CREATION AND STEWARDSHIP

            My continued reading of the Catholic Church’s Stewardship Letter[1] from several decades ago, is now at the section titled “Living as a Steward.” This takes time to talk about creation and stewardship. God wants us to be God’s collaborators in the wok of creation, redemption and sanctification, and it all started with the first story of God’s love for us and that was in the creation…. “in the beginning, when God created the heavens and earth.” (Gen 1:1).

            I have always said that Genesis 1:1 is the first stewardship scripture! I have approached this Scripture regularly as a way to explain that nothing we have is ours, if God created everything. Therefore, keeping our “stuff” and ourselves, whether its our time, our work, our love or our bodies, to ourselves is NOT stewardship and goes against Scripture.

            But this letter looks at it a little differently, still in the context of stewardship. Exercising dominion over creation, as it says in scripture is not abusing the earth, but, rather, continuing God’s work by cultivating and caring for it. The letter says all of that boils down to one word and it is “work,” but not as a punishment for sin but because it is “necessary” for human happiness and fulfillment.”[2]

            So if work is necessary for our fulfillment as humans, that means that working is a way to be in cooperation with God’s creation. Our work, our vocation, are all means of living out our call from God. Of course, sometimes our work is messy, and sometimes our work is hard, and sometimes we just want to leave work and put our feet up and complain about everything. But if we look at our vocations as a response to a call from God and not as work, how would our understanding of work change?

            If our work is not a true fulfillment of God’s call, we need to look at our lives and

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[1] The 1992 pastoral letter, Stewardship: A Disciple’s Response, by U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Stewardship.

[2] Ibid.