Making Peace with the Rest of Creation Metropolitan Anthony Bloom

        

Metropolitan Anthony Bloom of Sourouzh

When, we speak of reconciliation, we imply a new relationship, and a relationship which is truly new between two conflicting parties, or between a person deeply offended or even superficially offended and the offender. This implies the recognition on the part of the offender of his responsibility; it implies also on the part of the offended party greatness of heart, readiness to accept the humility of the person who recognizes his fault and an open exchange that makes it possible not to restore an old relationship, but to create a new one: Lo, I make all things new.

When we think of reconciliation we always think in terms of making our peace with our neighbour, or between social classes, political parties, nations; but there is more to it than a reconciliation between human beings. If you look at the Bible, you will see that the first moment when a rift appears is the moment when the first man, the first couple turn away from God and find themselves separated from Him. A French writer, a Protestant of France called Roland de Pury said in one of his writings, 'The sin of our first parents consisted in the fact that they turned their back on God to look elsewhere for fulfilment. And the moment they had turned their back on God there was no God for them, and all that was left to them was to die because God alone was a source of life’.

The second step in rift in Creation was the moment when Cain murdered Abel. And the Bible is so tragically clear when it says that God says to Cain, The earth is clamouring, is crying for the blood of Abel that was spilled in it. It was a tragedy for the earth to drink this blood; it was not that the earth was polluted, it was horror on the part of the earth that such thing could have happened.

And later, there is another step in which the visible creation is involved in human sin, in human evil; after the Flood, the Lord says to Noah and those who were saved together with him: Now all creatures are delivered unto you; they will be food to you and you will be their terror...

Isn't that the situation in which we live? An earth that has been deeply wounded by the first murder

Icon Mosaic of the "First Murder" 
 Sicily, Italy (1180-90)

who cries, still cries for the blood shed upon it, and also the way in which all creatures fear man who has become the main predator and a predator that is particularly dangerous, particularly monstrous, because in older world predators are a minority while the human race has increased ever more and is now not only in capability of murder, but in numbers of murderers remain the fear of whole creation.

And then, are we surprised that Saint Paul in one of his Epistles says that the whole Creation is groaning in the expectation of the revelation of the children of God. The whole Creation is groaning for the moment when men, humanity will come to its senses, when humanity, instead of being a band of predators, will turn again to God, find its place in the Divine Providence and play its role.

And now, if we ask ourselves what the role of man is, we have a passage in the Bible that could enlighten us and which we read always, century after century, wrongly. When God says, — and I am quoting words, I am not going beyond them, — that man has dominion over all the creatures of the earth, what does it mean? Century after century we have understood 'dominion’ as the power to dominate. Is that the meaning of the word 'dominion’? Dominion comes from the Latin word 'Dominus' which means the Lord, the head of a family or of a household; but does it mean to be a tyrant? Does it mean to dominate and to overpower? Certainly not. It means to be a wise householder, it means to be a wise husbandman, it means to be one to whom the Creation is entrusted so that it can grow to all the fullness to which it is called. This is the role of the Dominus, of the Master; to be a Master does not mean to be a tyrant; it means to be a guide.

Now, if that be the case, it is clear that we, human, have failed all along the line; failed God by turning away from Him and looking for our fulfilment, our place in creation apart from Him. We have failed Him by the shedding of blood, by the murderous hatred of one another, by treating one another as predatory beasts treat other races. We are the only race in Creation that destroy itself, and since the first blood was shed, the whole history of mankind is made of bloodshed; the earth is still crying not only for the blood of Abel spilled by Cain, but for the blood of all the Abels of the world, indeed, all the Cains of the world spilled by other Cains. And again, we are still confronted with the situation in which the whole creation is in terror of us because we are beasts of prey. And endowed now not with claws, not with fangs, but with the power to destroy indiscriminately and by the thousands what God has created with such love.

