Oil Spill ... and the "Uneasy Evangelical Conscience"

"I’ve left my hometown lots of times. But never like this.

Sure, I’ve teared up as I’ve left family and friends for a while, knowing I’d see them again the next time around. And, yes, I cried every day for almost a year in the aftermath of a hurricane that almost wiped my hometown off the map. But I’ve never left like this, wondering if I’ll ever see it again, if my children’s children will ever know what Biloxi was."

Finally, a mainstream articulation of Christian ecology.
As E. told me, it's about time.

Russell D. Moore, "Ecological Catastrophe and the Uneasy Evangelical Conscience"

A. "We’ve had an inadequate view of human sin.

Because we believe in free markets, we’ve acted as though this means we should trust corporations to protect the natural resources and habitats. [...]"

B. "We’ve seen the issue of so-called “environmental protection” as someone else’s issue.

[...] we’ve been willing not simply to vote for candidates who will protect unborn human life (as we ought to), but to also in the process adopt their worldviews on every other issue. [...] But perhaps the void is being filled by leftists and liberals and wannabe liberal evangelicals simply because those who ought to know better are off doing something else. [,,.]"

C. "We’ve had an inadequate view of human life and culture.

[...] What’s being threatened is a culture. [...] When the natural environment is used up, unsustainable for future generations, cultures die. [...]"

D. "Finally, we’ve compromised our love.

[...] Pollution kills people. Pollution dislocates families. Pollution defiles the icon of God’s Trinitarian joy, the creation of his theater (Ps. 19; Rom. 1). Will people believe us when we speak about the One who brings life and that abundantly, when they see that we don’t care about that which kills and destroys? [...]"

-V.

Isolations, and the Divorce of Creation from Christianity

The devil's best weapon is that of isolation.

Isolation from God is first and most obvious - it is the ultimate isolation to which all other isolations point. It is not for nothing that hell has been described as a God-absent sensory deprivation chamber.

There is also the isolation of persons. With individualism and individualistic non-Trinitarian thought, we have lost the sense of salvation as corporate and communal.

The twentieth century has seen the (empty) triumph of many other isolations, the acquisition by our Enemy of many isolating tools:

• In feminism (and reactionary machoism), the isolating and putting at enmity of the sexes.
• In public school, television, and modern nontraditional music, the isolating of each generation from those that have gone before.
• In modernism, the isolating from history (and her lessons) and tradition.
• In funeral homes' crematoria and embalming rituals, the isolating from death and the repentance death engenders.
• In an officially urban world, the isolating of man from the Created order.

It is this last isolation that I wish to consider.

It is an old tactic that has taken on new dimensions. Hitherto cities were best for the proliferation of leisure and its concomitant vice, but the Created order was still close. Not so today.

Concrete covers the ground, skyscrapers and "light pollution" shut out the sky, globalized agriculture and food distribution centres divorce us from the origins of our food, sewers and garbage trucks hide from us the consequences of our waste. Never before has man been so isolated from the natural, so separated from the Created order. In fact, as Wendell Berry points out, we have created a new word to articulate this separation: the environment, that which is around us. We have lost the sense that we are in it, that we are part of it, and that ultimately we will return to it.

It has been suggested in this blog (not by the authors) that the Created order is not a self-evident good because St. Paul - among others - fails to mention it. Completely aside from the fact that the Bible does not address everything nor was it meant to ...

[The New Testament was collated by the Church, its several parts determined by comparison with the oral tradition of the Church. The Church in turn has become epistle ... she has become the good news of Christ, articulated as she incarnates Him. The Church is the New Testament. Rather than a model where an issue does not exist for God (like cannibalism, say) if it hasn't been addressed in a text two thousand years old, we proclaim the living Body of Christ, which by virtue of its life can and will address all issues that the centuries reveal.]

... I would argue that it would have been utterly redundant for the Bible to have addressed it. If a man in those times chose not to care for his garden or his farm, weeds would have overtaken it, the plants would have withered, and he and his family would have starved. The apostles, evangelists, and epistolists were in the Created order; they had no concept of a people so divorced from their food source that they need a note from God to tell them to stop soiling their food supply or their water supply.

This last is the part that gets me. Christians, no matter their creed or lack thereof, have a responsibility to work for the betterment of Creation. This is not a matter of Left vs. Right, not a matter of hippie granola-crunchers vs. sober suit-wearers, not a matter of The Will of God vs. the sideshows. Even if a person who professes the name of Christ has the nerve to assert that care for God's Creation is a spiritual non-essential, he cannot get past the fact that pollution contaminates our water, our food, & our bodies, and pollution ultimately sickens and kills us.

It is impossible to get past the logic of this. Soil your bedsheets and you will sleep in excrement. Soil your food supply and you will eat the consequences.

- V.
The usual caveat.

On Wanting More Turf Than 7 Feet of Canadian Soil

I've had Wendell Berry on the mind of late, and a post has been hovering at the back of my mind, waiting for articulation.

One of the things I wanted to mention was our desire to have a bit of land to nurture, to use, to reap. E. and I were discussing Ochlophobist's recent series of posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12) - a thesis in pictures, really, lauding a way of life that he (and we) finds laudable - and it struck us forcefully that there is a fascinating subculture within Orthodoxy (agrarian postmodern?) that hungers for land. This is a hunger not for the gain that land might bring, but a hunger for the toil and the sweat and the tears that is a Christian engagement with God's Creation. A step back and away from the petroleum-fertilized factory farming of the latter part of the 20th century, a return to sustainable (ie. non-polluting) living, even if on a limited scale, and a re-engagement with God's Creation after the soul-straitening concrete canyons of the Big City.

