This is the final day of the liturgical period known as the Season of Creation/ Creation Time/ Creationtide, depending on your denominational background. It/they begins on September 1st and concludes on the Feast of St. Francis, which is always October 4th. Francis is the patron saint of animals and ecology.
While I will certainly continue to post about ecological and Creation stories I'll muse about the British monarch, even though he continues to be a head-scratcher for me. Why was it necessary for Charles to host an opulent state dinner for the Emperor Orange with a guest list that included a lot of unsavoury persons? How is it that the king is a billionaire living in luxury yet fancies himself as an environmentalist?
And yet...he has for decades explored Earthcare in various ways and as a professed Christian he sometimes puts these efforts in the context of his faith as well as the spiritual expression of those from a variety of traditions.
Somehow I missed an event sponsored by King Charles this summer called The Harmony Summit. He brought folk from a broad range of backgrounds to his vast Highgrove Estate to shine a light on the theme of living in harmony with the natural world or Creation. It was unabashedly spiritual and inclusive. I wonder if his late mother, Queen Elizabeth, would have been amused, although she loved the outdoors and had a strong Christian faith.
I'll share some of the BBC report of the event by Sean Coughlan and offer kudos to the king for orchestrating this event, one which he hopes was the first annual.
It wasn't exactly a run-of-the-mill royal occasion.
In the sunny gardens of the Highgrove estate, I stood in a circle with King Charles and an eclectic group who were attending his first "Harmony Summit".
We raised our arms in honour of nature as we stood around a fire, which was burning within a ring of flowers.
Presiding over the fire ceremony, in which we rotated as we honoured the north, south, east and west and then Mother Earth, was an Indigenous leader - an Earth Elder - wearing a headdress and a dazzling robe of blue feathers.
A conch shell was blown. Butterflies flew around the flowers. And, in a concession to modernity, as well as holding up feathers in a blessing for the King, the elder was reading his incantations from an iPhone.
There were people reaching to the sky, wearing colourful face paint and elaborate necklaces, while I held my palms up self-consciously, melting in my M&S suit.
According to a source close to the King, it's "perhaps the single most important part of his eventual legacy", bringing together different strands of his work that might seem separate into "one philosophical world view about creating a better, more sustainable world for future generations".
The King's views, including on the environment, were "once seen as an outlier, but now many elements have been accepted and adopted as conventional thought and mainstream practice, embraced around the world".
In his book, Harmony - A New Way of Looking at our World, the King describes his purpose as a "call to revolution", and writes that he recognises the strength of the word.
It's a broadside against a consumer culture, in which people and the natural world become commodities. He warns of the environmental threats to the future of the Earth. There's a call to protect traditional crafts and skills and also for a radical change in rejecting modern, unsustainable, exploitative forms of farming.
A humane, ruminative, humorous and quietly radical figure, he was at the centre of what he hopes will become the first of many such gatherings.
But it raised the question - and perhaps opened a window - into what the King believes. What is this thoughtful man really thinking about?
Harmony is the King's philosophy - it means that we should be working with the grain of nature rather than against it. Or "her", as he describes nature in his book on the subject, published in 2010.
It's about the inter-connectedness of all life, infused with a strong sense of the spiritual, and the idea that the human and natural worlds can't be separated.
It's the philosophy that stitches together his many different pursuits - on the environment, climate change, sustainable farming, urban planning, architecture, protecting traditional craft skills and building bridges between different faiths.
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