The spiritual life is the cultivation of a healthy relationship with God, man, and creation. Our relationship with each is indispensable. One cannot love one without loving the other. In his first epistle, St. John insists: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ but hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen” (4:20). Similarly, St. Nikephoros taught: “If you don’t love trees, you don’t love God.” He also prophesied that a day was coming when “men will become poor because they will not have a love for trees” — perhaps referring to the world of industry and consumerism. By all means, we must get to work developing the right relationship with God and His creation.
“The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.… The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it”(Genesis 2:8, 15).
Our role on earth is to a be cosmic gardener. We are here to cherish, listen to, and nurture the garden that is creation.
“The heavens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork” (Psalm 18:2,4).
From the stars to the tiniest molecules, God has embedded his logos and rationality. Discovering our place within creation, we have the task of acquiring eyes to see and ears to hear. The Scriptures and Holy Fathers explain that God has filled the universe with His wisdom. Open hearts will discover in creation the Way of God.
“It is ourselves that we must spread under Christ’s feet, not coats or lifeless branches or shoots of trees, matter which wastes away and delights the eye only for a few brief hours…let us spread ourselves like coats under his feet … let us offer not palm branches but the prizes of victory to the conqueror of death…wave the spiritual branches of the soul” (St. Andrew of Crete).
Give up your life to worship. Give up your time to pray. Give up your ambitions to follow. Give up everything the world has taught you to value, for the sake of serving our Lord Jesus Christ. Today we declare war against the world and its web of lies and fantasies, plunging into death, and rising up into life.
“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer” (Wendell Berry).
The day began with Mass in the biting cold, the moon above us, and the cattle lowing outside the chapel. It was peaceful … and wild. After a warming cup of coffee, we gathered by the barn to feed the pigs, tend to the sheep, and gather eggs. The day carried on as adults and children together worked the dirt, pausing only to pray the Angelus, heads bowed, and hearts focused on Our Blessed Lady. After work was done, it was time for Compline, and at last a refreshing meal by the flickering camp fire. Time changes when you spend consecutive days under the open sky. Eternity penetrates mundanity. The earth is charged with wonder.
Greetings in Christ! I regret that I have not kept up with the blog. It has been a busy past few weeks. We had a profound retreat last week at the Ave Maria Farm and I will write up reflections about it soon. Lord willing, I hope to get back to a normal routine now and to continue the discussion about living in modernity. In the meantime, I want to recommend the following article: “Screen Time is Stolen Time.” The endeavor to unplug is far more consequential than we suspect. In the meantime, what a wonderful surprise to find, as we rip our hearts away from the screens, that all around us is a beautiful world.
“The positive effect of screens, even when employed for educational purposes, is either negligible or non-detectable; the damage is huge” (Andrey Mir).
“The time spent with screens in early age is simply “stolen time” from kids’ development. Adults usually tolerate the waste of their time on gadgets, as they think they can compensate for this loss through later efforts. It does not work this way for children. Early cognitive development heavily relies on the plasticity of the young brain. ‘The great periods of brain plasticity . . . do not last forever,’ writes Desmurget. ‘Once closed, they can no longer be resuscitated. What has been spoiled is forever lost'” (Andrey Mir).
A friend of mine just introduced me to this wonderful music group. It says pretty much everything on its own. This is what true Christian culture looks like, neither antiquated nor unrealistic nor overly romantic. Perhaps it is romantic, in the true since, as the word “romance” stems from a deep longing to return to Holy Rome as it once was, that is, to Christendom. Contrary to the gospel of the Spirit of our Times, this is the life the Church creates on earth and what God offers to those who chose to pursue wholesome living.
How do we get back to it? Can we step away from the machine? Life will never be perfect, but it doesn’t have to be so barren. We can, for instance, start by turning off our screens and being families again, eating less and focusing on food we can grow with our hands, and recreating Christian neighborhoods — the original meaning of the word “parish”. Whether or not Western Civilization can experience such life again, jettisoned by so many eager progressives, it is, after all, the process that counts.
I think John Senior offers sound enough advice:
“It is time to go back to those conditions in which human beings can grow again… Simplify, as Thoreau said, not by changing governments — a change of collars on a dirty neck; not by denouncing IBM, Communism, the Catholic hierarchy, the Rosicrucians and Jews; but in a single, honest, unremembered act, as Wordsworth said, of kindness and of love. As the first significant act in the change of heart, really — not symbolically — smash the television set, then sit down by the fire with the family and perhaps some friends and just converse; talk alone, even one night a week, will cut your use of energy, and love will grow. Don’t force its growth. The hearth, like good soil, does its work invisibly, in secret, and slowly. After a long time beneath the hearth of a quiet family life, green shoots of vigorous poverty appear; you have become, in a small way, poor. If several families, sharing this humble secret, buy old houses on the same slum block and fix them up, they will have restored a kind of Auburn right in the midst of their ruined city and begun the restoration of that ordinary, healthy, human thing, the neighborhood” (Restoration of Christian Culture).
“If you want to live a truly Christian life, you must inhabit the earth in a way that is mindful of the whole of creation — humanity in particular, but also the entirety of non-human creation, spiritual and material…The life in Christ entails a consciously holistic, deeply responsible approach to everything and everyone God has made” (Peter Bouteneff).
“But that’s so backwards, right?” There is a widespread assumption in modern society that stepping away from so-called “progress” means becoming “backwards.” This attitude is utterly illogically. The very descriptions are subjective and arbitrary. They imply that fads are positive in nature, and tradition negative. It is as ridiculous as claiming “everything new is good!” Imagine one lemming saying to another, “Run forward! Forward is good!” In a spirit of progressivism, the two lemmings run forward zealously, right off of the face of a cliff. There was nothing positive about their forwardness.
“Disorder in the sensible will echo with disorder in the spiritual” (Fr. Francis Bethel 199).
Every Christian’s home should become a “little church” — imbued with beauty, order, wholesome rituals, and focus as in the Divine Liturgy. The environment in the home shapes the kind of people we become, whether in worldliness or in kingdom-mindedness. A wholesome atmosphere should make the home a sanctuary to everyone who walks in through the front door.