A recent moment of envious yearning (and joy! - both with him and for him) was reading about Lotar's purchase of a homestead for he, his wife, and his 1.5 children. These things are possible, evidently - I just don't know how to get where I can realize these dreams also.

Andrea Elizabeth articulates some of that bewilderment. She is not in quite the same place that I am in - I still hope for something a little more country, and I get the feeling that she has reached a point of contentment with her place/situation in life. In her words:

While I agree with and admire [Wendell Berry's] ethics, I haven’t been able to become an ardent disciple because I don’t think his particular way of life is completely practical for everyone. I love self-sufficiency, but not everyone is as smart as he is. Did he make most of his livelihood on his farm or by his gifted writing? I’ve talked about how much more fertile and better watered Kentucky is compared to where I live too. Still, I could probably get by with the produce available at our Farmer’s Market. Wait, last time I was there I noticed that most things weren’t local. But if I spent a lot of time studying, I could probably find enough local sources to keep us well-fed. But my attentions are usually diverted elsewhere. I resent the hour and a half I spend at Walmart every week as it is. And my home garden, which I prefer to access rather than going across town to the farmer’s market, I’m self-sufficient that way, got mostly eaten by bugs, or didn’t produce much (for the needs of a family of 8) for other unknown reasons. I intend on getting better at gardening though. It is a healthy sport.

Again, I don't agree with her conclusions, but I sympathize with her frustration. Here is Ochlophobist's response:

This weekend past we spent time with our best friends, on their third attempt at a sustainable farm [the subject of which was the photo-essay mentioned above -- V.]. They have all the skills and the desire to farm, but did not inherit any land, or any significant means, and they have not followed the most common path of niche farming today - to spend a few decades in a lucrative field and then, after accumulating means, running off to the boutique farm. It is likely that this third attempt will be their last, that most of their lives will be spent as serious gardeners, and not as farmers. There is a place for the mourning over lost dreams, but then one must go on and do the hard work in the real here and the real now that God presents to us.

I have written before, and I think honesty requires us of agrarian bents to say it again and again - Wendell Berry inherited the family farm, one that was semi-functional. He had financial means outside of farming, whether or not he needed such. What of those of us who did not inherit such things, and would never have access to such means? These facts are one reason why I must read Berry and Edwards (who wrote Ebenezer) as, first and foremost, eulogists.

But we can learn many important things from these eulogies. We can remember many important things. We are offered in them something of an image of repentance, if we look with our eyes open enough. And we can make our little, sputtering, seemingly inconsequential efforts at the human things. I live in a cheap ranch house on half an acre, but I can double dig a small garden, and I can make things with my hands as time permits, I can cook my own food from as honest of ingredients as I am able to secure. I can read lasting words, sing hymns, sit still. I can attempt to pace my life in a manner that bows as little as possible to the rush of the constant movement of consumption. I can remember that I have failed, and I will fail, and that I am small, that my efforts will matter little but somewhere in that littleness is my salvation, and as God wills the salvation of my children. One can still strive, even in this place, to cultivate the quiet, the slow, to choreograph the movement of one's hands and breath in the dance of activity and stillness in a manner that befits a human life - as best as one is able, in the midst of all those troublesome cares and demands. To borrow my oft put example - even the single mother living in one of those awful bauhuas projects can bake her own bread, and while that may be the only careful human act she has time for, aside from prayer, it is the sort of rebuke of consumenivorism that reveals a clinging to life, and grants a reward, the richness one experiences when coming upon the flower in the desert.

There is also the temptation, the very American temptation, of taking from Berry & Co. a moralist perfectionism. An all or nothing disposition which rots the soul, as it judges any effort which does not achieve a fast and secure perfection to be hell-fodder. There is a lack of pause with this sort of perfectionism, scarce disposition to cover the sins of others, few allowances, a poverty with regard to tenderness of heart. We have to live the life that we are given, and when we read Berry as moralist only, or moralist primarily, most of us end up under a load of impossible moral burdens. I will never get to the farm in KY. I have no way of getting there. I must concern myself with my own home, as Berry exhorts. In much of Berry's literature there is that call to be who you are where you are, in as human a manner possible, but the overt moralism in much of his work provides something of a contradiction in tone at times, and one is best to follow Andrea Elizabeth's reading and take this with a grain of salt. There is not going to be a Wendell Berry movement that changes America. You are not going to take part in some great motion of social change by getting your produce from a local farmer or growing one quarter of your caloric intake. This is not to say that such social movements do not exist and will not push and pull society in this and that way. It is to say that such an agenda betrays Berry and the whole notion of living an honest human life. Movement agendas are destructive abstractions. It is better to simply and quietly go about doing the best things one is able. There will always be the temptation to fight the Dark Lord of Mordor with his own Black Speech. Our focus must be upon the goodness of a row of okra where and when we find it, the goodness of the chicken in the backyard, the goodness of a pig allowed to run about, the goodness of grain and water getting under fingernails. These things are miracles always and only in their instances. As soon as we make of them a rule or a paradigm they are lost to us. God only ever loves this bruised reed, the one here, that you see trampled in front of you. The Society for the Protection of Bruised Reeds (S.P.B.R.) is not the work of angels, but a diversion. The poor in spirit hold up those reeds within their very short reach. And yet that greatest of miracles - the seemingly smallest reach that is the summit of all human affairs, of all human history, that short length from pierced torso to nailed hand, holds the entire universe in its mercied place. Today, right now, this world is kept on its rotational axis for the prayer of a little old nun, chanting O Heavenly King as she presses a cucumber seed into earth with her nub of a finger. There is no other way. [highlighting mine -- V.]]

