Orthodoxy & Creation
Why Support the Orthodox Fellowship
of
the Transfiguration?
With so many worthy causes within Orthodoxy, why should anyone support the Orthodox Fellowship of the Transfiguration?
This question was asked after a recent talk on Orthodoxy and the environment. "Why,” asked one newly ordained priest, “with a dozen other Orthodox organizations, each addressing a different issue and each seeking funds, should anyone support the Orthodox Fellowship of the Transfiguration – especially when there is so much poverty and many other pressing issues around?"
Orthodox Christians care for the earth and its environment because it is God’s creation – not ours, because we seek to obey God’s commands, and because we are told through the Scriptures to provide a right care for what God has placed into our care. The very word “Orthodox” translates as right worship or right praise. If we strive to honor God rightly, it follows that we must be willing to obey what God has mandated in His holy books. The implication is simple and blunt: a right relationship to God’s creation is fundamental for Orthodox Christians because right worship and right relationships are at the core of our faith. There are several ways to understand this. Here are four perspectives that offer some further insights.
God’s creation is the context of all issues
Our first duty as Orthodox Christians is to honor and obey God. Issues of poverty, pollution, disease, homelessness and crime all derive from and are consequences of a prior failure to deal rightly with our social and natural environment. It is no accident that God's first commands to Adam while in the Garden all deal with a right relationship to God and His creation. These commands are foundational to right Christian living.
If we disregard God’s commands about creation, we declare through our actions that we have forgotten God. This may be unintentional, but it creates a condition in which we passively allow the assumptions of the secular culture to order and shape our lives. As we submit to the culture of consumerism, materialism, and individualism, we also submit to a new captivity, not to Muslims or communists as has been historically forced upon various Orthodox peoples, but in this situation, we are willingly submitting to an ungodly and degrading culture. If we accept as normative that commercial forces may shape our lives, we are forced to accept standards and behavior that are out of harmony with God. Then, whether we like it or not, we also fall away from the holy principles of the Orthodox Tradition that encourage a more charitable, frugal and even ascetic way of life – requirements for a vigorous and fulfilling spiritual life. In other words, as Jesus teaches, “You cannot serve God and mammon.”
If there is to be any healing of our society and its culture, Orthodox Christians must provide a right teaching through an example of right living. This begins by aligning ourselves with the commands in Scripture and the principles of Church theology. Vigilance, ascesis and charity, more commonly termed prayer, fasting and almsgiving, are keys to a whole Orthodox way of life.
Through Christ’s Sacrifice a New Earth has been born. It falls to us, as faithful Christians, to enter into Christ’s healing and salvific work by bringing His new earth to fulfillment. Is it right for us to abdicate the cosmic dimensions to Christ's purpose? The Church through our patriarchs is calling us to reconnect to a right relationship to creation. This restoration is an essential requirement to an effective ministry to the sick, foreign missions or youth activities because all ministries require a sound foundation on the rock of Christ. Yet this foundation is also a vision of the sacred presence of Christ in all things. Without this foundation in Christ “everywhere present and filling all things” in creation, efforts in these secondary areas will falter and not be nearly as successful because they do not engage the root issue.
Healing the earth is the preeminent issue for our time
The patriarchs and the large majority of Church hierarchs are speaking today in one voice. They call us to repent for how we have abused and misused the earth. War and politics may grab headline attention in the news, but physicians and scientists tell us that pollution of the environment, climate change and persistent toxic chemicals will exert a far greater influence on our future. History affirms this sense. Of fifteen major historical civilizations, thirteen fell because they abused the land. Not one fell only because of war or external threats.
It is widely accepted that a healthy family is a building block for a healthy parish. However we cannot have healthy families nor healthy parishes without a healthy environment. It is fundamental therefore to take action to bring our lives into alignment with God’s commands in regard to creation. This is not environmentalism; this is the practice and path to a whole Orthodox way of life.
As we read the Fathers and saints, it is clear that a whole Orthodoxy is not merely a Sunday-go-to-Liturgy imitation of Protestant suppositions about church. For most people, a Sunday filled with good “wheat seeds” planted through the blessings of Christ is not sufficient to counter six days of “weed seeds” and tares together with the many assaults on the soul and spiritual formation that come through our hedonistic and coarsening culture. This emphasis upon a right relationship to the earth is so important that in the Book of Revelation, the question of how we treat the earth is the only criterion that the Apostle John cites in how we will face the Judgement (cf. Rev. 11:18).
