Season of Creation 2025 Irish Bishops Conference.

Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C

– Season of Creation 1 September 7th – Luke 14:25-33

By Sr Ann Concannon Saint Louis Sister

Today is the first Sunday of Creation Time, the month the church sets aside to remind us of the great gift of Creation and of our responsibility towards it. It can be easy to take Creation/Nature for granted: it’s just there and has always been there and is all around us. But when we think about it we realize that everything we need for life comes from ‘Nature’: energy from the sun, food from the earth, etc. 

Not only that! The late Pope Francis wrote a wonderful letter, called Laudato Si’/Praised Be, to the whole church, indeed the whole world, ten years ago. The big message he wanted to get across was that not only are we dependent on ‘Nature’ for life but that we and all other creatures are interdependent. It’s a relationship. We are all created by God who created the world and everything in it out of love; who saw all that was created and called it ‘Good!’ 

So, just as we depend on other creatures for life, so too does the rest of creation depend on us humans. In fact, the theme for this year’s Season of Creation is Peace with Creation. However, Pope Francis points out to us in his letter that we are not doing a good job of it. ‘Human-induced climate change’ is the phrase being used. 

What does today’s Gospel say to this? It speaks of the person who wants to build a house without first making sure s/he has enough resources to finish it. I’m afraid we are a bit like that. We want a good, healthy and peaceful future for ourselves and our children, but we are destroying the only home we all share – Our Common Home – by the wasteful way we are living today. 

Think about it. Think about the daily choices we make. Do we drive when, in fact, we could walk or take the bus? When we are shopping, do we buy the food grown locally when it is available or do we reach for the out-of-season food from hundreds of miles away? Have we grown tired of the motto, Reduce, reuse, recycle, or do we still practice it? The earlier part of the Gospel challenges us here: it speaks of the ‘cross’; there is always some cost to really following Jesus, and being mindful in how we are living in relation to the whole of creation is one way of practically living out our relationship with the God who does not forget even the two sparrows sold for a penny. 

This Season of Creation is a relatively new thing in the Catholic church. (The other Christian churches were far ahead of us in this.) This only shows that the church, too, must learn, as we all must, to change our ways. The first reading today tells us this when it says, ‘Who has learned your counsel unless you have given wisdom and sent your holy spirit from on high? And thus the paths of those on earth were set right, and people were taught what pleases you and were saved by wisdom.”’ We now know, in ways we did not know earlier, that caring for Creation, living in peace with Creation, greatly pleases God who made it all out of love.