‘The Crown of all Creation’?
Look closely at this photo and you will see three soft-bodied animals draping themselves gracefully around Lobelia stems as they venture out in the cool and damp of a Norfolk evening. The low temperatures and endless rain of 2024 have proved a seventh heaven for slugs. Gardeners all over Britain have, consequently, been wringing their hands in despair. One of them was my husband. He had carefully edged a flower-bed with a row of twenty tender lettuce plants but a mob of molluscs turned out in force a night or two later, started at one end and munched their way through the lot. Sunflower seedlings? Ditto. Young dahlias? Ditto.
Sympathetic friends suggested crushed egg-shells, beer traps and coffee grounds. Most effective of all, in the end, was to programme a regular evening walk around the garden with gloves and bucket and simply move them on. Despite their silent, insidious, sinuous, slimy take-over, we were loathe to kill them for, like every living organism in an ecosystem, slugs have a role. They’re not an optional extra for us to dispose of at will. As well as providing a crucial food source for other wildlife – hedgehogs and birds, for example – many species are key composters and help to break down decomposing vegetation.
A growing understanding of the interconnectedness of all things and the vital part each plays in the delicate balance of the natural world, is at last beginning, thank goodness, to nibble away at our deeply ingrained pyramidal concept of the value of living things - humankind at the pyramid’s apex and unsavoury slug-like species at its very base. The Genesis creation narratives have a lot to answer for here, particularly with the “dominion” which humankind is given “over every living thing”, including “every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth” (Gen 1.26). Those slugs!
Humanity has, especially in the 300 years since industrialisation, used that apparently God-given dominion to make the world a miserable place for so many living things: we have decimated forests, overfished the oceans, polluted the air, water and soil and stamped thousands of species of plants, animals and insects out of existence. We have caused radical harm by assuming the position of dominance. We have ushered in a terrifying period of environmental unravelling.
So….. I am finding it hard to use Common Worship’s Eucharistic Prayer G these days. I used to gravitate towards it whenever there was a choice. I loved voicing the words “you give us breath and speech”; the idea that Jesus is “the living bread in whom all our hungers are satisfied” moved me deeply each time I said it; I was glad to describe him embracing us “as a mother tenderly gathers her children”. Over the last few years, however, the idea that, “in the fullness of time you made us in your image, the crown of all creation”, has become a stumbling block for me. To describe humanity as “the crown of all creation” sticks in my throat. The phrase has noble roots (Psalm 8.5). Maybe for us to be the pinnacle of the whole created order was what was intended but we have abused that intention. We are no longer worthy of the crown.
