Sometimes the most profound lessons about caring for creation arrive in very ordinary ways and, for the Sandhurst Care for Creation Team, preparing for the annual Season of Creation Mass was one of them.

There was the usual planning: the Diocese applied to Parks Victoria for permission to use the reserve, Parks Victoria liaised with the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation, and we made arrangements with Djaara for a Welcome to Country. 

Then comes the question of exactly where to celebrate the Mass.

This year, Parks Victoria rangers walked through Huntly Streamside Reserve with members of the Sandhurst Care for Creation Team to find an appropriate site for us to gather without disturbing inhabitants of Huntly Streamside Reserve

And that meant encountering two very different residents.

Rainbow Bee-eaters, soon to be nesting nearby and permanent campers, people experiencing homelessness living on the reserve.

Suddenly, the Season of Creation was looking less like a theme for a Mass and more like an everyday reality. It is hard to think of a more everyday expression of what Pope Francis was getting at in Laudato Si’.

Pope Francis asked us to move beyond seeing creation as something “out there” – a beautiful landscape to admire, or a collection of resources to manage – and to recognise that we are part of a web of relationships. The earth is our common home, and everything is connected.
That connection became very tangible at Huntly.

The Rainbow Bee-eater is a spectacular seasonal visitor to Central Victoria. During the warmer months, these colourful birds arrive to feed on insects and raise their young in tunnels dug into sandy ground. Although they are not endangered, there is reason to take care of them. First, because they are created by God and second, because sightings of them in our region have fallen by more than fifty per cent over the past twenty years.

So, of course, the Care for Creation Team was happy to move the Mass to another part of the Reserve.

Pope Francis encouraged us to learn about the creatures and ecosystems around us. It is difficult to care for something we haven't taken the time to know. And care does not have to wait until a species is endangered, or a habitat is in crisis. 

Three years ago, the location of the Mass in the Whipstick was changed because of concerns about disturbing permanent campers in the national park. This year, the same consideration was part of choosing where we could gather at Huntly.

It brings another part of Laudato Si’ very close to home: “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor” are not separate concerns. The wellbeing of people and the wellbeing of places we share are bound together. Not two separate causes, but as cries arising from the same wounded home.

The Parks Victoria rangers encounter that reality every day. They care for a reserve that is habitat for wildlife, a place for the wider community and, for some people, home. Their respectful treatment of people living in the reserve deserves recognition.

Pope Leo XIV has put the same idea in strikingly simple terms. In his message for this year’s World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, he said we are called to safeguard the many “ecosystems” entrusted to us – “the ecosystems of creation, of human relationships and of the human heart itself.”

Perhaps that is what this Mass asked of us before we had even gathered.

To understand that the reserve is already alive with relationships: the bird nesting in the sand, the person pitching a tent near the creek, the rangers working to care for both …

And, when we gathered for Mass, to hold all of these beings in our prayers.