This is life in the meantime, living without despair, living in prayer and finding God in the here, in the now. This is re-remembering that what is holy in yearning for land is not the ideal of healthy land, sound ecology, the economy of thinking small and local ... what is holy is that baptism of the broken (land, ecology, and the rest of the cosmos) by Orthodox, through prayer, through vigil, through labour offered to God, ascesis in all its forms.

I will continue to yearn, and hope. I don't think this is wrong. But the now cannot, must not be forgotten.

- V.


On the meaning of the title:
When King Harald Hardrada of Norway put in his bid for the Kingdom of Anglo-Saxon England, the holder of the crown - Harold Godwinson of Wessex - retorted that the only English land that he would give Harald was the 6 feet to bury him. Or, as Harald was reputed to be a tall man, 7 feet.

... I would like land, yes, but I would rather that there be more planted in it than just me.

The monk Makarios

On the feastday of St. Makarios (Macarius) the Great, I inevitably think of my friend Fr. Makarios.

Fr. Makarios was a simple monk of the Orthodox Church. He has since joined the choir invisible but I had the great blessing of meeting him and conversing at great length with him before he died.

A Trappist monk before he was 20, Fr. Makarios had been severely disillusioned by Vatican II; he travelled far from his Catholic roots before finding a home and peace in the Orthodox Church. He was a man who had drunk deep from the well of the Fathers and who had a profound and thorough knowledge of the lives and writings of the Saints. Happily, he had the unmonastic failing of garrulity (his term, not mine), and was more than willing to answer the myriad questions of a new convert to the Faith.

I credit him with introducing me to the mind of the Church, exposing me to Orthdoxy's monastic heart, teaching me the things that don't come up in catechism class. Through him I was exposed to the strange but beautiful asceticisms of the Stylites and the Fools-for-Christ, I learned of the Protecting Veil, I was told of the miracles with which God has blessed His Church, the wonders worked by His Saints. He also told me of the Saints' secret and hidden asceticisms, those that only death revealed. He introduced me to the Edenic "environmentalism" that reveals itself through the lives of the Saints and the ancient traditions of the monasteries.

Through Fr. Makarios, I was shown the heart of Orthodoxy. I stopped thinking of Orthodoxy as a spreadsheet of points that had to be argued or proved in defense against the Protestantism of my youth or the Catholicism with which I had flirted as a young man: through his unteaching I came to see the Orthodox Church as a pearl of great price and unparelleled beauty, as my Mother, holding me to her bosom.

And he told me stories from his life, a bit here, a piece there, to illustrate his points. I won't tell his story at this time - instead, I will tell the part of that story that I witnessed. Because I cannot think of Fr. Makarios without remembering the bees.

Fr. Makarios and the Bees

I and one other had been helping Fr. Makarios in the monastery's candleshop when he was called out. He blessed us to continue his work, and departed. During his absence a batch of honey-encrusted beeswax melted, attracting a small swarm of bees. They filled the small candleshop.

I got to work industriously killing them, keeping count as I went. The other followed suit. I was nearing 100 bees killed with plenty more to go when Fr. Makarios returned.

"V.!" he cried, "What are you doing?"

I got that sinking feeling that is awakened guilt. And I remembered him telling me that in a monastery, Eden is restored and man is no longer at enmity with Creation.

"I'm killing bees," I said.

"Why didn't you ask them to leave?" he asked. He gestured us towards the door, and shooed us out. "Out! Out!"

I couldn't respond to the absurdity of his question, and I was feeling myself in the wrong and out of place, so I meekly complied with his order.

We sat down outside the shop in an embarrassed silence. A couple minutes had gone by, when Fr. Makarios invited us back into the candleshop. A single bee buzzed about the celing where previously there had been many dozens.

"What happened?" I said, incredulous. "Where are the bees?"

"I asked them to leave," said he.

By God's grace, through Fr. Makarios the concept of a harmonious Creation was made real to me; around him Eden was restored.

+

I don't know when Fr. Makarios died, so I remember him today.

Remember Thy servant - schemamonk Makarios - in Thy Kingdom. вечная память. Through the prayers of Thy Saints, revealed and hidden, have mercy on us.

- V.

Evolution, Historicity, and Ghost Writing the Bible

From Orrologion. I have left his post intact.

- V.

----------------------

The Editor's Prophecy

I've got no problem accepting that all of the events in the Old and New Testaments literally, historically happened, 'really'. If one is going to believe that the ever-existing Creator of the Universe decided to not only take on human form, but become a human being consubstantial to us, well then, it isn't hard to believe in all sorts of other things. Same with belief in miracles.

That being said, I think the consensus of the Church over the past 150 years has been that there is no necessity to believe in young earth evolution. This is likely due to the fact that the Genesis and other 'violent' accounts in the OT have been viewed primarily as types and allegories in the East for centuries and centuries prior to Darwin, even if a literal, historical reality to the events was assumed, as well - the 'higher' and 'more spiritual' meaning of these texts was always beyond that of the literal and historical.

The Church has also seemed to accept in a pretty nonplussed way modern critical methodologies and at least some of the results arrived at along this spectrum.

How does one 'square the circle', so to speak, given the fact that so many of our liturgical and patristic texts explicitly or implicitly accept the historicity of the events and persons mentioned and the traditional, single authors (e.g., Moses wrote the Pentateuch, only one Isaiah, Paul wrote Hebrews, etc.)?

I think there is a difference between the historicity of the events described and the reality of the person of the prophet/author describing.

There is also in Orthodoxy - and therefore also in the Church's precursor, Israel - a long history of 'secrecy'. Humility is honored. Saints will feign madness, they will not let the left hand know what the right hand is doing. Joseph will seem not to know his brothers. There are many examples.