Environmental pollution is sin made visible
The Scriptures declare repeatedly that sin is an offence, not only against God and neighbor, but also the created world, infecting immediately the individual, and then spreading pain and darkness to the larger society and all the earth. In the world of the Fathers, Christians understood that sin attacks us through the world, from the flesh and by the devil. In our day, those threats remain as powerful as ever. Now however we must declare a new form of sin. This new genre of sin emerges because of the way sinful presumptions have been institutionalized into the structure and design of society. We experience this as we use energy systems that pollute the air and water, in transportation in which the exhaust from our cars and trucks harms our neighbors, or in the design of a health care system that is so commercialized that charity scarcely remains in the system. This new form of sin comes about as we participate under the duress of a system that is out of harmony with God. The implication is that we are not only fallen, but we are participating in the deepening of the fall.
Saint Symeon the New Theologian tells us that at the creation, the pristine earth was formed and then human beings were created. In the re-creation and renewal, which follows from the Incarnation and Cross of our Lord Jesus, he says that the human being must first be restored and then the creation follows (cf. Rom. 8:19-22).
Jesus Christ shows us how we are crucial in this restoration. As He embraced the cross, so he calls us to follow him and to take up his cross as our own. Without the cross there is no self-denial, no asceticism, and so no avoidance of the materialism and consumerism that is destroying the environment and degrading our culture.
If we are to make any headway in spreading Orthodoxy in the contemporary world, parishes need to provide an example of whole Christian living. At the heart of the life of the Orthodox Christian is the cross. As we accept Jesus Christ, we must also accept his cross. The cross is not only the doorway to eternal life, it is also the key to a right relationship to our neighbor and creation. The cross means that for the good of all, we enter into Christ's holy sacrifice. As Saint John Chrysostom taught, we are to take from the earth according to our needs; not according to our greeds. Through Divine Providence, the earth provides for each person's needs, but creation was never meant to satisfy all our collective greeds. Through the asceticism of the cross we must learn to live with what is essential and respect the natural limits of the earth.
As followers of the cross of Christ, we must not crucify the creation through the unrestrained indulgence of our passions. As participants in the grace of the cross, we must realize the good life, not through the false path of the acquisition of creature comforts, but by the true way of the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, as Saint Seraphim of Sarov teaches us.
We are called by God to replenish the earth. In Genesis the seeds of earth healing are planted as God tells Adam to “dress and keep” the earth. Saint Basil explained that this means raising creation to its full cosmological potential. This is the priestly duty of each person: to care for what God has entrusted into our care and keeping and to raise it back to Him who created it. But without an intentional and thoughtful acceptance of the cross, there is no earth healing and there is no cosmic healing
The Transfiguration of Creation engages the modern predicament
Jesus Christ and the whole Orthodox tradition call us to transfigure the earth. In our day, the Orthodox Church is assaulted and weakened by the forces of modernity. Secularism and pluralism infect parishioner thinking and leave members vulnerable to all manner of materialist and consumerist temptations. Young people sometimes leave the Church because they fail to see the relevance of the Church to the modern condition.
As faithful Orthodox Christians, we can surely address these problems, but we must restore a spiritual vision and holy striving to fortify the individual parishioner and make transforming spiritual action fundamental to parish life. All other issues, including poverty and suffering in many forms, are consequences of our wrong relationship to the good creation. These are only different faces to the sinful and even blasphemous attitude which has lodged itself into the heart of many Orthodox parishes, and that considers the environment “just one more issue among many.” While we may know that this is a false belief, until we face and acknowledge that sin and cast it from within our midst and even from our own hearts, all of our efforts to help the poor will not be of much use, because they will not adequately address the root problem.
Concern for the environment – because it addresses the question of how should we live – brings the issues of spiritual formation into focus and allows each person to play a role in the healing of their neighborhood and the earth. No other entity in the Orthodox Church is charged with this task. For our day no other issue is as important for the future of our children and the well being of our earth.
For all of the foregoing reasons, how can we conclude anything but that a right relationship to God's creation is crucial to the health and spiritual vigor of the Church. And further, we are not just addressing some new issue. Rather, we seek to submit ourselves to those commands which God mandated in the beginning, and through them to reintegrate ourselves rightly into the creation which is the context of all issues.
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With all this as perspective, if we return to the original question, “Is an Orthodox concern for the earth important?” how can we do anything but seek repentance for how we have indulged in the decadence and spiritual forgetfulness of the consumer culture that institutionalizes pain, poverty, and pollution.
As a final note, we should take a clue from Saint Benedict of Nursia, the founder of western monasticism, and his "Rule" for monastics. Rule number ten declares that monks should treat the implements of the barnyard with the same holy regard as the implements of the altar. This direction implies that everywhere and in every thing we are dealing with the veiled fabric and person of our Lord Jesus Christ who with the Holy Spirit is "everywhere present and fills all things." If we can apply this principle to all the affairs of our life, then we will begin the journey to a respectful way of life that honors the creation and obeys the commandments given to us from the beginning.
