This makes sense. If men and women are careless and promiscuous in the use of generative sexuality, how could that not be felt in nature as a whole. When a culture feels its most important right is to be able to abort the growing life of their offspring, how could nature itself not mourn and wither?
Thanks for this piece. I think for many of our generation, how to fit nature or creation into our spirituality is a central question: certainly it was for me, and left me seeking for a long time, before discovering Orthodoxy; as I think was the case for Paul Kingsnorth and likely many others: how to view nature, how it relates to the divine, and so on. More people could be brought in, I think, if this need was answered more often or more directly (you're doing your part!).
For instance, I attend a men's group in my town, of homesteading types. All of them say nature is of key importance to their idea of spirituality. Two years ago, all were seekers or nonreligious; now half are Christian (of different stripes). The others still don't see that Christianity has anything (good) to say about nature, and it's a huge hang-up for them.
Dynamite stuff Michael, as usual. In my Substack Desert and Fire, a central theme is incarnations mysticism, which insists God did not visit the world as an emissary, He wed it. Christ did not hover above the dust, He ground it into His heels. He was born not among ideals but animals, straw, and afterbirth. This means the world is not a backdrop to redemption but its very stage and instrument. In the flesh of the world, the Word continues His descent.
Your reflection here, rich with the lives of saints and beasts, bears witness to what the mystics have long known: that grace reweaves the torn veil between spirit and matter, heaven and earth. When the saint is healed, the earth is healed. When man repents, the soil breathes. “The whole creation groans,” Paul wrote, but not without hope. It waits for the sons and daughters of God to emerge from their tombs of ego and dominion.
This is why the saints kissed trees and blessed wolves and fasted until even the elements recognized them. Their dominion was not a claim but a kenosis. Their authority flowed from surrender. These men and women did not escape the world in pursuit of God, they sank deeper into it, until even the otters and bears perceived the Imago Dei burning like a coal in their chest.
Incarnational mysticism insists that holiness is not an abstraction from the real, but a transfiguration of it. That to walk in the Spirit is not to float above creation but to see it rightly, lit from within, as if each leaf and stone whispered Christ’s name in secret. And when we love rightly… when we pray not just with our lips but with our limbs, with our food, our fasting, our land, our labor, then even the wild things remember Eden. Then the curse begins to reverse.
As you so rightly imply, the ecological crisis is not simply a moral lapse. It is a theological heresy. It is the refusal to see the world as sacramentum, a veiled grace, groaning not for our management but for our sanctity. Our culture of exploitation is the inverse of asceticism. It takes without reverence, consumes without thanksgiving. But the saints teach us another way. They show us how to live as if the veil were already torn, because it is.
It's too bad that the self-appointed saints of the left won't recognize the acknowledged saints of Christianity as the true saints of creation preservation. They even deny that we and the natural world were created by God, instead believing that we are the result of random collision of atoms in an undirected chaotic burst of energy. If their theories were true, it wouldn't matter if, in future iterations, we ceased to be ordered or beautiful. Balance and harmony are only temporary anyway.
This makes sense. If men and women are careless and promiscuous in the use of generative sexuality, how could that not be felt in nature as a whole. When a culture feels its most important right is to be able to abort the growing life of their offspring, how could nature itself not mourn and wither?
Thanks for this piece. I think for many of our generation, how to fit nature or creation into our spirituality is a central question: certainly it was for me, and left me seeking for a long time, before discovering Orthodoxy; as I think was the case for Paul Kingsnorth and likely many others: how to view nature, how it relates to the divine, and so on. More people could be brought in, I think, if this need was answered more often or more directly (you're doing your part!).
For instance, I attend a men's group in my town, of homesteading types. All of them say nature is of key importance to their idea of spirituality. Two years ago, all were seekers or nonreligious; now half are Christian (of different stripes). The others still don't see that Christianity has anything (good) to say about nature, and it's a huge hang-up for them.
Dynamite stuff Michael, as usual. In my Substack Desert and Fire, a central theme is incarnations mysticism, which insists God did not visit the world as an emissary, He wed it. Christ did not hover above the dust, He ground it into His heels. He was born not among ideals but animals, straw, and afterbirth. This means the world is not a backdrop to redemption but its very stage and instrument. In the flesh of the world, the Word continues His descent.
Your reflection here, rich with the lives of saints and beasts, bears witness to what the mystics have long known: that grace reweaves the torn veil between spirit and matter, heaven and earth. When the saint is healed, the earth is healed. When man repents, the soil breathes. “The whole creation groans,” Paul wrote, but not without hope. It waits for the sons and daughters of God to emerge from their tombs of ego and dominion.
This is why the saints kissed trees and blessed wolves and fasted until even the elements recognized them. Their dominion was not a claim but a kenosis. Their authority flowed from surrender. These men and women did not escape the world in pursuit of God, they sank deeper into it, until even the otters and bears perceived the Imago Dei burning like a coal in their chest.
Incarnational mysticism insists that holiness is not an abstraction from the real, but a transfiguration of it. That to walk in the Spirit is not to float above creation but to see it rightly, lit from within, as if each leaf and stone whispered Christ’s name in secret. And when we love rightly… when we pray not just with our lips but with our limbs, with our food, our fasting, our land, our labor, then even the wild things remember Eden. Then the curse begins to reverse.
As you so rightly imply, the ecological crisis is not simply a moral lapse. It is a theological heresy. It is the refusal to see the world as sacramentum, a veiled grace, groaning not for our management but for our sanctity. Our culture of exploitation is the inverse of asceticism. It takes without reverence, consumes without thanksgiving. But the saints teach us another way. They show us how to live as if the veil were already torn, because it is.
It's too bad that the self-appointed saints of the left won't recognize the acknowledged saints of Christianity as the true saints of creation preservation. They even deny that we and the natural world were created by God, instead believing that we are the result of random collision of atoms in an undirected chaotic burst of energy. If their theories were true, it wouldn't matter if, in future iterations, we ceased to be ordered or beautiful. Balance and harmony are only temporary anyway.
Beautiful reflection Michael, thank you. I can't speak highly enough of "Sacred Alaska".