It is my contention that many of the authors of the biblical texts may in fact be compilers and editors. They may also feign their identity leaving themselves either anonymous or pointing to a greater light than themselves, out of humility. St. Xenia of Petersburg wore her husband's clothes and would only respond to her husband's name - she was taking on the ascetic endeavor (podvig) of foolishness-for-Christ's-sake quite literally in her husband's name and on his behalf.

Similarly, sometimes humble, anonymous prophets may have pulled together writings and tales written or told by others (explaining the different 'tones' or 'vocabulary' within a work) to their own prophetic end. What is historical is the editor's prophecy, though the building blocks of that editorial creation may or may not be historically 'true'. What is most important, and this is agreed on by the Fathers, is that the typological and allegorical meanings of the Scriptures are the most important.

Our only question is whether the historical is also 'true' - and, it should be noted, historical is different than literal.

Christ literally spoke of birds of the air and flowers of the field, as to whether he was referring of specific, historical birds and flowers is a different question; Christ literally spoke of a poor man named Lazarus and a rich man, whether these were real historical men that experienced the things Christ mentioned is a different question.

(Many of the arguments against 'fundamentalist' and 'literal' readings of Scripture are in fact arguments for the use of typology and allegory and against assuming the literal reading is historical. Much of the confusion is (purposefully?) due to a conflation of these distinct arguments.)

It seems to me that historicity can be left to science, archaeology, etc. and a case can be made either way. It doesn't really matter in the same way it doesn't matter whether Shakespeare's Macbeth acted, thought and spoke like the historical Macbeth. An editor/prophet is making a different point - just like many of the posts here do not reflect my own thoughts and words though my editorial intent would push one toward a certain way of viewing the world - by using the building blocks available to him. When Macbeth speaks, we do not say Macbeth-S when referring to the character in Shakespeare's Macbeth and Macbeth-H when referring to surviving documents written by the historical man. We simply say 'Macbeth'.

It's not good to constantly be winking at the audience and reminding them that you're really just an actor and not 'really' _______. Neither does a metaphor remain a metaphor if it is explained - that's called a simile.

- Christopher Orr

Keeping Hands & Breath Low, and Eyes Upward

From Ochlophobist:

We live this life between sky and earth; anything which hinders the view of either is a fabrication. When my parents moved to suburban Detroit, and I found myself surrounded by mile after mile after mile of boxes of sameness, I would lie on the asphalt parking lot at the church in front of our parsonage, and stare at the sky, for it is all that I had left, having been taken from hill and field. I had only sky those years, divorced from earth, and therefore from myself. Having learned from this, or rather suffered it, now each place I go I seek a field in order to know the place and myself there. Prairie grass or cotton, one can make something of a life, keeping hands and breath low, and eyes upward. [emphasis mine]

I can't think of anything to improve upon this.

- V.

Is it Orthodox? III

Is it Orthodox to care for the environment? Perhaps we should instead ask if it is Orthodox to venerate an icon, or if it is Orthodox to combat the Gnostic hatred of matter.

The whole earth is a living icon of the face of God. … I do not worship matter. I worship the Creator of matter who became matter for my sake, who willed to take His abode in matter, who worked out my salvation through matter. Never will I cease honoring the matter which wrought my salvation! I honor it, but not as God. Because of this I salute all remaining matter with reverence, because God has filled it with his grace and power. Through it my salvation has come to me.

- St. John Damascene (675-749)

Other quotes from the Fathers:

Creation reveals Him who formed it, and the very work made suggests Him who made and ordered it.

- St. Irenaeus of Lyon (129 –203)

I want creation to penetrate you with so much admiration that wherever you go the least plant may bring you a clear remembrance of the Creator. … One blade of grass or one speck of dust is enough to occupy your entire mind in beholding the art with which it has been made. … The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. O God, enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all living things, even our brothers, the animals, to whom Thou gavest the earth as their home in common with us. …We remember with shame that in the past we have exercised the high dominion of man with ruthless cruelty so that the voice of the earth, which should have gone up to thee in song, has been a groan of pain. May we realize that they live, not for us alone, but for themselves and for Thee and that they love the sweetness of life.

- St. Basil the Great (347-407)

Quotes from: A Cloud of Witness: The Deep Ecological Legacy of Christianity, by Frederick Krueger. (Santa Rosa: Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation, 2002, 4th ed.)

- V.

Is it Orthodox? (cont.)

The only people who appear to care about God's Creation as much as Orthodox ought to are the pagans and the environmentalists.

The pagans worship a false god or goddess that cannot save, cannot lead them into all truth. They discern the [good] form that God has made, but are powerless to receive the grace that God wishes to impart to them through that form. The sacramental and the salvific power of Creation are lost to them, because they do know the God Who created and blessed what they worship. I am minded of St. Paul's words: They worship that which they do not know.

The environmentalists (the followers of environmentalism) worship a barren and lifeless ideology that cannot save them from themselves and the corrupting evils of the heart. In the crucible of their ideology they have discovered a strange alchemy whereby abortion, forced sterilization, and euthanasia are good things, cures to the disease of overpopulation. Their love of environment is unmediated by a love for their fellow man, and so the greatest law, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," is lost in stewardship enshrined.

[And in the writing of this post I hear and read of such a worshiper who recently made the following remarks in the wake of the death of some sealers: "The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society recognizes that the deaths of four sealers is a tragedy but Sea Shepherd also recognizes that the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of seal pups is an even greater tragedy." This is a perfect illustration of the lovelessness of the religion of environmentalism.

