Spiritual Practice for Creation Care: ‘Stations of Creation’

Jul 13, 2022

By John Helt

One of our activities during Annual Meeting 2022 was a Sunday-morning guided walk along “Memory Lane” at Green Lake Conference Center. It was a kind of “Stations of Creation,” in the tradition of the Roman Catholic “Stations of the Cross,” designed as a time of spiritual reflection on how we care for ourselves as we care for God’s good Earth. The goal was simply to walk outdoors, among the trees, along the lake, and beneath the sky, using words of scripture, prayer and song to cultivate our connections with God, with one another, and with the whole created world around us. We explored some of the many ways our faith inspires us to care for creation, especially becoming involved as individuals, families and congregations in the movement to respond to climate change through the Kairos Call to Action, approved at the 2020 Annual Meeting.

We used a range of readings and hymns in the course of the walk. Two of the resources used:

• Earth Gospel: A Guide to Prayer for God’s Creation, by Sam Hamilton-Poore
• Laudato Si, the second encyclical of Pope Francis, which carries the subtitle “on care for our common home.”

Larry Littlegeorge offered the Lord’s Prayer in the Ho-Chunk language. So many pieces came together for me in that moment. The lake itself, in addition to the erstwhile “Pilgrim Center,” will no longer be “Green Lake” in my heart and mind, but that name in its original Ho-Chunk, “Daycholah.” As we walked among cedars, pines, white oak and shagbark hickories along the path, Larry also shared that the white oak is a sacred brother to the warrior clan to which he belongs in the Ho-Chunk nation.

The shores of Daycholah became for me something more than a place to encounter the sacred. The water, the trees, the rocks and bees, became themselves named and holy.