Christians sometimes speak as though care for creation were a recent addition to the life of the Church. It is not. For centuries, the Orthodox Church has begun its ecclesiastical year on September 1, the Feast of the Indiction, with prayer that embraces the whole created order. In 1989 Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I designated September 1 as an annual Day of Prayer for Creation, calling Christians to recognize that our relationship with God cannot be separated from our relationship with the world God has made. That Orthodox witness gradually became an ecumenical one, and today Christians around the world observe the Season of Creation from September 1 through October 4, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi.

The Anglican Church of Canada formally adopted the Season of Creation at General Synod in 2019 as an annual season of prayer, education and action for the care of God’s creation. Then, at General Synod 2025, our Church took another significant step, adopting September 1 as the Feast of the Creator, a Major Feast which may also be transferred to a Sunday within the Season of Creation. The Feast does not replace the Season of Creation; rather, it gives the season a profoundly theological beginning. We begin not with the environment as an issue to be addressed, important though that is, but with worship: with God, the Creator of heaven and earth. A national task group has since been developing readings, prayers, Eucharistic texts and other liturgical resources which draw us more deeply into the richness of the biblical witness to creation and into that profoundly Anglican and incarnational conviction that God is known in and through the material world.

This year, with the permission of Archbishop John, the Cathedral will be using material from these new trial-use resources in our worship throughout the Season of Creation, beginning with the Feast of the Creator on September 1 and continuing until October 4, the Feast of St. Francis. I hope these weeks will be more than an opportunity to talk about creation as though it were simply another issue on the Church’s agenda. Creation is the first gift of God, the place in which the Word became flesh, and the world which God in Christ is reconciling to himself. To praise the Creator is therefore also to learn again to cherish what God has made, to repent of the ways we have diminished it, and to ask what it might mean for us, here and now, to live as people who truly believe that “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it.”