Later in the same article another environmentalist is recorded to have advocated assassinating vivisectionists. Vivisection is morally wrong, but murder will not improve the situation any.]

These faiths are graceless and loveless. Only in Orthodoxy do we have an understanding of why it is we must tend this earth that God has made, steward it carefully, work it respectfully, and heal it by our prayers. We know the true function of this Creation, and that is to be the vessel of God's love to us, the means of humbling ourselves for the betterment of lesser beings as icons of Christ's mercy, and the reciprocation and echo of our jubilant voice of praise to God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

- V.

Is it Orthodox to be environmentally-conscious?

I was recently asked if it was Orthodox to care so much for the environment.

I would boldly and unequivocally state that it is very Orthodox to care for the environment, although unOrthodox to be passionate about environmentalism. The "ism" marks the point when an idea, descriptor, or reality is "deified" to the status of false god. Idolatry ensues.

Indeed, I would go so far as to say that we have a better reason to care for the environment (what Orthodox have traditionally called Creation or the cosmos) than anyone else.

In the beginning, when God created, He called what He had created "good." A solid, unambiguous good, just as the first man and the first woman were also created good. Recently I heard it said that one of the hallmarks of the demonic is a hatred of Creation. Our Enemy hates what God has made, what He has called good, and seeks to despoil it, to despoil us.

The Old Order

When Man sinned (first Eve and then Adam), sin entered the world, the cosmos, through Adam, God-appointed steward of Creation. Through no fault of its own, Creation became fallen and corrupt, and it is for this reason that animal is at enmity with animal and man, and even the inanimate movements of nature (earthquake, tornado, lightning, etc.) are at war with both animal and man. And yet, though fallen, Creation is still good - God does not begrudge it its existence, but wills that it be, and continue to be. [Credit Fr. Stephen]

And as countless generations of men and women lived and died, their sins repeated the first sins of our first parents, and Creation groaned under the weight. Until the Advent of Christ, when all Creation rejoiced, and until Pentecost.

The New Order

In the icon of Pentecost, we see the flames of the Holy Spirit descending upon the Apostles, and below them a crowned man who represents the cosmos ... not just "the world", but all of Creation. Through this descent, the Holy Spirit began to restore, through and by the prayers of the God's holy faithful, all Creation to its Edenic, prelapsarian state. This is a process that continues to this day and enjoys its greatest flowering in monasteries and in remote hermitages where holy prayer is constantly lifted to God. Here we see a tsunami rebuked (St. Herman), a bear living in harmony (St. Seraphim), and other supranatural phenomena.

And sometimes there is no monastery or hermitage, just a holy man - whose heart has been made a temple of unceasing prayer - who reveals a fundamental, God-given peace and reconciliation between himself and Creation. Here the Holy Spirit is at work.

However, it is not just in the wonders of the thaumaturges or the monastic gardens that we see the Holy Spirit restoring and healing Creation. The Holy Spirit makes use of the matter that surrounds us to bless, heal, and sanctify the people of God . Where God mediates His grace through physical Creation, we identify this as "sacrament" or "sacramental." Water becomes the laver of regeneration. Bread and wine become the medicine of immortality. Oil becomes sacred chrism or instrument of healing. Pigment and binder become windows into heaven.

And still more things are brought into the Church to celebrate the feasts and to be yet another source of blessing to us. Greens are brought in at Pentecost, eggs at Pascha, flowers on Holy Friday, willows on Palm Sunday, etc.

As the Church year progresses, over and over again the sacramental (and therefore salvific) role of Creation is liturgically taught. We learn from the Church that all of Creation has the potential to become sacrament, by the power of the Holy Spirit through the prayers of the saints. And so the Church reveals to us the true beauty and potency of Eden, where all the cosmos becomes vessel for the Holy Spirit and bestower of God's grace.

The Contest

And so we come to the present, where the age-long demonic hatred of man, of family, of Church, and of Creation is naked and brutally active. In a nation where the blood of the innocents is shed, where God and His bride are mocked and derided, where family are endlessly torn and riven, we should expect to see poison poured into the rivers and perversions of nature sown in our fields. We should expect to see the earth paved over, the heavens obscured by bright lights and concrete monoliths, and the masses enticed away from the God-given and Spirit-blessed countryside and drawn into the desert of the city.

This is a contest where the Evil One will make use of any greed or lust to harm everything that God has proclaimed good.

And here we stand, the people of God, powerful Davids before the empty might of the Goliaths of our age (big industry, materialism, Mammonites, etc.), who rage and roar with demoniac loathing the barren mantras of their masters. And as we are fully present in our lives, it is our calling and our duty to rebuke the evil, to reclaim the good, to sanctify, bless, heal, restore, redeem ... to fix the brokenness around us in all its forms. And I would assert that that would include rejecting plastic, combating the acquisitive spirit of materialism, planting a garden, shunning GE perversions, and returning ourselves to a simpler sustainable future-friendly unselfish manner of living.

- V.

The Vox Clamanti Manifesto

I have heard it said that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, and as a general principle, I would have to agree. However, at certain times and in certain places a prophetic voice is needed, a voice crying out in the desert, a chiding one that calls a people to change. Sometimes it is needful to curse the darkness.

To put it another way, Solomon wrote that every purpose under Heaven had its proper season. Sometimes one builds, sometimes one tears down. Our purpose and aim is to do both.

A Time to Build

For the sake of our own sanity, we cannot always be railing against the dying of the light. We need, and those who read this blog, need to hear and see beauty. We need to be secondary creators in emulation of our first Creator.

So expect from time to time descriptions of our parish, the natural world around us, and the joys of friendship, parenthood, and marriage. Perhaps also some art works, some art discussion ... perhaps some poetry.

