Season of Creation 2025

The Wheaton Franciscans, in the lineage of St. Francis and St. Clare, celebrate the land we are privileged to call our own. We affirm the way in which the overflowing goodness of God is revealed in its natural beauty, in the life forms it sustains and inspires, and in the ever-evolving complex relationships that its ecology evokes. The land makes possible great healing and much loving and nourishes both body and soul.

The great Franciscan insight is that all creation mirrors God. Everything that God has made reveals the mysterious love of God much in the same way a beautiful work of art reveals the great care and love its artist-creator lavished upon it. The land teaches us that God has created a world that flourishes through ever-increasing diversity and manifests most fully via thriving, vital interdependence. The rich and complex relationships of the land’s ecology offer ever-new ways to understand the depth and breadth of God’s goodness and grace, even where we would least expect it. In the ecology of the land, all life requires sacrifice, and death is often a precursor to the possibility of more life. The seasonal cycles of nature can wonderfully instruct us about the mysterious graces of our own life’s changes. Our souls take heart as we learn that there is a time for everything, and often that which is presumed most bitter, in time, ripens into good fruit. The ongoing revelation of God’s goodness and blessing is unstoppable.

The great wonder is that the very ecology of the land and all its marvelous creatures has today become so vulnerable to our human activities. It certainly invites our participation in ever more responsible ways. The land instructs us that no blooming prairie or red-tailed hawk, walking path or deer track, woodchuck den or human construction is without great beauty and great price. We have come to the awesome realization that the very healing gift of the land’s beauty and diversity is dependent upon our human generosity and dispensation. As we come to care for the land, and we are ecologically literate enough to comprehend the magnitude of our collaboration in its vitality, we exemplify no less than the original great goodness God intended all creation to reveal.

Our loving care for the land, our celebration of it as precious and worthy of concern, exemplifies God’s own affirmation of and participation in creation. Such is God’s great intention. From the very beginning, it is God’s great desire for us to participate in the divine revelation and divine pronouncement of all as “very good!”

Such holy participation prompted St. Francis of Assisi to sing a great canticle of familial creaturely connection. We know this prayer today as his Canticle of the Creatures. Already over 800 years ago, St. Francis was inspired to prayerfully name all that shines, flows, burrows, flies, walks, and blossoms as no less than his own sister and brother. In a contemplative insight that rivals contemporary ecological science, St Francis knew himself and every one of his sisters and brothers to be dependent upon “our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us” all. From Brother Fire to Sister Water, what a grand interdependent planetary family he intuited. It prompted him to reach out to everyone and everything in both peace and celebration. Consequently, St. Francis made it his life’s work to remind all creatures, from the citizens of Assisi to the wolf of Gubbio, from the larks to the lepers, just how much God cherished them. He would also be quick to add that they could best witness to God’s great family of love by blessing one another in peace.

Today it falls to us to ask how we might best be kin in such an Earth household. For some clues, we might well turn to St Clare, a friend and supporter of St. Francis. She would often exhort her sisters and the early followers of St. Francis to contemplate and to gaze. In other words, to look carefully and deeply all around them, so that they could see what God might wish to reveal in the sisters and brothers that God gave them to see. Looking in this contemplative way, we can perceive where we might bring light and hope where there is none, healing and reconciliation where there is brokenness, comfort and concern where there is suffering. In such caring consideration of everyone and everything around us, we can be inspired to see the goodness that God intended to reveal from the first moment of creation.

As Wheaton Franciscans, we have inherited a spirituality that affirms the natural world and the universe around us as the primary divine revelation of the overflowing goodness of God. Brother Sun and Sister Moon; Sisters Stars, and Brothers Fire and Wind; Sister Earth, our Mother…

These are not simple poetic terms of endearment for the elements of nature, but express an intuitive Franciscan way of honoring their full vocation. Indeed, it is our vocation and the vocation of all our brothers and sisters to reveal a universe full of the “very good!” of God. We might even say that we are given to one another, so that there might be “life and life to the full”, in a rich and grand earthly cooperation of brotherly and sisterly love.

Yet, as we look around us today, the sheer magnitude of our human presence and the devastating ecological consequences of unaware behavior confront us everywhere. Our gospel calling has taught us that we cannot say of any human body, “It is nothing.” Now we are awakening to the reality from within our Franciscan tradition that we cannot say of any aspect of creation, “It is nothing.” We know in a way that St. Francis and St. Clare could not, how necessary and precious some trees and a bit of open green space can be.

Theological Reflection
You are invited to reflect on this short essay and see what it says to you about creation and God.

1. As you read the reflection, did you find any points that you particularly agreed with?
2. Did anything make you think in a new way about the campus, the land on which you live or about God?
3. Is there something that you would add or delete from this theological reflection?
4. Is there something that you wish you could ask the author?