The Season of Creation is an ecumenical time running from what Pope Francis has designated the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, September 1, to the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi, October 4, and over this period, I’d like to offer some invitations—and challenges—to a form of contemplation that is just as much rooted in the Holy Father’s idea of contemplation, but which has received scant attention thus far on this blog. What I want to propose is a new kind of contemplation in the mud—not the mud that exists in ourselves, either by sin or just inadequateness to God, as we contemplate the Trinitarian persons, nor the mud in both ourselves and others as we contemplate Christ at work in and present in them, but rather contemplation in the mud of the earth.

Recalling first Pope Francis’ notion of “our God-given aesthetic and contemplative sense”

In the past few weeks, I’ve given quite a bit of space to understanding the striking phrase used in the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia: “our God-given aesthetic and contemplative sense” (QA 56). The pope’s idea seems to be that beauty goes together with truth and goodness. Truth is what we seek with our mind, or intellect, and goodness with our heart, or will. And praying is knowing and loving God at the same time. So, within us, there is some psychological constant between aesthetic experience (a fancy word for appreciation or our taking-in of beauty) and contemplative prayer. That’s “our God-given aesthetic and contemplative sense.” Contemplative prayer, in a Christian sense, just is experience of beauty, when God is involved.

This idea of contemplation the pope applies especially to contemplation of the beauty of Christ and the image of God manifested in others. That is made clear in a long passage from Amoris Laetitia (127–129), as I’ve discussed before. Although the definition obviously works for thinking and loving God directly in the Trinitarian person and the mysteries of Jesus, it also extends beyond that. We know and love God in the mystery of Christ’s body extended throughout time and space, especially where it is suffering, in need, or excluded. We know and love God at work in others and evangelizing us through others.

The question is what this definition could make of contemplation in the mud of the earth, as I’ve called it.

Is it contemplation in the sense of prayer?

I think most of us would be comfortable with the idea that we can have an aesthetic experience of ecological nature. It takes a poor imagination and love of good things to not find ecology pleasing, something to dwell on, and so on. Likewise, it takes a will twisted, perhaps by concupiscence, perhaps by ideology, not to want to protect such beauty, which is, not just beautiful, but necessary for our survival, for the ecological reality is in fact our common home. But can we extend to this the idea of contemplation in the sense that Pope Francis seems to mean—some sort of prayer, some sort of knowing and loving God at the same time? That is the big question.

Evidently, we could relax the meaning by saying that contemplation is knowing and loving at the same time, full stop. Not knowing and loving God, but just knowing and loving any object whatsoever. Then, obviously, we could have contemplation of ecological nature, and it would be identical to an experience of beauty.

If I’m recommending something like contemplation in the mud of the earth on a blog about Christian contemplation, though, I don’t think that would do. It remains a purely natural experience. It might be undergone in a state of grace, sure. But then again, it might not. And at any rate, the state of grace isn’t what makes something (contemplative) prayer. It’s the actual involvement of will and mind both turned towards God at the same time.

What I’d first note here is that the phrase from Querida Amazonia that I love so much is originally used to talk about our relationship with ecology, nature, creation. Here is the passage in full:

From the original peoples, we can learn to contemplate the Amazon region and not simply analyze it, and thus appreciate this precious mystery that transcends us. We can love it, not simply use it, with the result that love can awaken a deep and sincere interest. Even more, we can feel intimately a part of it and not only defend it; then the Amazon region will once more become like a mother to us. For “we do not look at the world from without but from within, conscious of the bonds with which the Father has linked us to all beings” [quoting Laudato Si’ 220].

Let us awaken our God-given aesthetic and contemplative sense that so often we let languish. Let us remember that “if someone has not learned to stop and admire something beautiful, we should not be surprised if he or she treats everything as an object to be used and abused without scruple” [LS 215]. On the other hand, if we enter into communion with the forest, our voices will easily blend with its own and become a prayer: “as we rest in the shade of an ancient eucalyptus, our prayer for light joins in the song of the eternal foliage”.[1] This interior conversion will enable us to weep for the Amazon region and to join in its cry to the Lord. (QA 55–56)

If we read this passage carefully, perhaps slowly and more than once, we will see the elements fit together.

What the pope describes is an aesthetic experience, because it refers to the beauty of something. We know about it. We focus on that. But that isn’t everything. We don’t just have knowledge. This is emphatically not thinking in a Gnostic way of resuming everything in one sweeping view of knowledge, setting ourselves at a pinnacle, and looking down on the uninitiated. At the same time that we know something, we are drawn to its goodness, not just its usefulness for us. We love it. Since we know about it, and since that knowledge involves the implication that we are connected to it, now, loving it, we feel intimately a part of it. When we think about its fragility and the part we can play, however great or small, there is a conversion. We “weep” and “join in its cry to the Lord.”

