In the book, PRAYERS FOR A THOUSAND YEARS, we find this prayer by Sr. Miriam MacGillis, from Genesis Farm in New Jersey; it celebrates not only the earth that we know today, beginning again to burst with the new life of Spring, but offers us a prayer (very Franciscan) that acknowledges, with GRATITUDE, all that has gone before us in the past billions of years in bringing creation and the world we know today to birth:
I give you thanks for the enormous contribution of those who lived before me,
for the thousands of years during which humans crafted their images of you in the image of the feminine and of the Earth,
for loosening our tongues that we might utter words about your eternal word,
for the Ice Ages that shaped the lands, mountains, and rivers, that have in turn shaped our imaginations,
for all of the mammals who have taught us to birth and succor our young,
for the coming of the flowering plants that channel their energy into the seeds by which the future is endowed,
for the birds who brought song and melody to the Earth,
for the great green plants and their interdependence with insects,
for all the teeming life within the oceans which fashioned the sensing organs of Earth,
for the first simple life forms that learned to take nourishment from the sun, our mother star, and laid down a pattern giving themselves away to others, and receiving life from others,
for the super nova event by which our mother star collapsed and created the stardust out of which this solar system was formed,
for stars and galaxies in which is incarnated all the dreams, visions, and energies by which you have shaped this present moment,
for the first moment -- that utter act of giving by which you brought forth this single body of the universe out of which I weave the web of my own existence,
for the dark, impenetrable, pregnant, awesome mystery that you are, and out of which you called my name. AMEN.
