I’m in the middle of editing the papers from last year’s ORIC Conference, and I came across a striking line in one of them: ‘By healing yourself, you heal the entirety of nature.’ My first, kneejerk reaction was to think that this was dangerously quietistic. Taken out of context, might one not read it as suggesting we can address the environmental crisis merely by attending to our own spiritual state? An extreme (and radically spiritualized) version of ‘Think globally, act locally’?
But in an Orthodox context it doesn’t mean that at all. If, as Orthodoxy believes, we are called to be the priests of creation, then this is a reminder that no effort to heal the environment is complete (or even achievable) without at the same time walking the path of self-healing, i.e. of theosis.
And so, I was led back to St Gregory of Sinai’s insistence that the perfect hesychast ‘sees the entire creation luminous’.
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