20090301 Forgiveness, Stewardship and Mother Earth
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www.orthoanalytika.org
Part I: A world made in Love rewards forgiveness with happiness (now and forever).
Part II: Kyivan notions of stewardship were informed by its agrarian paganism; what is ours informed by?
Part I:
Living according to the Law of Love
Romans 13:11-14:1
St. Matthew 6: 14-21
People still mystify me. If you ask them what it is that they truly desire, most will tell you that they desire happiness. This part makes sense: we were not designed for fulfillment and love, not for misery and hopelessness. We were created for loving fulfillment. The part that mystifies me is that these same people who deeply desire happiness, do nothing to bring it about. Worse yet, they act in ways that virtually guarantee their misery. I can kind of understand it for people who don’t know what it takes to be happy: they might be excused for their failure. Like mice in a maze, hungry for the cheese they smell; they strike out in different directions, but the dead-ends they find leave them only hungry, tired, and frustrated. The world is full of frustrated people.
But we are not like them: as Christians we not only smell the cheese, we know exactly how to get it. God has not hidden happiness in a maze (the world does this): He has made it very clear. As we learned last week, He made this world in love and to run according to this love. We are a part of this creation. To be happy, we need only learn to love; to submit our lives to love; to become love. How hard is that? A world made in love will naturally reward this. It certainly could be much worse.
A Brief Aside: Systems of Lies and Selfishness
[Can you imagine a system that was based on something else? One that rewarded something other than love? I doubt that you have to work hard to imagine such a system: most of you are familiar with communism. Communism created a huge bureaucracy that ran on fear and lies. To get ahead, you had to tell lies and seek alliances with powerful people; people who were powerful in part because of who they knew and in part because lying came so easily to them. Historians describe how Soviet citizens developed a kind of double-mindedness in order to preserve a little bit of sanity and honor. Devotion to love and truth gets you martyred in situations like that. Some of our predecessors here fled their homes at the first opportunity in hopes of finding something better. I pity those that did not make it out. Communism did more than destroy the economies of the former Soviet Union, it created a vast moral wasteland that will take generations to correct. High levels of abortion, alcoholism, adultery & divorce are just part of the communist legacy; the list of symptoms goes on and on.
But communism is not the only system that rewards something other than love. The maze we have built in our own country rewards some some virtues that are derived from love, like hard work and sacrifice; but it also promises to reward false virtues like selfishness, consumerism, and hedonism. Capitalism and democracy are the most efficient ways to organize production and government, but if they are separated from love they will still lead to misery. The same goes for our marriages, our families, and our parish: if they are built on something other than love then they may survive, but they will not bring what we really desire. Staying in unloving relationships adopting the same kind of pathologies and double-mindedness that communist did; and the legacies of living in such systems also take years of constant effort to heal.
We need only look at troubled and broken marriages, workplaces with unhealthy environments, and communities with poisoned cultures to understand the point I am trying to make: institutions that are not based on love do not bring lasting joy. They may bring other things, like the redistribution of wealth [communism], fully stocked grocery stores [capitalism], children [marriages/families], and beautiful churches [communities/parishes], but they cannot bring real happiness.]
The Real World and the Rule of Forgiveness
So while I can understand why some people spend a lot of energy that takes them further and further away from the joy they claim to want, I cannot understand why Christians do this. God is very clear and very specific about what we need to do if we want to be happy. He tells us how to bring joy to ourselves, our families, and our communities: we must live a life of love. Last week He told us about charity and how we must care for those in need. This week He gives us detailed instructions about three more things: forgiveness, fasting, and investing. As today is Forgiveness Sunday, let me focus on it.
Happiness requires that we forgive people. Salvation requires that we forgive people. You cannot live a life in love if you do not forgive. So why aren’t we doing it? This is what I meant when I began my homily by saying that people mystify me; I do not understand the disconnect. Let me make the puzzle clear: We want to be happy. Happiness requires love. Love requires forgiveness. But we refuse to forgive. As a result we cannot love and you cannot be happy.
As a teacher, I have wracked my brain trying to understand which part we do not understand, but I can’t. I daresay that we understand the logic, but that it has not sunk in; love remains something that we choose to do rather than who we are. But as long as that is the case, as long as love remains one of several reasonable responses then happiness will be similarly fickle. If we can honestly chose to love one person but not another; or if we can honestly chose to forgive one person and not another; then we remain part-time Christians. If we can do this, then love for us is like an accessory. But like the baptismal Cross we wear about our necks, love has not been given to us as an accessory, worn only when it matches the clothes we are wearing. It was given to us in order to become the center and basis of our lives, just as it is of the God in whose image we are made. If we do not learn to do this, then we will not be happy. Not now, not ever, and not “forever and ever”.
We must learn to forgive. If we do not, then we must admit that we do not really care about happiness; [we must admit] that we are selfish and vain; and [we must admit] that we prefer gnawing on poison misery than the Body and Blood of Christ. I am not saying that it is easy. People have hurt us. Some of this pain may even have been intentionally inflicted. Overcoming this will require effort. But we have to start now. Hate does not become us; spite deforms us and makes us ugly. Moreover, its poison threatens the health of our relations and this community. We must let go of it and forgive. We must let go of it and love. Unlike spite, love will heal and beautify us.