And so, our calling is to come to our senses, and it is not only a matter of coming to terms with one another, but to come to terms with our vocation, singly and collectively, to become masters not as overlords, but as guides, and indeed, Saint Maximus the Confessor tells us that man was created of two natures as it were, rooted in two worlds, on the one hand rooted in the created world, the material world, but also rooted by vocation, but also by the breathing into him of the breath of God to the spiritual world, and that his vocation is to grow to such fullness that he can guide all creatures to become beyond their materiality citizens and partakers of the world of the Spirit. I think we must understand very concretely, very precisely the words of Saint Paul when he says that one day will come when God shall be all in all; not be present in the few, but have filled all things.

But then, again, when we look at the world around us, isn't it terrifying to see that the only reason why all things are not fulfilled in the way in which the sacraments are fulfilled inspiring to God, that the only reason is that we stand between all things created and God, while we should be the bridge, the teachers, the masters, the leaders, the ones who are the High-Priests of this created world to make it, all of it, sacred and holy. And how terrifying it is to think of the way in which we treat things created as though they have no vocation, no calling, as though they were pure, or rather dead materiality. I remember asking a young theologian how he would define a tree and his answer was, A tree? Building material.... Isn't that horrible? And isn't it horrible to think that to us bread is expendable, that we eat more than we need and throw away what is left over not even thinking that we can feed birds with it, animals with it. Isn't it a monstrous way in which we treat the animals which

are entrusted to us? Isn't it monstrous that we treat the whole created world as beast of prey instead of treating it as people whose responsibility was to set them free by becoming ourselves free men of God, and make them enter into the Kingdom of God. We are to create a City of Man which is coextensive to a City of God; a City of Man of which the first citizen could be the man Jesus Christ, true man and true God.

Is that the City of Man which we are creating? And beyond it, is that a world which we are and we do not recognize ourselves as guilty; we try to readjust things. Yes, we are aware that if we continue with the humanity may perish, but that is not a problem; let it perish if that is all there is to humanity, to be brutes, and ever-increasing brutes, more and more more and more fierce, more and more Godless. And I am not speaking of believers as contrasted with atheists, I am speaking of all of us. We have no right to call ourselves believers if all that we believe is that we have a good God whose duty and function is to look after us while we don't look after the myriads of things He had called into being in an act of love, to see them in divine joy. We must recognize our guilt, we must recognize it actively, not in order to save our skins but in order to become what we are called to be. And if we recognize it, we must.

Icon of Creation.

We must humbly treat all things which God have created, treat them as servants treat their masters. The Lord has said to us, that we are not called to be overlords, but to be servants. We imagine that at best and very unrealistically we should be servants to one another which we are not, in fact, that we are called to be servants of the whole creation serving it with all our lives, all our intelligence, all our hearts, all our depth, all the degree of participation which we already have to the mind of Christ revealed in the Scriptures, and to the mind of God revealed to us by the voice of the Holy Spirit within us. This is what we are to be.

And this is reconciliation; we must seek forgiveness by making reparation, because there is no such thing as gratuitous forgiveness. Forgiveness begins with recognition of sin with exposing oneself to the offended party, asking to be forgiven and undertaking to make reparation, and not undertaking but actively doing it at the cost it may cost us, paying the price, whatever price it be. Unless we do this, we will never, never be able to make our peace between ourselves because humanity cannot be united on the common cause of serving its own advantages. Beasts of prey do not become a vast Kingdom of united groups. And this is what we are trying to do: to remain beasts of prey, predators, as fierce as we want to be, as successful, as all the techniques of murder allow us to be, and remain selfish, afraid of one another, greedy, lustful, cruel to each other, because beasts of prey do not know what it is to love. We are called to make our peace by choosing a vocation which is great enough, big enough for mankind; the building of the Kingdom of God that includes our making our peace, not first of all with one another; o yes, with one another from the one to the other, in small groups, in ever increasing groups, yes, but first and foremost with the world in which we live. And then we will have a common purpose, and in the community of this purpose, of making the world into what God willed it to be, we will find truly reconciliation with one another. It is not enough to repent, it is not enough to seek forgiveness from God; we must obtain forgiveness in other ways by actively, truly being God's servants and God's messengers in this world.

Reference:

Excerpt from Saint Albans & Saint Sergius Fellowship Conference 1990

http://masarchive.org/Sites/texts/1990-00-00-1-E-E-T-EM02-035MakingPeaceWithRestOfCreation.html