Catholic Outlook Magazine | September Edition | Season of Creation | 2023 Issue

Ask the cattle and they will instruct you,the birds of the air and they will inform you.
The creeping things of the earth will give you lessons and the fish of the sea will explain to you.
(Job 12:7-8)
Reflections on a personal journey
in eco-spirituality
STORY DR KEVIN TRESTON OAM
I was invited by Catholic Outlook to reflect on my
own spiritual journey, especially as it is woven and
infused with the wonder and mystery of creation.
Perhaps it is fitting to begin by acknowledging the
spiritual and cultural heritage of thousands of years
bequeathed to us by our First People, our Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Indigenous sisters and brothers,
who have so much wisdom to share.
My journey
My early childhood years during the 1930s and 1940s
on a sugar cane farm in Innisfail, North Queensland,
very much involved me in the rhythms of farm life, the
daily tasks, floods, planting, harvesting, animal care,
fruit and vegetable gardens, cyclones. When I think
about it, my lived Irish-shaped Catholic faith did not
really connect with the rhythms of creation all around
us every day. In my childhood faith experience,
our stay on earth was portrayed in Church life as a
brief time where we were tested to judge if we were
worthy or unworthy of a heavenly eternity. Our daily
prayer ‘Hail Holy Queen’ expressed a gloomy earthly
human fate of ‘mourning and weeping in this valley
of tears’. The big thing – actually, the only thing that
ultimately mattered – was to get to heaven.
And yet, looking back on my early childhood
spirituality, perhaps in the depth of my
consciousness of my inner spirit, the profound
rhythms of nature were deeply embedded in my soul:
the regular ventures into the rainforests, the swamps
teeming with life (including deadly black swamp
snakes), regular farming cycles according to the
seasons, catching a horse to ride to school…
Metanoia
So what happened in my faith life journey to enrich
this early childhood inner spirit of nature?
I came to understand the divine energy of the Holy
Spirit does not separate the Dream of Jesus as the
Christ into discrete sections such as humanity and
creation. A Hebrew understanding of ‘reign of God’
suggest a meaning of ‘reign of unity’. We are not
separate from creation.
For the cosmic story is our story too. Every morning,
I say a little prayer: ‘Thank you Mother Earth for
giving me the oxygen and nitrogen from the trees,
oceans, grass and all nature enabling me to breathe
(I take a breath) and live’. I am conscious daily that I
would be dead within a few minutes if I did not have
nature’s oxygen to breathe. If the Incarnation means
anything, surely it explains that God’s revelation in
Jesus as the Christ is a manifestation of God’s love
into the oneness of creation.
The universe story
And here is the most important learning for me. What
is becoming increasingly evident in the beginning of
this third era of the Church’s story, is the imperative
of the Church to reframe the Christian Story within
the Great Story of the Universe.
For the story of the universe is a narrative that spans
almost 14 billion years since the Big Bang or Flaring
Forth: galaxies and stars formed between 13 to 8
billion years ago; our solar system with the stars, sun,
planets and earth about 3.8 billion years ago, then
the succession of eras such as the Cambrian era
485 million years ago. Over millions of years, trees,
plants, animals, mountains, rivers, flowers, grass,
emerged. Perhaps, about seven million years ago,
ape-like creatures appeared and eventually homo
habalis, homo erectus and homo sapiens evolved.
Sometimes, it is true that some people can get
carried away by unchanging rosy feel-good images of
nature. The rhythms of nature’s cycles are often brutal
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