God knows this is difficult, and as Our Great Teacher, He has given assignments that will help us gain mastery. One of these is our daily prayer rule. Repeated often enough, the prayers in our Prayer Book will teach us how to forgive. For instance, we cannot say; “Lord, save and have mercy on those who hate me and deal wrongly with me by doing me harm and do not permit them to come to condemnation because of me, as sinner” on a regular basis without it changing and healing our hearts. That is why Orthodox Christians are supposed to say it and similar prayers every morning. Today, we will complete another assignment our Great Teacher has given us: after Liturgy we will perform the Rite of Mutual Forgiveness. Each of you will forgive and ask forgiveness of everyone else. This is not empty ritual: it is one of the many things that we do to become happy.
After all, we want to be happy don't we?
Part II: Stewardship, Mother Earth, and the Invisible Hand
It’s been a real blessing to teach a course at seminary this semester. It’s not just that I love teaching no matter what the context (I do); it is just much more satisfying to work with people who share the same assumptions and goals I do, and to do so in a forum where we can actually talk about these and work out their implications. FWIW, I am pretty sure that my students at the Naval War College (where I just finished teaching) shared many of the same assumptions and goals as I, but the secular setting demanded that these be left untouched. This was completely appropriate and enjoyable in its own way, but it really is nice to be able to talk about the most important things (both eternal and local) with beautiful people, and to do so with undisguised love and delight. This is one of the many reasons I love our seminary of St. Sophia’s.
Earth, the mother of Rus’
One of the topics of study this past week was to explore paganism in pre-Christian Rus’ and how it informed (and perhaps continues to inform) Kyivan Spirituality. The data are pretty spotty, so we risk learning more about the historians themselves than about the people of pagan Rus’ (always a risk when good data are rare; in the IC I often learned a lot more about other analysts than I did about Islamist insurgency), but reliable historians (e.g. Fedotov) suggest that Rusyn paganism was heavily informed by her agrarianism. Mother Earth was less a deity than an integrated part of the pattern of life. While the Rusyn pagans had other “deities” such as Perun, Mokosh, Stribog, Dajbog, rusalki, and domovoi, there was less an established pantheon than local expressions of a grounded and local pantheism. Water and forest spirits were important, but the over-riding strength of nature was in the earth and her soil. Spirituality was not directed to gods above, but toward the ground that sustains and enfolds. This was the loam that accepted the seed of Christ, and you have to know that it earthiness affected the nature of the harvest.
We have to remember that Christianity takes on local expressions as it baptizes local cultures: it is imperial only in the sense that it draws out the best of what went before and fills in the empty spots, and draws it all toward the light. Kyivan Spirituality thus took on a special folk/earthy character (more so as you moved down the social ladder and away from the direct influences of Greece and the Northlands). I think we can assume that the Christians of Kyiv had a natural appreciation for God’s creation and man’s place in it. The stewardship they felt toward the earth was that of the husbandman and nurturer. Natural affinity for the soil was less a vestigial remnant of paganism than a stunted remnant of life before the fall; restored, ennobled, and sanctified by Christ’s Incarnation and Resurrection. Kyivan Rus’ had its own temptations to deal with, but at least in this the Church had something it could work from.
The Invisible Hand that Guides Us
What about us here in America? What is the culture that Christ is baptizing here? In particular, what kind of ingrained attitude towards the earth do we give the Church to work with? How do approach stewardship? I’m afraid that the answer is not so flattering. There are many parts of our culture that are easily baptized (we are a post-Christian nation, after all!), but this is one that needs some serious work. Even the best among us think of stewardship in terms of “sustainability” and “do no harm”; the rest of us approach it as a manager does his factory and workers, a master - his plantation, or (the most popular approach) a consumer - his grocery store. Some visionaries (e.g. PETA) recognize how unhealthy this is for us and our world, but without the Church/Truth to guide them, their sentimental relativism makes them less true prophets than dangerous activists of absurdity.
Thank God, the solution to this problem does not need to be created from scratch. Many of us have spent less than a generation or two isolated from the earth. Our culture retains hints of traditional agrarian values that can be drawn out and augmented with those which many of our newer immigrants have brought. We may not remember how to plow a field, but most remember how to till a garden. We can also educate ourselves. Reading Christian authors such as Vigen Guroian, Wendell Berry, and Rod Dreher (and meditating on Genesis and the Psalms) may not turn us into true stewards, but it can at least help us to see and feel how much we have lost. Perhaps then we can begin the difficult transformation from consumers to husbandmen.
Things I’m working on
In addition to reading Guroian, Berry, and Dreher, I have been trying to nudge my habits in a healthier direction. I’m new at this, so suggestions are welcome:
Replacing almost all of our lights with CFL’s and LED’s and opening areas up to more sunlight. If I were building from scratch, I would set up the lighting to rely exclusively on sunlight and LED’s (or whatever technology replaces it... bioluminescence?). This would mean darker evenings, but perhaps submitting our own biorhythms to that of the earth’s rotation might not be such a bad thing! It would also require almost no energy. Replacement style LED light bulbs use 1-2 watts, and while they are not bright, I find them to be bright enough. Hopefully mass production will bring the cost and down and the quality of the light (which tends to be blueish) up. [Yes, I really do dream of building a comfy cabin “off the grid”... as long as it had internet!]
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