While running loops and rows in the Grove Street Cemetery this morning, I was being serenaded by the voices of birds, crickets and other insects, singing as if in response to the opening line from the hymn “All Creatures of Our God and King”:

“All Creatures of our God and King, lift up your voices and with us sing—Alleluia! Alleluia!”

Just on the other side of the cemetery’s high stone wall, the sounds of New Haven—a peripheral cacophony with its beeping horns and droning crosswalks—provided backup vocals to the song of the creatures around me. The contrast reminded me of something Our Holy Father, Pope Francis said in his letter announcing the 2022 Season of Creation:

“Listen to the voice of creation. If we learn how to listen, we can hear in the voice of creation a kind of dissonance. On the one hand, we can hear a sweet song in praise of our beloved Creator; on the other, an anguished plea, lamenting our mistreatment of this our common home.

The sweet song of creation invites us to practice an “ecological spirituality” (Laudato Si’, 216), attentive to God’s presence in the natural world. In this Season of Creation we pray once more in the great cathedral of creation, and revel in the “grandiose cosmic choir” made up of countless creatures, all singing the praises of God.

Tragically, that sweet song is accompanied by a cry of anguish…a chorus of cries of anguish…our sister, mother earth, cries out…the poorest among us are crying out…our brothers and sisters of the native peoples are crying out…and today’s young people are crying out, anxiously asking us to do everything possible to prevent, or at least limit, the collapse of our planet’s ecosystems.”

When we truly listen to the voice of creation, our hearts are moved to experience what the Holy Father refers to as an “ecological conversion,” by which we must “repent and modify our lifestyles and destructive systems,” because “living out our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue” (Laudato Si’, 217).

The Season of Creation began on September 1^st, the World Day of Prayer for Creation, and will conclude on October 4^th, the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi. The full letter from the Holy Father can be found here: https://seasonofcreation.org/2022/07/21/message-of-his-holiness-pope-francis-for-the-celebration-of-the-world-day-of-prayer-for-the-care-of-creation/.

Resources to celebrate the Season of Creation can be found here: https://seasonofcreation.org/catholic/.