Kathy Thomson’s visual displays often enhance our worship.
I am so grateful that the church is celebrating a Season of Creation every year, leading up to the Feast of St. Francis.
This year’s theme, “the Water of Creation,” comes from the vision described in Ezekiel 47:1-12 in which water flows from God’s Temple, bringing new life wherever it goes. In the installation I created for St. Mark’s I intended to invoke a place of natural beauty that is saturated by “living water.”
Our lives are inseparable from the life of all creation and we are responsible for making good decisions based in the knowledge given to us. In the 1980’s all living things were threatened by increasing UV radiation because chemicals commonly used by humans were causing the thinning of a protective layer of Earth’s atmosphere called the ozone layer. Safe alternatives were found to replace the harmful chemicals and international agreements were made to protect the planet. As a result, by the mid 1990s the ozone layer returned to normal.
As humans, we have an outsized impact on Earth’s environment. Our problem solving inventions sometime unintentionally release harm into the world. We must face and correct our mistakes, there are always life affirming alternate solutions.
The water of creation flows in us and through us and we are all called by God to manifest it every day of our lives.