What shall I give up this Lent? How shall I pray this Lent? Familiar questions, yes, but in these times might these questions need new answers?
For the first question, our commitment to Earth might lead us to new ways of “giving up for Lent.” One could give up bottled shampoo, for example, and switch to bar shampoo. Or eat even less red meat. Or amend an old category, like giving up eating chocolate but adding the practice of buying Fair Trade chocolate products for Easter gifts.
Why take on this practice for Lent? Yes, to decrease the ways we harm the environment, harm Earth, harm creation, but also to better connect this “giving up” action to a way of prayer that supports and deepens our experience of all creation as one, all creation as sacred, all creation as charged with divinity. Those who pray with creation describe their experience in many ways, for example reentering Paradise, being awake to nature, listening to the voice of divinity. Or, simply, eco-prayer.
Like all contemplative prayer, eco-prayer is practiced best in a time set aside for silence and solitude, but now in the presence of nature, either virtual presence—in a photo or a work of art or a scene from a TV show like PBS’ Nature—or actual presence—in yard, garden, park, lakeside, hilltop, with one’s fellow creatures: grass, tree, bush, weed, flower, squirrel, rabbit, pigeon, robin, with moon, sun, star—while sitting, walking slowly, journaling; with senses awake to the divine. For God asks, “Do I not fill heaven and earth?” (Jer. 23:24).
Our action and our prayer both express and hopefully deepen our love for the divine in all creation, in all creatures, experiencing more and more that we are all one.
With this prayer, we connect our Lenten eco-giving up and our Lenten eco-praying. Our action and our prayer both express and hopefully deepen our love for the divine in all creation, in all creatures, experiencing more and more that we are all one.
And how does all this connect with the cross? “The grace of the crucified and risen Christ washes over all creation,” writes Elizabeth Johnson, a theologian and Sister of St. Joseph of Brentwood. A greater experience of our oneness with creation focuses us on that truth.