The Season of Creation 2025 ("Peace with creation")

A reflection on discipleship in Luke 14:25-33, in light of the five-week Season of Creation (Sept 1 to Oct 4). Written and spoken by Kieran J. O'Mahony OSA. 

Gentle piano music to close the meditation

Transcript

John’s Lane
D08 F8NW
7 September 2025
Season of Creation 2025

Welcome
Our Gospel today is about discipleship, that is being “Christ-learners” in our time. With the many challenges of our world marked by what some call a poly-crisis, discipleship most certainly includes the care of creation. We have 4 weeks of Advent, 6 weeks of Lent, 7 weeks of Eastertide and, now 5 weeks of the Season of Creation. 

Topic

This new season allows us to focus on how to be disciples, Christ-learners, in our time, facing the critical issues before us.

Steps
The Season of Creation starts on September 1, the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation. The project began in 1989,  when the Greek Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul/Constantinople proclaimed the 1st September as a day of prayer for creation. When the World Council of Churches took it up, it became a season, from September 1 to October 4, ending suitably on the feast of St Francis. Under the leadership of Pope Francis, the Catholic Church joined this initiative officially in 2015. All together, the world’s 2.4 billion Christians (roughly 34% of the world’s population) are called to take time to care for creation and to reflect on it during this five-week season. 

For 2025, the Season of Creation has as its theme “Peace with Creation”, inspired by the passage from Isaiah 32:14-18; “My people will abide in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places.”  In a world of challenges and division, marked by war and climate change, how can we as people of faith create and work towards peace with creation? 

There are really excellent resources on the Irish Bishops’ website, as well as on the website of “The Season of Creation.” We know, only too well, that we are at a crucial time for our common home with both climate change and biodiversity loss already impacting the lives of many people, their livelihoods and all life.

So as Christians, how are we responding to these social, moral and ethical challenges? People of faith have three grounds for responding. First of all, the created world is not a kind of impersonal reality over against the human. On the contrary, God is present in all that is and we ourselves are part of creation. As St Augustine said, “[Creation] is the divine page that you must listen to; it is the book of the universe that you must observe.” When we honour the creation we honour the creator; even more, we are in touch with the creator. 

Secondly, we are fortunate that Pope Francis committed us as Catholics to the protection of the environment. He made this clear in 2015 when he published a letter, Laudato Si’, taking up a phrase from the hymn St Francis. If you happen not to have read it, perhaps now is the time: it is a passionate document and speaks to our concerns today directly. Not only that, there are many Laudato Si’ groups who continue to reflect, raise awareness, and undertake advocacy and practical programmes.

On the 8th anniversary of Laudato Si’, Pope Francis followed up it with an update in 2023, entitled Laudate Dominum, Praise the Lord. It is briefer but more focussed and even more directly rooted in what scientists are saying. The Holy Father was very direct: 

25. Contrary to this technocratic paradigm, we say that the world that surrounds us is not an object of exploitation, unbridled use and unlimited ambition. Nor can we claim that nature is a mere “setting” in which we develop our lives and our projects. For “we are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it”, and thus “we [do] not look at the world from without but from within”.

Thirdly, care for creation is simply part of social justice, viewed in terms of the generations after us. We are inspired by the love of the creator, the teaching of Pope Francis and by love of our neighbour, both today and into the future. We have been gifted with a garden, let us not leave it a desert!

Conclusion
None of this is going to be easy. As we see from the Gospel, discipleship is always costly and today the form costly discipleship takes has, in part, to do with the great emergency of our time, climate change and its harrowing consequences. As believers, we are not powerful people but we have a spirituality and a voice and we can make personal choices.

Let me close with the official prayer for the season of 2025:

PEACE WITH CREATION
Creator of all,
we praise you for the gift of life
and for the faith that unites us in care for our common home.
We confess how estranged we have become—
from one another, from your Creation, and from our truest selves.
We acknowledge that our greed and destructive impulses
have fractured our relationships with you, with others, and with the Earth.
Fertile fields have become barren,
forests lie desolate,
oceans and rivers are polluted.
Thriving communities have become places of suffering,
and the earth cries out.

Beloved Christ,
who spoke “Shalom” to frightened hearts,
stir us to compassionate action.
Inspire us to work for the end of conflict,
and for the full restoration of broken relationships—
with you, with the ecumenical community,
with the human family,
and with all Creation.
Prince of Peace,
through your wounds, teach us to stand in solidarity
with the woundedness of others,
of creation, and of the world.
Through your resurrection,
make us people of hope—
with a vision of swords turned into ploughshares
and tears transformed into joy.
May we come together as one family,
to labour for your peace—
a shalom where all people
may dwell in safety,
and rest in quiet places.
Amen.