Guest Post
The Rev. Randall Warren, Rector, St. Luke’s, Kalamazoo
God is having one conversation with all creation. Because we believe that God is one, we hold this idea of one Creator and the Creation in conversation to be true. Because we believe that our God is also a trinity of persons who are nevertheless one, we know that singularity and diversity (concepts so challenging for us to hold together) are not opposites to God. Therefore, we know that the one conversation is continually taking place in a variety of ways and in many forms. Because this conversation is everywhere present all the time, and because its forms and occurrences are so diverse, it is often difficult for us to perceive.
Sadly, when we forget that God is having one conversation with all of creation, terrible things arise.We more easily waste, disregard, disdain, or oppress our natural environment, the animals, and our fellow human beings. Failing to know that another part of creation is in conversation with God makes that other seem to us less or unimportant. The other becomes disposable in our eyes.
That said, the word “conversation” comes to us through the Old French and once included the ideas of one’s actions or habits, as well as the place one lives. Creation cannot help but be in one conversation with God because that is where creation lives, with and in its Creator. As we have noted, however, it is often hard to remember or to perceive that God is having one conversation with all of creation. Yet every now and then we catch a hint of that conversation happening.
In the early 16th Century, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was busily drafting the first ever Book of Common Prayer. He most often wrote in a small room overlooking the garden at Lambeth Palace in London. Looking out at that garden, Archbishop Cranmer knew that only God’s grace, mercy, and love could create this abundantly beautiful world in which God cares for us. Drawing on an old English cathedral tradition known as the Sarum, he wrote the following collect for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany. “Almightie and everlasting God, whiche doest governe all thynges in heaven and earthe: mercifully heare the supplicacions of thy people, and graunt us thy peace all the dayes of our life” (1549 BCP). God governs all things and has created an abundant universe in which God does indeed care for us. Under the concept of how we pray shapes what we believe, by asking for God’s peace, we remind ourselves that divine care and peace are there, a part of God’s one conversation with all of creation.
At about the same time, again in the early 16th Century, a Native American who was most likely a woman of the Mississippian culture, lived somewhere in what is now the region of Arkansas and Oklahoma. She made the beautiful pot in the picture above. It is on display at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The circle motif, and the interlocking lines she used to decorate her work speak of a creation that pulls together in abundance and beauty. The circles reminded her of the sun, which her people conceived of as an all seeing eye which kept watch over a nurturing and harmonious universe.
So at about the same time, in two very different places on the globe, a man and a woman from two very different cultures, were moved to share the same idea. They taught their people that the universe is benevolently governed by divine forces that care for them, having made and placed them in a beautiful world. They offer us a glimpse, a whisper, of the one conversation that God is having with all of creation.