And, where possible, where appropriate, and where we see them, we will offer our solutions to the various issues raised.

A Time to Tear Down

There are, regrettably, many thing that need changing in this world of ours. It is a deeply flawed and hurting world that we have inherited, a world under bombardment not only by our sins, but by our man-made toxins and our mountains of forever garbage. And it is a world where there is little to no repentance for our demon-like hatred of God’s Creation, man and world both, because we have constructed around our misdeeds horrible ideologies to defend them. … Here follow the issues that we have identified (and this section will undoubtedly evolve over time).

A. Environmental Concerns

These issues form an assault on the Creation that God called good. It is a failure to recognize that when the Holy Spirit was poured out on all the cosmos at Pentecost, He began to restore, through and by the prayers of the faithful, all Creation to its Edenic state. It is a failure to realize that all of nature has the potential to become sacrament, to become grace-bestowing, and it is a wanton violation of our role as stewards of a world that is not ours but God’s, lent us for a while. In many cases, our profligacy holds dire consequences to our health and well-being, and the health and well-being of our descendants.

I. Toxins: I have broken these down into four categories, from what I consider the most immediately damaging and dangerous to the least.

• Injected toxins – These would include street drugs, some pharmaceuticals, and vaccinations. These are easiest to avoid, most immediately damaging, and affect humans (and sometimes their progeny) alone.
• Ingested toxins – These would include unbound chemicals in our plastics, pesticides and heavy metals in our foods, and fluoride, chlorine, and various medications in our water. Where these toxins are carried in our groundwater and our waterways, the responsibility for them is shared, and the consequences involve more than our species alone.
• Breathed toxins – These would include cigarette smoke, smog, airborne pesticides, and vapours from household cleaning supplies. These are harder to avoid, and involve, again, a shared responsibility and collective harm.
• Absorbed toxins – These would include the plastics, pesticides, and bleaches found in our clothes, as well as skin contact with certain cleaners and varnishes.

II. Genetically modified organisms (GMO’s) are aberrant creations formed in Frankensteinian laboratories in a world-wide experiment to see what happens when the unnatural is tossed into nature. All too frequently these are self-replicating monstrosities.

Completely aside from whether or not these are a mockery and a blasphemy against God’s Creation, we eat many of the products made from these GMO’s, and we do not know what the long term effects will be.

III. Nuclear waste and depleted uranium are persistent and invisible mutagenic pollutants that will remain with us for millennia.

IV. Hormones in our meat, milk, and water have already been shown to have an effect on the hormones of those who consume them. This is another global experiment gone awry.

V. Garbage – our plastics and the throwaway culture that gave them birth – must be combated, reduced, and ultimately eliminated. There is no “away” to “throwaway”. Non -biodegradable garbage stays here in this world, our home, and as such is a present to our descendants that will keep on giving.

VI. Animal torture and the wanton cruelty towards animals, whether as manifestation of sociopathy, as the result of the industrialization of animal husbandry, or as a result of reckless and irreverent experimentation, constitutes a kind of savagery unknown even to the barbarians of yore.

VII. Clear-cut logging, unlike a more selective logging, is a habitat eliminator and the forefather to desertification. I recognize the need for wood for many uses and purposes, but our harvesting of this resource must allow renewal, rebirth, and the harvesting by future generations.

VIII. Power lines I include tentatively, largely because while we know that all electrical systems throw off magnetic fields, we do not know the long-term effects of constant habitation in a powerful magnetic field such as is given off by high-voltage power lines.

B. Social Concerns

These issues invariably are an affront to the human person, a degradation of the image of God, and a complete and utter failure to see God in others. Sadly, many of us participate in them through our self-indulgence and our pride.

I. Abortion: We need to take a tougher stand against this holocaust, this incessant feticide and its byproduct industries. Any vaccination that uses cell-lines derived from human fetuses (read: babies) must be avoided as we would avoid the taint of Nazi gold pulled from Jewish teeth. Likewise fetal stem cell research and any medical “advance” derived from fetal stem cells must be banned, boycotted, and shunned. Lastly, in vitro fertilization must be rethought where human embryos are formed in large number but not implanted in the mother’s womb. Throwing these out, as is customary in most cases, is another form of feticide, and as such constitutes murder.

II. Human trafficking: We as a society agree that human trafficking (the buying and selling of humans for the purposes of slavery) is wrong. However, we lack the moral courage to create an outright ban on prostitution and pornography so as to crush sexual slavery and the traffic in woman and children for sexual purposes. We lack the moral courage to outlaw and criminalize all companies that use forced labour, slavery, and sweatshop labour. We lack the moral courage to place adoption and organ transplants under the microscope to ensure that human exploitation was not involved, and we lack the will to vigorously punish those who engage or who knowingly benefit in such practices.

III. Usury, or interest, is a form of slavery in that it creates bondage through debt. The receivers of interest (the ever-wealthier) effectively enslave, through the medium of the banks, the ever-poorer. Banned by Mosaic Law and the Church, it has enjoyed not a resurrection but a revivification in more recent times.

IV. War, torture, and the use of weapons of mass destruction are similarly great evils. While I might argue that a defensive war is a necessary evil to preserve a nation in the face of military aggression, I fear that we have lost the ability to discern what a defensive war is. It is not a preemptive war, and it is not an offensive invasion of [another] belligerent country.

C. Cultural Concerns

These issues are those that, while not an affront to Creation or the human person, are distractions that interfere with our ability to stop, think, meditate, pray, and simply be, in silence and before God. Monastics would recognize these, I think, as tools of the Enemy to keep us from the knowledge and pursuit of God.

