Groaning of Creation - Our Role: co-creators or destroyers

Humanity, of all creatures, has the ability to understand itself both as a creature and as a spirit force, a divine emissary. This leaves us in a unique position to augment the forces of love and life (God) or to disregard and/or pollute and destroy them. When I say this, I am not simply referring to our relationship to the environment, but to our relationship to all humanity, our relationship to our community, our relationship to our families, and our relationship to our self/our relationship to the spirit of God within us.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Romans 8:22

The groaning of creation as pertains to humanity is nested within the creative flux and flow from source through spirit to form and vice versa. It is this: the balance of planetary “Godliness” has been drastically altered by humanity and humanity’s self centered, egoistic needs of security, control, power, esteem, fear. Some of these are instinctual impulses, remnants of earlier humanity and living conditions. Some are exaggerations of our self-knowledge. In any case, defense of these needs turns us away from our divine inheritance as co-creators of life with God. Defense of these needs is evidence of our identification with our physical selves, rather than our spiritual selves. Thus, theologian Anne Primavesi suggests that as the spirit awakens humanity “it animates the gift of perception within us, opening our eyes to how things really are. It gives us the gift of epikeia, the ability to respond with sensitivity to the presence and reality of other living beings, creating relationships and exchanging energy.”

Anne Primivesi, From Apocalypse to Genesis: Ecology, Feminism and Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 260.
This is a continuation of a discussion of what is meant by, "The groaning of creation." See previous blogs for the whole Kreation Kielbasa.

© Peggy Beatty 2010