PREFACE

This book is about God and nature, which I combine to call spiritual ecology. I love God and I love this world, and I don’t think you can love one without loving the other too. More specifically, this book is about an altar that I believe must be built in the wilderness because it is our primal role as human beings on earth to do so. I know that “God,” “nature” and “altar” are words freighted with many, and often very different, associations, but I have no intention of insisting on one over another. While I touch upon many world religions and belief systems, I am not an expert in them. Instead, you are encouraged to explore the spiritual ecology outlined here through your own beliefs. There are many words I could choose for God – Allah, creator, divinity, spirit, even nature – but all of them are either too specific or too general for our purposes. So far, a singular, gender-neutral, third-person pronoun has not been found to avoid assigning a male or female gender to God. It is possible to say Him/Her in every instance, but this is hardly an appealing prospect. Using the word “it” is problematic in that such a word does not allow for a personal deity. In this manifesto I have chosen to use “He,” with the hope that the reader will understand that in English we are required to use a gender-specific pronoun and that in doing so I am not suggesting that God is male in any way. I have also made careful choices about the examples and imagery I use to illuminate the spiritual ecology outlined in this manifesto, some of which are specifically drawn from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Again, I am not insisting that these be received whole cloth with the traditions that surround them. They are offered here partly as prototypical images that have historic resonance in the human psyche and, as such, reveal profound insights into spirituality and nature. I have been like the honeybee all my life, gathering the nectars from every flower in the spiritual meadows. This book is a honeycomb of pages based on 40 years of reflection and experience in the wilderness and not a Christian apology for nature, and certainly not a manual of belief. I am inviting you on a journey with me and hope that you are challenged to find deeper resonance in your own beliefs about nature. Before we take that journey together, there are three things I want you to know about me because each of these deeply inform this manifesto.

POET

The first is that I have loved poetry for almost my whole life and it permeates everything I do and say. A poem is a celebration of truth in words. A poet, therefore, must be someone who is devoted to the truth, to the seeing of things as they really are. This is a fundamental devotion that requires courage and self-discipline, because it is somehow human nature to turn our gaze away from the way things are and to fabricate something utterly different. In this way, a poet practices daily the discipline of seeing purely.

A poet must also say purely, however, by which I mean that the words chosen to express what is seen must be exact: the right word used in the right place and in the right relationship with the other words in the poem. No word must be out of place or extraneous. The integrity of the seeing must be matched by the saying. So, in addition to being a lover of the truth, a poet is a lover of words. “There they were, seemingly lifeless, made only of black and white,” wrote Dylan Thomas about words, “but out of them, out of their own being, came love and terror and pity and pain and wonder and all the other vague abstractions that make our ephemeral lives dangerous, great and bearable.”^^

Words are wondrous because they are vocalized breath, and breath is the spirit of life. My lifelong love of poetry has taught me that the poet’s vocation is fundamental to life on this earth, and therefore in the natural world to which we genetically belong: namely, a fidelity to the truth (however hard it may be to find), and a devotion to the honest use of our breath to vocalize meaning, an art that humans uniquely (and I would add divinely) possess. When we speak about ecology merely as a web of systems and things and evolutionary processes, we miss the point. A rainbow is an arc of colours formed in the sky by the refraction and dispersion of the sun’s light by water droplets in the atmosphere. This is what it is. But that’s not what it means. Spiritual ecology, such as I plan to introduce to you here, needs the poet.

PRIEST

The second fact about your author is that I am an Eastern Orthodox priest. The Orthodox Church, with 250 million members, is the second-largest Christian communion and shared the first thousand years of Christian history with the Roman Catholic Church until the schism in the 11th century. Most eastern countries, such as Russia, Greece, Ukraine, the Middle East, Romania, Turkey and Egypt, are culturally Orthodox (or were for hundreds of years before the rise of Islam), and even some of the First Nations in Alaska (the Aleut and Tlingit, for instance) consider Eastern Orthodoxy their native religion.

