Our Father in heaven,

you are also at home in the air, soil,

in the forests and oceans:

hallowed be your name.

By the care we take of your creation,

may your kingdom come.

All that you see is good.

Your will be done on earth as in heaven -

your will to till and to care.

Give us today our daily bread,

that all may have enough

to live life in fullness.

Forgive us our sins -

our greed, our exploitation,

our lack of concern for other species

and for future generations -

as we forgive those who sin against us

by reconciliation with justice and peace.

Lead us not into temptation,

the temptation to equate

dominion with exploitation,  

and deliver us from evil,

the evil of destroying your gift of creation.

For the kingdom,

the power and the glory are yours

- such things do not belong to us -

now and for ever,

Amen.

So be it.

(source unknown)

Passiontide, when we try to enter with Jesus into his ‘passion’ (suffering), begins today. The cross is in sight. But, in the words of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Christ plays in ten thousand places”. In other words, Jesus is crucified not just on Golgotha but anywhere where cruel, selfish, thoughtless choices lead to suffering. Over the next few days, we’ll explore some of the contexts in which he enters into humanity’s suffering, but today, with the help of this Lord’s Prayer for a time of environmental crisis, we gaze sadly at the ‘passion’ of the natural world.

We see the ‘Passion of Environmental Crisis’ in this photo. Wildfires are a natural part of many ecosystems but in 2018 the rising temperatures and prolonged drought of California’s changing climate led to its deadliest wildfires ever. This raging inferno swallowed up a football field of forest every second. Within hours it razed this town to the ground. Ironically, it was called ‘Paradise’.

In 2016, the Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi (b.1955) collaborated with Greenpeace in a project to highlight the plight of the Arctic where higher-than-usual temperatures are melting ice at scarily rapid rates, threatening biodiversity and raising sea levels elsewhere in the world. In his ‘Elegy for the Arctic’ we hear the ‘Passion of Environmental Crisis’. Notes from Einaudi’s piano drip insistently like melting water while an ice fall crashes into the sea only yards from where he’s playing.