I. Speed: We live in a society that exists at only one speed, and that is breakneck. We need to slow down, we need to stop. We need to escape the tyranny of the ticking clock and the fear of “wasting” time as if it were something wastable. Just as God created us in matter so that we could learn to receive His grace through matter, He created us in time to experience Him in time.

There are many things – all the important things, in fact – which cannot be obtained quickly, or by any measure of time, but only by the measure of living, suffering, praying, loving, and growing. Building a marriage, raising a child, achieving maturity, gaining wisdom, and finding salvation itself are the products of a life, and cannot be measured by time or gained by the “spending” of time. We examine and speak of time as if it were quantitative, when any child could tell you it is qualitative.

II. Silence: St. Gregory Palamas was identified as a saint in part through his defense of hesychasm (silence) as a means to finding and experiencing God. Centuries before him, St. Elias discovered that God was not to be found in the crashing thunder but in the still small voice. And before him the Psalmist wrote of the need to be silent on our beds.

Silence is a precondition for meditation and prayer, and has become an ever-rarer commodity in the face of modern noise. Music pumped over the radio, through headphones, and in the supermarkets, engines roaring throughout the world, there are few places where one can entirely escape the sounds of busy, worldly Man.

III. Advertisement: Our senses and our peace are under constant assault by the omnipresence of signs and their ubiquitous siren call to buy, buy, buy. We are urged to satisfy our inner emptiness through endless consumption. We are titillated and amused, seduced into greed. We are not given the chance to rest, but are barraged and bombarded until we accept the hidden premise that we are consumers, not citizens of a nation nor the distinct people of God.

D. Ideological Concerns

These issues can be divided into two categories: heresies and philosophical ideas. Both, however, derive from the imagination of Man independent of Christ and His Church.

Thoughts may and should be free, but the implementation of these ideas – these pernicious and dangerous follies – have cost us a great deal, and will continue to cost us, unless we replace them with real wisdom and real knowledge.

I. The cult of youth: In the West we worship youth and beauty, and so we do everything in our technological power to promote youth, beauty, and “sexiness”, and to hide what is old and ugly. Our seniors are locked away into old folks’ homes. Our disfigured are urged to undergo plastic surgery. Our young starve themselves into looking more “beautiful”. Wrinkles are botoxed away and faces are lifted, grey hairs dyed, and beards shaved.

There are two even uglier consequences to the cult of youth. First, we hide our dead behind makeup and we attempt to preserve the illusion of life – eternal youth – through embalming, a profound abuse of the body, and a manifest disbelief in the reality of the resurrection of the dead. Second, the logical extension of the worship of youth results in the perversion of baby beauty competitions and prepubescent whore chic (where we display our young as sex objects), and pedophilia (where our young are perceived and treated as sex objects).

II. Modernism teaches, in essence, that things will keep on getting better. Evolutionary theory is a rationalization as to how this reversal of entropy works. What makes modernism so dangerous is that it has given us countless technologies without reckoning their cost. Vinyl must be a good, because it is a new technology – but the production of vinyl involves the incredibly toxic dioxin. Atomic energy must be a good, because it is a new technology – but in the 63 years since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the ushering in of the atomic age, we have yet to find a safe way to handle the waste. Genetic manipulation must be a good, because it is a new technology – but we have produced alien species unknown to this planet with consequences unforeseen and unlooked-for.

It is the recklessness of modernistic technophilic zeal that has given us the heavily polluted world we know today.

III. Calvinism: This is the Christian heresy wherein free will is removed from Man’s finding of salvation. Grace (a pale, limited grace) is bestowed upon the elect, will he nill he, resulting in the saving of just these elect. Calvinism’s bastard child is the Enlightenment, and its grandchild atheism. Where God has been made odious and onerous, there people will flee Him. Doubtless some hardy Germanic types have found Calvinism the intoxicating and heady brew necessary to stir them to great and glorious achievements for the Kingdom of Heaven. However, for many (most?) others, Calvinism does not solve the age-old problem of theodicy but enshrines it. We depart from the question as to why does God allow evil and we conclude with the statement that God wills evil.

IV. Globalization, aside from its resultant dependence on slavery and forced labour, and apart from its systemic replacement of the person of the local merchant and artisan for the faceless and soulless body of the international and unaccountable corporation, is a modernistic movement that is causing massive pollution of the environment through the endless crisscrossing of oceans and continents by exhaust-emitting mega-vehicles. The only solution to globalization is a restoration of the merchant, artisan, and craftsman, the re-empowerment of the small farmer, and the replacement of the ideal of globalization with the ideal of locavore.

V. The Armageddon Complex: In the world at large disregard for the environment seems to stem from selfishness and greed. In the Christian community, however, this disregard originates from what I call the Armageddon Complex. This is the belief that the end of the world is at hand, with its implicit destruction by hail and fire, etc; in the face of this destruction there is no point to cleaning up the world (or to keeping it clean).

We do not know the day nor the hour of Christ’s return. We may suspect He is coming soon, but to fail to care for our home would be a dooming and a damning of our children to live in a toxic cesspool should He not come. In point of fact, ours is the first civilization to fail to provide for, think of, or work towards the betterment of the next generation.

VI. Compulsory public age-graded education: One of the worst (again modernistic) ideas of the 19^th century was the one that remade the education of our young. It concluded that all children learned alike, at the same age and in the same manner, cloistered away from real life and real-world experience. It concluded that apprenticeships were bankrupt, despite being the primary method of disseminating knowledge for millennia. It concluded that all children would do best divorced from the God-created whole spectrum of ages that is the family at the microcosmic level and society at the macrocosmic. And it concluded that the government and its emissaries the education theorists, pedagogues, and teachers would know better how to raise and educate a child than the parents who knew it best.