My own journey to the Orthodox Church was somewhat anomalous. I grew up in a secular household with no religious affiliation, but I felt a divine calling from a very young age and spent a good deal of my early life searching for its source. In 1992 I had a conversion experience that led me to call the Orthodox Church my home. I was ordained in 2002 after studying for three years at an Orthodox theological seminary in New York and thereafter served as a parish priest for ten years in Victoria, BC. You will notice that this book draws from the resources of many spiritual traditions, including a great deal from my own, gathered from years of reading in, and practising, the spiritual life. The richness of Orthodox spirituality on the subject of ecology is vast but almost unknown in the West. The Eastern Orthodox world view has not been shaped by Western history and dialogues; we rarely polarize faith and science, and our rituals and traditions are rooted in the earth, the cycles of natural life and, most of all, in beauty.

This ecological manifesto bears a lot of my experience of the priesthood. I have seen first-hand the transformational power of an ecologically minded practice in the spiritual lives of many. What is more, I have learned a good deal, mostly through trial and error (and mostly still through error), about the geography of the spiritual life through my years as a priest working within (though not exclusively) my tradition and serving others. It is my conviction, which I will of course explain, that each of us is a priest to the natural world and that each of us, in our own way, must become (or build!) an altar in the wilderness, a place of offering and sacrifice, a place of healing and reconciliation.

FATHER

The third fact about me is that I am a single dad raising three daughters full time. I consider this to be my highest vocation, and it has taught me several things that also form part of the foundation to this manifesto. One of the key lessons can be summed up neatly this way: “God can bring great beauty out of complete devastation.” This is a saying of Olga Michael, a Yup’ik woman who is widely venerated among the First Nations in Alaska as a saint. ^^ In 2009 my marriage of 15 years began to disintegrate, and the rest of what I had built in my life along with it. In a short amount of time I lost my home, car, books, possessions, all my savings and, most frighteningly, my identity. Worst of all, there was nothing I could do to stop it all from happening. The story arc of the first 40 years of my life changed dramatically and I felt as though I was left without a story. This was the “complete devastation” part. However, looking back now, I see that my marriage was unsustainable and so was how I was living my life. The story had to change.

I think that the human paradigm we are living today is also an unsustainable story. Ecosystem devastation, species extinction, unchecked resource extraction, wasteful consumerism and exploding population growth are leading to changes not only in the availability of clean air and essentials such as food and water for all, but also in the integrity of the planet’s basic systems on which all life depends. These factors alone will alter almost everything we expect from modern life in the West. Disillusion of any kind is a healthy, though painful, process, so this inevitability actually gives me hope. This is what my experience of becoming a single father has taught me. Finding a new story and a more natural way of living, one that takes into account who we are and what our place is in the natural world, will be the great beauty that emerges from the devastation.

What my daughters have taught me, however, is much more important. This is wonder. My girls have spent much of their life following me on hikes all over the world. In some cases, this has demanded from them extraordinary strength and courage – being caught in the backcountry at night and having to find our way to safety through the darkness, or scampering around cliff faces, or trudging for kilometres through rain-soaked, muddy forests. My daughters will carry the memories of these experiences all their lives, and I’m sure they will be shaped by them.

Children need to be challenged in nature and at the very least be exposed to it often. The adventure inherent in experiencing the outdoors cultivates attachment to it, leading to engagement and, ultimately, love and appreciation. Most of all, though, when a young person experiences outdoor adventures, it calls out the natural sense of wonder in them. This wonder is a very active kind; I would describe it as playful. Recently, I hiked a long, gruelling trail straight up a mountain face with a small group of teens from a youth camp. When we arrived at the top, a turquoise-blue alpine lake cradled by three snowy mountain peaks greeted us. The teens stopped in their tracks before the majesty before them, silent. They stared for a moment, taking everything in. Then one said to the others, “Let’s go!” They were off like a shot, leaping over logs, wading through the cold waters, skipping rocks, searching for fish and tadpoles or whatever they could find. This is what wonder is, and this, for me, is the gateway to an authentic spiritual ecology.

So poetry, spirituality, faith, priesthood, fatherhood, seeing and speaking the truth in love, an appreciation of nature and a wonder that leads to play – these are the things I bring personally to the forthcoming pages. My hope is that these things, as well as the observations I offer you from a lifetime of reflection on God and nature, will lead you into the wilderness our souls share with the astounding complexity of the natural world, and show you why building your own altar – inside or out – is vital to healing the deep divisions between human beings and nature that now, as never before, are becoming manifest.