The World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation will be celebrated on the 1st September 2024, with the theme: Hope and act with creation. The invitation is towards active hope. Who can deny that it is a virtue so necessary in the current situation of creation, which includes us human beings?
It should cause a heartfelt appeal, if we let the images of the many places where creation groans and suffers today pass before our eyes: the list is long and we know it, at least in part.
I am writing these lines whilst I am in Papua New Guinea, where I am visiting our friars in Papua, and also Indonesia and Timor Leste. Even in this corner of the world where creation is beautiful, its groan rise loudly. It is that of the forests that disappear quickly, too quickly, in order to dig up mother earth and extract the minerals of which she gives generously, and we consume greedily. It is the groan of the native people who see the balance of the forest, the mountains and the swamps, of the rivers where they know how to move and live, semi-nomadic as they are, upset. In short, I find myself in one of the many Amazons of the world, too often forgotten or hidden.
Yet these wounds of creation, survive with stubborn hope, this year let us touch them as we remember the 800 years of the stigmata that marked the body and spirit of Saint Francis. The wounded corporeality of the Poverello is part of that groan and suffering of creation that St Paul speaks of in his Letter to the Romans 8, 22.
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We can say that in his own flesh he felt united with all creatures, with particular intensity with the poor, the abandoned, the sick, the discarded, the least (see Fratelli Tutti, n. 2). Br Francis discovered creation as a living reality, in which each creature remains itself, with its unique characteristics. From Mother Earth, to Brother Sun, to Sister Moon and the stars and all the others, even the humblest, water, are a sign of the Creator, who truly “supports and governs us”, and is “beautiful and radiant”, “clear, precious and beautiful”.
This movement furrowed the flesh of Francis, discovered fragile after the experience of war and imprisonment. Thereupon, the first creatures he let touch him are … the lepers! They would seem to be part of a creation that came into life broken, wrong in some way. But no. Creatures are not something romantic and perfect, but what exists, in its reality. Touching the wounds of the lepers and taking care of them opened to the Poverello a new contact with reality, which is a reciprocal relationship of all creatures, and with Christ, who is the Firstborn of creation.
For this reason, we can hope and act with creation: no one is saved alone. Prayer is almost helpless in the face of what wounds creation, but it can and does open the doors to hope and supports action.