THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH IN THE PHILIPPINES

The Season of Creation is an annual  celebration that calls all Christians worldwide each year to pray and respond jointly to the cry of creation.  It is a broad ecumenical initiative to gather the Christian family around the world to come together to listen to and care for our common home. Every year, the celebration opens on September 1^st, the Feast of Creation, and concludes on October 4th, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of ecology.

I believe it is no coincidence that on the opening day of the 2024 Season of Creation, something dramatic and sad happened in our country that ought to jolt us from our inaction or indifference on what is happening with creation. As you know, our weather station, PAGASA, conducts climatological analysis to project the volume of rainfall and for the month of September 2024, it said that 230 millimetres of rain was expected. On the first day of the month however, which is also the first day of the celebration of the Season of Creation, tropical storm Enteng entered the country and dumped that entire projected rainfall volume for this month in less than 18 hours, triggering massive flooding and landslides. The feared La Nina, which involves above-normal rainfall and more ferocious typhoons, is here.

The latest data indicates that 15 people have died from the storm while 1,720,568 others were affected. The rains and floods forced 88,077 individuals or 21,681 families to flee their homes and sought shelter in evacuation centers while 18,757 individuals were being served outside evacuation centers.

The destructive effects of the typhoon Enteng demonstrates to us that figuratively there is no such thing as a safe place from the weather disturbances. In the low-lying areas, floods have become killers and destroyers of property and so one would assume that higher elevation areas may be safer as these will not be reached by floods. The fact however is that landslides are the killers and destroyers of property in higher elevation. We recall the very sad incident on October 29, 2022 in  when people at Kusiong, Datu Odin Sinsuat, Maguindanao  fleeing from the floods sought shelter at our chapel, St. Peter’s Church, built on a higher ground in a mountain side that could not be reached by the floods. In the middle of the night, however, the mountain side just gave way, unleashing an avalanche of mud, rocks and water that destroyed everything in its path including the chapel and resulting in the death of 20 persons and injuries to many others.

The reality of climate crisis is very real in our midst and everyday we wake up to the threat of death and devastation from its effects as the Philippines is now ranked as among the most disaster-prone country in the world, often landing in the first spot for a number of years, according to the World Risk Index.

Nobody now disputes that what is happening is caused by human disturbance of the environment which is looked at more as a source of economic benefit rather than as a home that needs to be protected and cared for. This is why all of us Christians must be involved because we know that everything we see around us was created by God for our sustenance and enjoyment and never for our destructive exploitation and utilization. The evils that our Lord Jesus Christ has denounced and called on us to repent from are the same behaviours that are driving the destruction of creation. Selfishness, greed, dominating power and the insatiable yearning for much more than what we actually need are leading us to ecological Armageddon as we actually witness in climate crisis, biodiversity loss and human suffering.

The Fifth Mark of Mission of the Episcopal Church in the Philippines is to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth. Guided by this mission imperative, the Church is engaged in various concrete actions, ranging from institutional opposition to mega hydro electric dams such as the proposed Chico River Hydro Power Dam project that was eventually scuttled way back in the 1980s and large scale irresponsible mining and other ecologically destructive operations, support to and funding of environmentally friendly initiatives, to building and/or enhancing community forests. Being a church of indigenous peoples, creation care is being woven into our spirituality as we affirm the  indigenous peoples’ values which considers the created world sacred since every material thing has a spirit and wasting a material thing is wasting its spirit which must be avoided at all cost. In our current understanding, what is present in us as well as in every material thing is the Spirit of God that hovers over all of lands, seas and air and everything in them.

Let us take this Season of Creation as an opportunity to continue praying for creation and as we do, let us again seriously consider and actually do everything we can every day, individually and collectively, to protect our earthly home. This includes making environmental stewardship a primary consideration in every choice that we make, from the simple to the complex – from the foods we eat, the clothes we wear, our ways of communicating, transportation, lifestyle, our preoccupation and pursuit of  careers and to our participation in shaping society’s public policies that determine the nature of ecological utilization. Let us take guidance from the Joint Statement issued on the occasion of the 2023 Season of Creation by Pope Francis, Archbishop Justin Welby  of the Anglican Communion and the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of the Eastern Orthodox Church where they said, “Future generations will never forgive us if we miss the opportunity to protect our common home. We have inherited a beautiful garden.  We must not transform it into a desert for our children.”