This Sunday: Sacred Earth Service

Come and join us this Sunday at 5 p.m. for a Sacred Earth prayer service. While the race into space continues to generate growing interest, the attention and care for the earth—our home planet—remains too limited, as the most recent Climate Change Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan this past week illustrated. The challenges of climate change are by themselves a prophetic call for our times. For decades we have been invited to respond, but it is taken us time—maybe too much time—to realize just how profound the needs of the earth affect the needs of our human race.

Praying with the earth, therefore, as God’s primary revelation, may open our minds and our hearts to our planet earth and to our instant connection with it. During our Sacred Earth prayer services this fall, winter, and spring, we will take inspiration from a book recommended by our deacon, The Rev. Kyle Pedersen: Becoming Earth by Ferris Jabr. This amazing author unveils a radical new vision of earth—namely that the earth is a living entity, a vast interconnected “biotope” to which we belong. In turn, “we, and all living things, are more than inhabitants of Earth—we are Earth”, Jabr writes.

Bringing earth into prayer has been a centuries old practice but, maybe more than ever, it requires our participation.