Relationship with Creation - Berry & Wirzba

I thought it would be helpful to share a few words from Norman Wirzba & Wendell Berry’s book, The Art of Commonplace (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003), as we consider the gift of creation and our role within it. All of the following quotes come from this book.

Though more of us than ever before live a life of luxury and ease, fewer of us can claim that our lives are permeated with peace and joy. The frantic, stressful striving going on all around us indicates that we are profoundly lost. We seem unable to ask with any seriousness or depth the question of what all our striving is ultimately for. . . the source of help cannot come from within ourselves for “it is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are” . . . Our fundamental mission is that we have presumed to be the authors of ourselves and our destinies, and thus have forgotten or denied that we are a part of “a great coauthorship in which we are all collaborating with God and with nature in the making of ourselves and one another.” We can only become what we truly are by acknowledging that we do not exist by, from, and for ourselves. . . Once we have forgotten or denied our biological kinship with the earth and its inhabitants, it is hardly an accident that so much of human spiritual life is premised on an escape from rather than an affirmation of this life.” (ix)

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world – to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity – our own capacity for life – that is stifled by our arrogant assumption; the creation itself is stifled. . . We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. . . we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it. (20)

The divine mandate to use the world justly and charitably, then, defines every person’s moral predicament as that of a steward. But this predicament is hopeless and meaningless unless it produces an appropriate discipline: stewardship. And stewardship is hopeless and meaningless unless it involves long-term courage, perseverance, devotion, and skill. This skill is not to be confused with any accomplishment or grace of spirit or of intellect. It has to do with everyday proprieties in the practical use and care of created things – with “right livelihood.” (299)

To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want. (304)