Bring Back the Buffalo (II): All Creatures of Our God and King

This summer I had the opportunity to read G. K. Chesterton’s brief but delightful biography of St. Francis of Assisi. The prayer of St. Francis has been one of my life’s “theme prayers,” ever since I heard it back when I was a teen. One of my favorite hymns, too, is “All Creatures of Our God and King,” a musically and lyrically stunning piece of hymnody based loosely on Francis of Assisi’s “The Canticle of the Sun.” In these small ways, then, the thought and spirituality of this 12th century Italian Saint has colored my imagination for a long time, but I’d never really known his story—at least not in its entirety—until I’d met him in the pages of Chesterton’s book.

There’s no end of fascinating details I learned about this radical and passionate follower of Jesus Christ—a man who, in Chesterton’s opinion, is surpassed only by Christ himself when it comes to his spiritual impact on the course of Christian history—but the detail that stood out to me especially was his profound sense of brotherhood with the Creator’s world.

I’d already gleaned hints of this from the lyrics of “All Creatures of Our God and King,” but the picture became more clear and more compelling as I read the saint’s life story. St. Francis is often called the “Patron Saint of Ecology,” because he was so insistent on our duty to love and care for God’s green earth (this, coupled with his vows of mendicancy and his call to simplicity, suggests that leaving as small an ecological footprint as possible is certainly a corollary of the Christian life, even possibly an urgent responsibility). In his account of the Saint, though, Chesterton emphasizes how this was not “mere” stewardship of the creation for St Francis. It was a deep sense of kinship and a profound sense of love that overflowed from his joyful recognition that the Sun, the moon, the beasts of the earth and the grass of the field, all, are created creatures like we are. Since the creator himself is, in his very essence, love personified, and since Francis was so swept up in reciprocal love for his Lord, a deep love for all the works of that Lord’s hands—from the flowing water pure and clear, to the Brother Sun, who brings the day—was just the spontaneous, altogether natural, deeply joyful welling up of his spirituality.

I am thinking about St. Francis of Assisi’s profound awareness of his kinship with the created world today, though, as I continue to reflect on the recent encounter a delegation from our church recently had visiting the Pelican Lake First Nation’s Reserve, which we had partnered with last Christmas in a “Bring Back the Buffalo” initiative.

Our trip was, in one sense, an opportunity to witness the impact that the Buffalo herd we’d contributed was having on the Pelican Lake community. In another sense, and deeper, though, it was an opportunity to encounter and learn about the Indigenous culture of the people who call Pelican Lake home, a chance to grow in our understanding of what truth and reconciliation really means, by growing in our understanding of the culture and worldviews of the First Nations people.

Our First Nations hosts were very gracious towards us, and deeply hospitable, teaching us about the special place the buffalo have in Indigenous culture, inviting us to participate with them in a sweat lodge, and leading us in a water ceremony, among the many other ways they showed us welcome. I was deeply impacted by this encounter, but I was saddened to learn from the leaders of the Christian group that we had traveled to Pelican Lake with, that not every church across the country is as warm or open to these kinds of cultural learning encounters as we had been.

Some Christians, I was told, have great difficulty seeing the Indigenous culture’s deep respect for the creation, their veneration of it, even, for what it is: a deep-down conviction that Creator’s world is alive and all of it is spiritual, and we human beings are part of it, but only part—we are kin, so to speak, with all that is. Speaking to the water and asking it to cleanse and rejuvenate you is just too much like worshiping the creature rather than the creation, it seems, for some believers to see past it to the conviction underlying it: that the whole world is alive to One who Made It, and so long as we can’t see that, some small part of ourselves will remain dead inside to the creator who Made Us.

It might be helpful one day to trace the theological lines of thought that lead to this, what is, in my opinion, a gross misunderstanding of First Nations culture. We could explore, for instance, the historical connections between the Enlightenment’s disenchantment of the world, liberal Protestantism’s demythologizing of the Faith, and the contemporary, evangelical tendency to reject as idolatry anything that is too open to the spiritual aliveness of the Creator’s world, to show that our worldview is, in many ways, far more philosophical than it is Christian. That will have to wait for another day and a different venue than a blog, though.

For today, I’d simply point out that Psalm 148—with its glorious acknowledgement that the whole of the Creator’s world is alive and responsive to him—and its thrilling invitation to the entire creation to praise him—the words of Psalm 148 are closer in spirit to the prayer our Cree host prayed at the water ceremony we attended in Pelican Lake than it is to pretty much anything else I’ve come across. Do we really believe it, when the Scriptures teach us that the hills will rejoice and the trees of field clap their hands, that all things look to their creator to give them their food in the proper time, that when He sends his Spirit, they are created?

As the story of St. Francis reminds us, some Christians, at some points in the history of our Faith, have answered a humble, pious, deeply faithful “yes” to those questions. They have taken the Word of God at its word, I mean, and tried to live into our kinship with the rest of the Creator’s world, with full appreciation and great love.

St. Francis lived some 800 years ago now, of course, and even “All Creatures of Our God and King” is a pretty deep-cut, when it comes to the kind of music that gets sung in church these days. But if we wanted a place to start, to relearn some of the lessons he taught us, reworked and reframed for the modern world, I suppose that having more authentic, respectful conversations with our Indigenous neighbours, to understand how their sense of kinship with Creator’s world impacts their worldview, would be a good place to start.

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