VII. Right to Paradise: We appear to believe that we have the right to a disease-free paradise where there is peace and plenty for all, along with all the paradisiacal technological gizmos and devices that are the hallmark of the wealthy. Ours is a jubilant and narcissistic expectation that we are owed everything we desire. We have seemingly fallen heir to the world, and we consume and consume its resources without any sense of the other three-quarters (or more) of the world that has none of the advantages we have. We are astonished and indignant when these rights are encroached, when disease makes a comeback, when oil prices rise, when our peace or our prosperity is in any way lessened. We cannot fathom that bacteria and viruses mutate, that peak oil exists, or that there is sin in the world.

Ours are the “rights” of the delusional maniac, unaware of a fallen world. Ours are the “rights” of the locust, devouring everything in its path. We have no right to Paradise, no right to any Utopia. We can only be given Eden through the sacramental life of the Church, the healing of the Holy Spirit, and the prayers of the saints. And we will only fully enter the garden when God makes it anew.

In the meantime, our avaricious society is a blight upon the earth and a gross inequality that time and the wrath of other nations will iron out. We should accustom ourselves to a simple life before it is made simple for us.

- V.,
Writing for V. & E.

Witnesses, Trees, Brides, and Evolution

I have been working on a commission that has kept me out of the blogosphere. It isn't done, but my son has decided to alter my schedule.

Let us leave the ridiculous and the inconsequential (my more recent posts) and move back the the meaningful.

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The Two Witnesses

And I will grant my two witnesses authority to prophesy for one thousand two hundred sixty days, wearing sackcloth. These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth. And if anyone wants to harm them, fire pours from their mouth and consumes their foes; anyone who wants to harm them must be killed in this manner. They have authority to shut the sky, so that no rain may fall during the days of their prophesying, and they have authority over the waters to turn them into blood, and to strike the earth with every kind of plague, as often as they desire. When they have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up from the bottomless pit will make war on them and conquer them and kill them, and their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city that is prophetically called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified. (Rv.11:3-8)

The Church Fathers wrote that the witnesses at the Eschaton would be Enoch and Elijah, the only two prophets who did not suffer death. At the end of all things, Enoch would prophesy to the Gentiles, and Elijah to the Jews.

As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, "Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead." And the disciples asked him, "Why, then, do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?" He replied, "Elijah is indeed coming and will restore all things; but I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but they did to him whatever they pleased. So also the Son of Man is about to suffer at their hands." Then the disciples understood that he was speaking to them about John the Baptist. (Mt.17:9-13)

Some readers of this text anticipate a return of Elijah in the sense that John the Baptist was a return of the spirit and power of Elijah (Lk.1:16-17) - I think of Michael O'Brien's Father Elijah as an example of this line of thought. However, it seems clear to me that we are looking at a literal return. "Elijah is indeed coming and will restore all things."

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The Tree of Life

The garden of Eden had two trees: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the tree of [eternal] life. The second tree has been revealed to us as the Cross. A couple thoughts.

1. I suspect that, had there been no Fall, the fruit of this tree would have been Eucharist and Communion for Adam and Eve and their children. (Although the mind boggles at Eucharist and Communion without Crucifixion. Speculative theologians welcome.)
   
2. The presence of a tree of [eternal] life argues that immortality is something bestowed on us by the fruits of the tree; it is not natural to Man. Therefore death was present in the Garden, in the animals, in the vegetation. Death was observable to Adam & Eve, and would one day have been experienced by them had they not then eaten of the tree of life. As we know, in the wake of their eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve were barred from eating of the tree of life. [Eternal] death, or hell, is a consequence of the Fall.
3. The only effective Orthodox argument against evolution that I have heard was one that stated the impossibility of Darwinian evolution in a world without death. If there was death (just not spiritual, or eternal, death), evolution remains something that is not alien to Orthodox theology.

Thanks to E. and Vic from Other Side of the Sun for helping me flesh out these ideas.

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Church as Bride of Christ

Just as Eve was formed out of the side of Adam to be the bride of Adam, so the Church has been formed out of the side of Christ, that is, out of blood and water, Eucharist and Baptism, to be the bride of the New Adam.

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Two Thoughts on Evolution

As has been evidenced above, I don't have a problem with evolution. To my mind, it is a perfectly reasonable way to explain the fossil record. Furthermore, I don't have any issues with the idea that Man is descended from apes, with a caveat explored below. I would like to suggest one thing, though, and take issue with another.

First, the suggestion. I don't know that we have had much evolution going on since the time of Adam and Eve. Perhaps a consequence to the Fall is the end of evolution and the beginning of devolution. [Others might here argue that evolution doesn't work too well with the Law of Increasing Entropy. Entropy could be a fancy way of describing the destructive impact of the Fall upon the cosmos. Or, more simply, entropy is a recognition that without God acting to create and maintain, the universe unwinds itself.]

Second, I wish to take issue with the Latin name for man, Homo sapiens. I don't really care what we call the ancestors of Adam & Eve ... they were animals, brutes, like the rest of Creation. However, I see a moment when God takes one (or two) more intelligent brutes from out of all Creation and breathes life and spirit into them. And in that moment God creates a new thing, utterly unique in all the cosmos, something that is both matter and spirit, some one who has both a mortal body and an immortal soul, some one who needs a tree of life in order that the two are never separated. But this new thing, this Man, is not different from the brutes by merit of being wise, or sapient, but through being God-breathed. If there was evolution, then God spoke into the process and created a miracle. I want to replace Homo sapiens with Homo spiritens (or its equivalent - I'm not sure of the Latin).

- V.