Season of Creation 2024
The Season of Creation is a time to renew our relationship with our Creator and all creation through celebration, conversion, and commitment together. During the Season of Creation, we join our sisters and brothers in the ecumenical family in prayer and action for our common home.
Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I proclaimed 1 September as a day of prayer for creation for the Orthodox in 1989. In fact, the Orthodox church year starts on that day with a commemoration of how God created the world.
The World Council of Churches was instrumental in making the special time a season, extending the celebration from 1 September until 4 October.
Following the leadership of Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I and the WCC, Christians worldwide have embraced the season as part of their annual calendar. Pope Francis made the Roman Catholic Church’s warm welcoming of the season official in 2015.
In recent years, statements from religious leaders around the world have also encouraged the faithful to take time to care for creation during the month-long celebration.
The season starts 1 September, the Day of Prayer for Creation, and ends 4 October, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of ecology beloved by many Christian denominations.
Throughout the month-long celebration, the world’s 2.2 billion Christians come together to care for our common home. [source]
In 2019 The Anglican Church of Canada joined this worldwide coalition and, on the urging of our Primate, asked individual dioceses and parishes to consider marking the season, not as a new liturgical season of the Christian Year (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost Season) but as a thematic focus culminating at the Feast of St. Francis.
At St. Philip we will mark this season with liturgical elements and a drawing forward of the theme of Creation Care. The readings for the season are not special but the regular Revised Lectionary Readings - but looked at through "Creation Care glasses." We will also have a service of "Blessing the Animals" on October 6th at which we will bless parishioners' and visitors' pets; it will be, quite literally, wild, woolly, and wonderful!
If you have ideas on how we might embrace "Care of Creation" as a congregation or as individuals, please feel free to drop me a line; it is our shared action that will make a difference and make the season meaningful.