22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 30 August 2026 – Commencing the Season of Creation
From time to time in life, disillusionment can settle upon us. Why can’t we and others live up to the ideals that are important to us? Why can’t things simply be as they should be? Why can’t people live as we hope they might? We can be left wondering whether our ideals are ever really possible, whether the world for which we hope can ever be realised.
Perhaps this experience has a particular resonance for us as we prepare to enter the Season of Creation, which begins this week on 1 September and continues until the Feast of St Francis of Assisi on 4 October. It is the season, given by the Church, to ask us to look with renewed attention at the extraordinary gift of the world God has entrusted to us. And, if we look honestly, what we see is both beautiful and wounded. We see the astonishing beauty of creation: the first hints of spring around us, the lengthening days, the flowering trees, the remarkable diversity of life. Yet alongside this beauty we see the scars. We see changing climates and increasingly extreme weather. We see forests destroyed, waterways polluted, species disappearing, oceans under pressure. And, as always, it is often the poorest communities, those who have contributed least to these problems, who suffer their consequences most severely.
Confronted by all this, it is easy to become disillusioned. We might ask: what difference can I possibly make? Have we already left things too late? Can human beings ever learn to live differently upon the planet? Yet one of the most radical truths we will ever learn in life is expressed by the Australian poet Les Murray in the opera libretto of Patrick Whites, Voss: “The mystery of life is not solved by success, but by failure, a perpetual becoming.” We can spend our whole life learning the meaning of this. It confuses us because it is almost the opposite of what our culture teaches us. Immersed in a culture of success, achievement and consumption, we can be constantly encouraged to acquire more, experience more, travel more, possess more, produce more. We are seduced into believing that a good life is one in which our choices are unlimited and our desires endlessly satisfied. And yet the ecological crisis confronting our world exposes the illusion at the heart of this way of thinking. We inhabit a finite earth. We are creatures, not gods. We live within limits. We depend upon soil and water, air and climate, plants and animals, and upon one another. The earth is not simply an endless storehouse of resources for our consumption. It is our common home, a gift received rather than a possession acquired.
Life itself, and the Gospel as life’s deepest commentary, teach us a very different, counter-cultural truth. Something becomes possible precisely in the shattering of our illusions. Something new can emerge when we acknowledge our limits and vulnerability. The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh puts it starkly: “And three sad people had found the key to the lock/Of God’s delight in disillusionment.” How can God have a delight in our disillusionment? Only because disillusionment can strip away our illusions. It can open our eyes to realities we had previously refused to see. It can free us from the fantasy that we are entirely self-sufficient and in control.
This is the possibility to which we are invited by the scene in today’s Gospel. Peter wants what all of us instinctively want. He wants strength, power and success. He wants Jesus to succeed. He wants the Kingdom of God to arrive triumphantly. He wants suffering to be avoided. When Jesus begins to speak of rejection, suffering and death, Peter cannot accept it. This cannot be the way. Peter personifies something deep within each of us: the desire to avoid vulnerability, to escape suffering, to imagine that life can somehow be lived without loss or limitation. As Jürgen Moltmann once described the scene: there stands the human being wanting goals and ideals that are powerful, victorious and promising success. Yet before him stands the suffering and crucified God, loving human beings as they actually are, uncertain, mortal and dependent upon one another. It is, in a sense, the encounter between the human being who wants to be God and the God who has chosen to become human.
Perhaps this is also at the heart of our ecological conversion.
So much of the environmental crisis has arisen because humanity has forgotten that it is part of creation. We have imagined ourselves standing above creation rather than living within it. We have behaved as though the earth belonged to us, rather than recognising that we belong to the earth and, ultimately, that the earth belongs to God. The Season of Creation therefore invites us into something much deeper than simply becoming more environmentally conscious. It invites us to recover our identity as creatures. It asks us to rediscover humility before the world that God has made. Therefore, we are not called to become paralysed by ecological anxiety. We are not called to carry the whole weight of the planet upon our individual shoulders. But neither can we anaesthetise ourselves against what is happening. We cannot simply look away because the problems seem too large or because the changes required of us are inconvenient.
Pope Francis continually called us to hear both “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” These are not two separate cries. They belong together. The suffering of creation and the suffering of humanity are intertwined. When land is degraded, when water becomes scarce, when climate becomes more unstable, when ecosystems collapse, it is inevitably human lives, especially the lives of the poor and vulnerable, that are affected. However, the Christian response is not despair. Nor is it denial. It is presence. Jesus calls his disciples to follow him not along the pathway of domination and invulnerability, but along the pathway of self-giving love. To follow the Crucified One means, then, learning to remain present to what is wounded rather than turning away from it. We are invited to stay present to the woundedness of our common home long enough to hear what it is asking of us. Perhaps it asks us to live more simply. Perhaps it asks us to consume less thoughtlessly. Perhaps it asks us to recover gratitude for things we have come to take for granted: clean water, fertile soil, trees, birds, oceans, seasons, food. Perhaps it asks us to recognise that care for creation is not an optional interest for Christians but part of what it means to love our neighbour, particularly those whose lives are most vulnerable to environmental degradation.
Above all, it asks us to rediscover relationship. We need one another. We need the earth. We need the innumerable forms of life with which we share this extraordinary planet. We are members of what Pope Francis called a “universal family,” bound together in relationships we did not create and cannot entirely control. When we share our hurts with one another, we discover companionship. When we acknowledge the wounds of the earth together, we discover responsibility. And when we allow both the beauty and the fragility of creation to touch us, we may rediscover wonder. This is where ecological conversion finally begins: not with guilt, but with wonder; not with despair, but with gratitude; not with the illusion that we can save the world by ourselves, but with the humble recognition that we belong to something infinitely greater than ourselves. And from that renewed sense of belonging, may there arise in us not despair, but the courage to live differently: not paralysis, but responsibility; not domination, but care. For the mystery of life is not finally the achievement of perfection. It is, as Les Murray reminds us, a “perpetual becoming”: the patient work of allowing even our disillusionment to become the place from which something new can begin.
