Eco Contemplative Practice for use in church services
On 6 October for the Harvest Eucharistic Service bringing the Season of Creation to a close at St James’s Piccadilly, the eco group was invited to introduce a contemplative element to the start of the main Sunday Service. Many people found this inspiring, so we thought others would be interested to hear about this. Here is the text that was used to introduce it:
“We’re entering into a really long tradition this morning, of Christian contemplation grounded in creation. Beginning in the third century, the desert fathers and mothers practised the art of attention, Prosoche (pro-so-chi), which included their sensory experiences.
These early Christian contemplatives engaged all their senses, everything, they really knew that contact with their surroundings included everything they could see, but also transcended and went far, far beyond that. They sought a vision of the world as a whole. They realised that ‘to dwell in the place of God’ is to live with particular, intense awareness. Of living within an intricate web of relationships, which constantly shifted and changed.
St Antony, for example, fell in love with a particular place in the desert where he built his cell. He planted a garden and gave himself fully to the life of that place. He lived within this beautifully reciprocal, fluid relationship between place and spirit, and his interior and exterior landscape.
So now we’re going to experience this contemplation for ourselves, and move to move out into the Courtyard or Garden, for about 5 minutes {give people longer if that is feasible.}
Please keep silence if you can, and allow some aspect of the created world to really hold your attention – to contemplate you. Maybe that will be a plant or piece of bark or a stone. Or simply look up at the sky, feel the air on your skin, or listen to the sounds.
(Version to use if too wet and this is done indoors): You can move around the space. Maybe you look and hold the things in front of you in the pews, the altar and reredos behind me, the fossils in the stone, or maybe the sound of rain outside.
See if you can gaze or listen as if for the first time. As you do, you might feel that creation contemplates you in return.
You’ll hear the sound of the singing bowl to call us back together again.”
Monthly eco contemplative liturgies
Every month in the garden at St James’s and on Zoom, there is an Eco Contemplative Liturgy before the main Sunday service, with has readings, prayers and a more extensive period for being in contemplation with the garden and its inhabitants. Further information from ecochurch@sjp.org.uk.
The above contemplation is based on The Blue Sapphire of the Mind. Notes for a Contemplative Ecology by Douglas E. Christie. Oxford University Press.
