Season of Creation Celebrates “Miraculous, Wonderful Reality”
On October 1, representatives from diverse faith communities gathered at the Interchurch Center Chapel for a special Season of Creation Interfaith Gathering at the Interchurch Center on Morningside Heights.
The ceremony was part of the Season of Creation, an annual observance held from September 1 to October 4, that hearkens back to a 1989 prophetic message from the Ecumenical Patriarch Demetrios I on the urgency of care for the environment. This year’s observance has special meaning because it coincides with the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ groundbreaking encyclical on “care for our common home.”
Co-hosted by the Graymoor Ecumenical & Interreligious Institute and the Interfaith Center of New York, in collaboration with the Interchurch Center’s Committee on Ecumenical, Interfaith, and Community Concerns and the Center for Earth Ethics, the event invited participants to “recommit our diverse religious communities, hand in hand, to the moral and institutional responsibility to the Earth of which we are a part.”
CEE Executive Director Karenna Gore spoke to the urgency of this perilous ecological moment—and to the beauty and mystery of creation. “The beautiful side is the miraculous, wonderful reality that we are a part of,” she said. “We cannot afford to do anything but to draw on the deepest wells of our faith and spiritual traditions” to preserve creation.
CEE Senior Fellow Veronica Raya reflected on the importance of unity and shared purpose. “How can we work for anything if we are not together?,” she said. “It starts with us. It always starts with us.”
Other speakers included Dr. Aaron Hollander (Graymoor Ecumenical & Interreligious Institute), Rev. Dr. Chloe Breyer (Interfaith Center of New York), Imam Saffet A. Catovic (Justice For All and Al-Mizan: A Covenant for the Earth), Aminta Kilawan-Narine (Sadhana Coalition of Progressive Hindus), and Father James Puglisi (Franciscan Friars of the Atonement).
During the program, each speaker poured water into a shared vessel. At the end, Steven “Owl” Smith of the Ramapough Munsee Lenape, led participants in a concluding ceremony in which he poured the combined water onto the roots of a tree outside the Interchurch Center in Riverside Park.