ROGATIONTIDE

We’ve screwed the world up. I don’t mean that in a grand rhetorical sort of way. I mean it quite literally. The world itself- soil, water, plant, air…we’ve screwed it up.

This is triply sad for those who follow the Lord Christ. First, because creation is a trust we’ve botched. Second, we botched it because we’re greedy, lazy and compromised with the spirit of the age we’ve been born into. Third, we fail to love our neighbor, those who live downstream from us and those who live “down time” from us, when we pour our poison and filth into the creek.

This is yet another example of how things are precisely not supposed to be.

It’s not ours to misuse; for all our churchy talk we’re idolaters, and we could care less about other people, if that care requires expense or inconvenience. These are the lessons of our modern ecological crisis.

But this is a controversial comment in some circles. Surprisingly, the more conservative we are as Christians, the more blind we are to the dependence and responsibility we share for creation. Against this, the church has set its Rogation Days.

The commemoration of Rogation Days is an ancient one. The church has designated the beginning of this week as a time to ask our Lord’s blessing on his creation. It’s an especially appropriate time for the church to lead the way in acknowledging the dependence each of has towards the earth and her sustenance. For our generation, this dependence has been successfully hidden behind the increasingly vulnerable and centralized agribusiness of modern technology. Its still there. We all still need to eat, but few of us have the wherewithal to provide for ourselves. And those to whom we look are increasingly squandering the remaining fertility of our world.

We need to repent of the evils that began in the unthankfulness of hearts grown arrogant with pesticides, fertilizers, and machinery. Our modern sorcery needs to be placed at the service of our God, his creatures and our brothers and sisters.

Wendell Berry offers a few precepts to help us get started:

1. Beware the justice of Nature.
2. Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature or in defiance of Nature.
3. Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human
intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.
4. In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour.
5. Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.
6. Put the interest of the community first.
7. Love your neighbors--not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.
8. Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.
9. As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household--which thrive by care and generosity--and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.
10. Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.

Most of these are implied in the ancient traditions and processions of Rogantide: Community, the humility formed from dependence on nature and nature’s God, and therefore the self-evident necessity of living in a way that nurtures and protects the knowledge and appreciation of all three.

May God revive the petitions of this season and the kind of heart that finds its celebration both appropriate and needful.