by CCW | 12 September 2021 08:00
“Take no thought,” the King James Version following Tyndale puts it. Other translations have the disconcerting phrase “be not careful.” “Be not anxious” is a more modern rendering and reflects the contemporary therapeutic culture in its various nostrums. But are we really to be without thought and without care? Is anxiety simply about our emotional and psychological state of being? No. I think the readings for today speak very directly to the question about how we think about nature and thus ourselves. They counter some of our modern obsessions and preoccupations; in short, our worries are the things in which we over-invest ourselves, thinking about things in the wrong way. Hence Jesus bids us three times to be not anxious as part of another way of thinking about ourselves and the world. It is about seeing the world in God and God in the world.
There are no end of worries and concerns, fears and anxieties that beset our troubled world: concerns about the environment and climate, about the economy and jobs, about adequate housing and food security, let alone the myriad of disturbing preoccupations with respect to identity politics that more and more are about a sense of alienation from the body and nature. For all of these worries and anxieties belong to a common problem: the sense of our disconnect from creation and nature and thus from one another and ourselves, even our bodies. The last two hundred and fifty years or so bear witness to what some have called “the great acceleration” referring to the forms of our technocratic mastery over nature and over ourselves that has altered the very world in which we find ourselves in destructive ways, a world which we sense is increasingly unlivable and threatening. This is to state the obvious.
Yet what is required has very much to do with our thinking, about how we think about nature or creationChanges. If we assume, as many have, that nature is just dead stuff there for us to manipulate and use however we wish, we can only discover that this is ruinous and destructive of the natural world and ourselves. There are, it seems to me, three conflicting modern approaches to the natural world which in their separation from one another contribute to our contemporary dis-ease. One approach is this idea of our complete mastery or dominance of nature that ultimately fails to respect the natural order. It arises out of a sense of our separation from nature that leads to an instrumental manipulation of nature, the consequences of which are now more fully before us. It is, however, an overstatement about ourselves as distinct and separate from the natural world in its externality.
Another modern approach reacts against this manipulative view of nature to assert that we are entirely a part of nature. It collapses our humanity into the natural world but in such a way that negates any kind of moral responsibility for our actions. For if we are simply and entirely part of the natural world, one aspect of the so-called Gaia principle, then everything that we do is simply natural. Thus there can be no accountability for our actions that ultimately affect the natural world.
The third approach is more despairing. Nature is nothing more than a human construct, an illusion since it is just about the words we use. There is a complete disconnect from everything including ourselves. Words, language, are meaningless signifiers in this view, all “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
These approaches in their separation and division only add to our discontent. What is needed is to see how they belong together in an integral way. Human beings in our self-consciousness are at once separate from nature and yet fully part of the created order and our thinking is precisely that which connects us to that order and to one another. Our dominion over nature really means acting in the image of the dominus, in other words, God, whose creative act is all about a care and respect for creation. God speaks the world into being as good in its parts and as a whole, indeed very good. Our evil lies in the disconnect that human sin and pride create which distort and negate the world as existing for God.
“The invisible things of God are made known through the visible things of creation,” as Paul puts it in Romans and one way in which that profound idea of natural theology is known is in ourselves. “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus,” Paul says, by which he means we are to see ourselves as “a new creation” in Christ “by whom the word is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.” He is speaking about an entirely different relation to the world through our relation to Christ. That new creation and new relation is not about the destruction of the world but about its redemption, about its truth and the truth of ourselves as found in God.
This helps us to grasp more clearly the strong words of the Gospel and the deeper meaning of being not anxious. It has entirely to do with the recovery of a thinking perspective about creation and about ourselves. “Behold, the fowls of the air”; “Consider the lilies of the field”, Jesus says, recalling us explicitly to the beauty and wonder of the created world which shows the Providence of God at work in nature. “But seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,” he says. In other words, we are to see the created order in relation to the Creator and Redeemer of that world and thus ourselves as well. This is the proper form of our spiritual freedom which reconnects us to creation and to God. We are not to be in constant flight from nature as something which restricts and restrains us, or as something which frightens and threatens us – both are features that belong to the distorted forms of our modern thinking that result in nihilism, the sense of a meaningless world and our lives as meaningless.
There are gnostic dualistic tendencies in our modern dystopia because we have forgotten the goodness of creation as existing for God and as revealing the glory of God. Jesus’s strong words here are about the recovery of our proper relation to the world and to ourselves through the kingdom of God. It means seeking his will in our lives rather than being buried in ourselves, in our fears and anxieties. To seek the kingdom of God recalls us to creation in God and thus to our Creator and Redeemer and to the rightness and goodness of that order. Thus we are bidden to respect and honour the natural and created world and to find our freedom within its order and being precisely as created by God. In place of despair, there is delight and joy, the counters to all and every fear.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 15, 2021
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