Our understanding is helped along if we also connect a sense of gratuity and gratitude to our mysticism or contemplative leisure (QA 73, 83). This nature we see is a gratuitous gift of God. If it is in danger, how much the greater we appreciate its status as a gift not to squander.

This type of prayer becomes all the stronger, too, when we connect it to not just God as Creator, but to Christ. There is first the gaze that Jesus himself must have had for creation, according to what we read in the Bible (LS 96–100; QA 57). In the second place, there is contemplation of Christ in other human beings; the cry of the poor emerges especially when there is the cry of the earth (LS 49; QA 8, 52). These dimensions are all connected. I don’t think we could ever separate them in any useful way. They are permeable, not self-enclosed. They will fluctuate between one another in our experiences, if we truly love God the creator, Jesus our brother, and God present in our neighbours.

If we mull over all this, I think we can see that, for a Christian contemplating ecological nature, grateful to God for all that is good and alarmed at threats to that gift and to the people especially vulnerable to its collapse, there is indeed prayer. It is prayer that knows and loves God: as creator, as gift-giver, in gratitude, in the gaze of Jesus on creation, in our fellow children of the Father. It also is clearly an experience of beauty. Not only does the theoretical coincidence of mind and will, truth and goodness, confirm it. We also just know it. Everyone knows the experience of natural beauty. We are floored by it on a trip to a park as children, in a classroom when we learn how complex the world is, reading some of the Psalms attentively, or watching a BBC documentary. Contemplation in the sense of Christian prayer, check. Aesthetic experience, check.

The invitation, the challenge

So, I think this is solid. The notes to hit are of course distinctly Christian ones—gratitude for a divine gift, a will to change, concern for Christ in others, appreciation of their beauty too as part of an integral ecology—but we can encourage, in this Season of Creation and beyond, a Christian contemplation of ecological nature. Or, as I called it at the beginning, contemplation in the mud of the earth.

To remind myself, and maybe some readers, of the importance of this kind of Christian contemplation, I’ve changed the colour theme both on the blog and the associated social media sites. Gone is the blue-purple theme. Here for the next month are mixed green-brown hues (though not so much of the brown, since as much as I like the image of mud, the colour isn’t always the most appealing).

Throughout this year’s Season of Creation, some things are happening that might especially focus our prayer. Among so many other things, there are two good bookends to the month.

At present, Pope Francis is on a papal trip to Mongolia. This is evidently a visit to a small community of Catholics in a country which, while landlocked, is definitely a periphery of the world in many senses. But it is also a visit to one of the most important places for the health of our planet. Amazonia and the Congo may be the big lungs of the earth (cf. LS 38; QA 48), and plankton in the oceans (cf. LS 40) may contain a huge chunk of the photosynthesis we need to keep an ecological balance, but Mongolia represents the grasslands in a way that no other country does. The timing of this papal trip at the start of the Season of Creation can help focus our month of prayer and action.

At the other end is the Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi. On this day, Pope Francis intends to publish a new “exhortation,” presumably an apostolic exhortation, but not an encyclical. It will be “a second Laudato Si’”[2] and updated to “current issues” including “the most recent extreme weather events and catastrophes affecting people across five continents.”[3] Already the Holy Father has urged us as follows:

It is necessary to stand with the victims of environmental and climate injustice, striving to end the senseless war on our common home, which is a terrible world war. I urge all of you to work and pray for it to abound with life once again.[4]

The issue is framed as, not just natural ecology, but integral ecology, social ecology, social justice, human fraternity.

We also know by now that anything attacking the modern economy or promoting the environment will be an ideological sticking point for many of our fellow Catholics, and as the publication of this new apostolic exhortation approaches, we will feel the pain of their refusal and the agony of Christ in that denial, however great or small personal culpability may be in an individual case. Nonetheless, it will sting. It will not hurt as much as the cry of the poor and the excluded, or not in the same way, but it too will hurt.

This, I think, is all the more reason in this Season of Creation, and beyond, to consider contemplation in the mud of the earth as another form of Christian contemplative prayer. Everything is connected.

[1] The pope here quotes Sui Yun, Cantos para el mendigo y el rey, Wiesbaden, 2000. Sui Yun is a Peruvian poet born to Chinese immigrant parents from Guangdong province; she writes in Spanish.

[2] Pope Francis, “General Audience” (August 30, 2023), which can be read here.

[3] “Pope Francis writing a second part of Laudato si’,” Vatican News (August 21, 2023), which can be read here.

[4] Pope Francis, “General Audience” (August 30, 2023).