Heavenly Father, your Holy Spirit gives breath to all living things; renew us by this same Spirit, that we may learn to respect what you have given and care for what you have made, through Jesus Christ our Lord. – Andrew Linzey

This prayer from Andrew Linzey nicely encapsulates the themes of a genuine Christian ethic of creation. I think in light of earlier posts on this topic, what’s needed is a way of reconciling a due respect and care for God’s creation with a proper commitment to human flourishing.

However, given that a lot of what seems to drive our abuse of creation is our relentless pursuit of material wealth, and that this pursuit may actually at some point hinder human happiness rather than promote it, the reconciliation may not be as difficult as it first appears.

For Christians in particular, human well-being isn’t measured by increases in material well-being. It’s important, of course, and we’re called to make sure that those in need have adequate material sustenance. But the energy and resources we devote to what earlier generations of Christians would’ve contemptously referred to as “luxury” may indicate that we’ve strayed considerable from a Christian vision of the good life.

In a liberal society wealth-creation offers a convenient lowest common denominator-type goal that everyone can agree on despite differences over religious values, the meaning of life, etc. But if we’re pushing against the limits of what is sustainable, this won’t be a viable option must longer.

What we need to learn, and what any public philosophy founded essentially on self-interest seems incapable of fostering, is self-limitation. What Christians may need to recover is the practice of asceticism, not understood as a form of joyless self-denial, but as a way of orienting the self to love of God and neighbor, the contemplation of truth and beauty and the pursuit of genuine human flourishing.

In this interview, Linzey points out that there are aspects of the world that our practices of reducing creation to mere “resources” blind us to:

[Our mistreatment of animals is] an impediment to spiritual pleasure. That’s why I think vegetarianism is implicitly a theological act. It’s not about saying “No” but about saying “Yes.” About enjoying the lives of other creatures on this earth so much that even the thought of killing them is abhorrent. I think God rejoices in Her creatures, takes pleasure in their lives, and wants us to do so too. So much of our exploitation of animals stems from a kind of spiritual blindness: if we sensed and really felt the beauty and magnificence of the world, we would not exploit it as we do today.

From this point of view, something like vegetarianism may serve as a spiritual practice that actual allows us to see the world differently. Of course, there are other ways of doing this. The novelist and philosophy Iris Murdoch wrote that the necessary precondition for moral growth is learning to perceive reality as existing in itself and not as something for us. She thought art was particularly suited to this since it’s goal is to make reality present to us. By learning to attend to something for its own sake, which often involves hard work, we go out of ourselves and gradually inhabit a less self-centered, and therefore more accurate, perspective on reality. This is the key to human flourishing.

Obviously human beings need, as Wendell Berry reminds us, to use the world. But spiritual disciplines that teach us to look at the world as something more than mere material for our use may lead us to redefine what our needs are, and to distinguish genuine needs from spurious ones. And, somewhat paradoxically, genuine human flourishing can only occur when we stop seeing ourselves as the center of the world. But Christians of all people should be ok with this, since we have it on good authority that self-seeking is the surest path to self-destruction and that only by losing our lives to we truly find them.