The choir has arrived. It is dawn. A red glow hovers to the north, at the tree line, just past my window this late summer day.
Today they arrived without my attention, though many days I watch for them. When I do finally look up, I see a few dozen “choristers” – small black birds, of a species I must admit I do not know, sitting in a half-dead tree, the name of which I am also, disappointingly, ignorant. I’ve watched this dawn ritual for years. The birds’ dark silhouettes anticipate the warmth of the crest of sunlight as they perch on bare branches. Their backs turn toward the coming light to dry feathers and warm bones.
Mostly, they are stillness itself. They could be mistaken for leaves. Occasionally some will flit from branch-to-branch, rearranging the quarter notes of their bodies, composing and recomposing hymns I’ll never hear.
I don’t remember when I began to think of the birds as “the choir” but for some time now, they have anchored my early-morning prayer. Their presence. Their vigilance for the sun. Their companionship. They model what I desire for my own heart each morning: at one with myself in the presence of the mystery that sustains us all, to paraphrase the Brazilian theologian Sister Ivone Gebara.
Watching their familiar forms in the tree across the street this day, I realize they are drawing my attention just in time for the Season of Creation, which opened this week on Sept. 1. Since 1989, the date has been recognized as World Day of Prayer for Creation. It was proclaimed first by Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios, who drew on an ancient liturgical tradition of the Eastern Church that recognized the date as a symbol of God’s act of creation. In 2015 Pope Francis called on Catholics to also observe the date, so Catholics joined the rest of the Christian world to observe a “season of creation” which runs through the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, Oct. 4.
Last year, Pope Leo promulgated a votive Mass for the care of creation. It can be used in any season but is especially appropriate during this observance. The prayers call for us to “lovingly care for the work” of God’s hands and to “live in harmony with all creatures.”
This year’s observance calls us to such care and harmony in awareness of the connection between armed conflict and environmental degradation. This is a topic with which I am entirely too familiar. You may be, too.
In addition to the world’s wars decimating creation and displacing people right now, I’m old enough to hold other sorrowful memories of institutionalized human violence against Creation. Faces come to mind. The tortured face of the Napalm girl made it impossible to turn away from the violence perpetrated by our own military against people and creation in the Vietnam of the 1960s and 70s. I see, as well, the pained face of a doctor I met in Basra in 2002, who shared the heart-breaking, intimate, effects of depleted uranium antitank ordinance used “experimentally” – and abundantly – during the Iraq war of the 1990s. His wife refused intimacy, he said, so horrified was she of bearing a child who could be still born, or with the severe birth defects caused by this immoral weapon. There is also the face of a veteran I know, who every day deals with health challenges caused by living 24/7 within coughing distance of the ubiquitous, environmentally disastrous “burn pits” that accompanied him and thousands of other military women and men during the 2003 Iraq war.
The wars raging in the world today, just like those of the past, are evidence of human, political and diplomatic failure of the highest order. They are human tragedies, yes, and environmental disasters. The harm we do to ourselves – we who like to claim our place as the highest form of consciousness in the multiverse – this we also do to creation, the miraculous, sustaining, mysterious wholeness from which our humanity was birthed.
Watching “the choir” in the tree outside my window during prayer each morning is no remedy, is it? But my daily practice is a gentle, living reminder of my personal responsibility, during this Season of Creation and always, to “lovingly care for the work” of God’s hands and to “live in harmony with all creatures.” It is my personal reminder that I am, after all and in fact, in the presence of the mystery that sustains us all.
It is a start; a small one. Because first comes attunement to the relatedness of every living thing. Then comes the work of loving care and harmony.
Sister Beth Murphy, OP, is a Dominican sister of Springfield, Illinois.
This article appears in August 27-September 2, 2026.
