A Liturgy of Creation: Creation and Christian Formation, Part 4

Let me offer four simple suggestions by way of entrance into the liturgy of creation.

1. Wilderness: Go camping. Go camping in wilderness if you can. When we camp we are creating tight and simple human culture closely aligned and responsive to creation. How else are we to know God as a shelter and refuge outside of a well-staked tent during a thunderstorm? Truly, we can only passionately wail Psalm 40 along with Bono with integrity when we have experienced an endless muddy portage and then the respite of a piece of ancient uplifted granite bedrock. "I waited patiently for the LORD; he inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure." I know of no better way to experience the primordial culture-making command of Genesis 1:28 ("Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion…") in context than to arrive at a deserted wilderness campsite at dusk and to create culture by making camp. In camping we can take up with the liturgy of creation in a way that shapes us towards greater affection for the Lord.
2. Work: Grow some of your own food. Food is the most basic and elemental way in which we daily take up with creation and it comes as gift. That does not mean that work is not involved. It is. Farming is very hard work, but when all is said and done the food-giving gift of a planted seed is sheer grace. In whatever job or task that is before us we often experience both the blessing and curse of work. But in gardening, or working closely with creation, the full range of the liturgy is distinctively heard. This is because we are not meant to be mere observers of creation but participants in it. In work close to the earth we experience the liturgy of creation as participants and that can powerfully and subversively orient us towards the object of creation’s praise.
3. Wonder: Take up bird watching. This is a very practical suggestion that Dr. Cal DeWitt often gives to those who ask him how they might "behold" creation with the wonder that it deserves. Beholding is a way of seeing creation as it truly is. Seeing in this way takes a lifetime of discipline and practice. Because we have become so accustomed to seeing creation through strikingly utilitarian and anthropocentric eyes it is very difficult to see the intricacies and complexities of creation as motions in a Christ-centered liturgical dance. Bird watching is one discipline that provides a new way of seeing the liturgical splendor, which is all around us.
4. Worship: Celebrate the Eucharist. In For the Life of the World, Alexander Schmemann writes that the first and basic definition of man is that he is the priest — standing in the centre of the world, unifying it in the act of blessing God, receiving the world from God and offering it back, and so transforming his life into communion with Him. The world, Schmemann writes, was created as the matter of one all-embracing eucharist, and man as the priest of this cosmic sacrament.

This "liturgy of creation" that I have been contending for is not separate and independent of formalized and gathered Christian worship. The liturgy of gathered Christian worship – especially centralized in the Eucharist – is the liturgy of creation. And our place within this holistic and cosmic liturgy is not only that of participant. Our rightful place is that of priest in creation’s liturgy in which we cultivate and nurture a creation that sings its song to the King.