World Day of Prayer for Creation 2022 says “If we learn how to listen, we can hear in the voice of creation a kind of dissonance. On the one hand, we can hear a sweet song in praise of our beloved Creator; on the other, an anguished plea, lamenting our mistreatment of this our common home.” This is an invitation from Pope Francis to listen not only to the sweet song of the creatures, but also of the “that sweet song is accompanied by a cry of anguish… a chorus of cries of anguish.”
Pope Francis outlines the cries of anguish, where we can also identify the places of our pastoral and social ministries (from Latin America to Asia):
- The mother earth who cries out – she weeps and implores us to put an end to our abuses and to her destruction.
- The creatures who suffered from the tyrannical anthropocentrism—of the human failure to assume the responsibility to care for creation.
- The poorest among us who are crying out. Exposed to the climate crisis, the poor feel even more gravely the impact of the drought, flooding, hurricanes and heat waves that are becoming ever more intense and frequent.
- Our brothers and sisters of the native peoples are crying out. As a result of predatory economic interests, their ancestral lands are being invaded and devastated on all sides, “provoking a cry that rises up to heaven”
- Young people are crying out, anxiously asking us adults to do everything possible to prevent, or at least limit, the collapse of our planet’s ecosystems.
Importantly, Pope Francis calls us to be “attentive to God’s presence in the natural world” as a way of nurturing our ecological spirituality, summoning us in a new relationship with God, and also entails a different relationship with others and with creation.
On 1 September 2022, representing the Laudato Si’ Movement of the Roman Catholic Church for the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Karlsruhe, Germany, Fray Jaazeal Jakosalem, OAR, member of ARCORES, presents this message to the Panel on the “Season of Creation (SoC) and ecumenical call for ecological conversion”:
“A real ecological spirituality brings a real Kairos for creation, a true ecological repentance of what we have done to creation… Likewise, our silence to the many cries of creation destroys our relationship with God.
Ecological repentance not only brings spiritual change; but should bring also ‘system change’ – in society, in the church, and in our own spaces of encounters.
Our ecumenical spaces of encounter/s must bring a greater awareness of ecological repentance to our faith communities. If only faith communities listen to the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor, we can then end the anguish of our people and our planet.”
These are important resources for the Season of Creation:
