Our Relation To Others Through Creation (Part 2)

Be careful to seek out all the commandments of the Lord your God, that you may possess this good land, and leave it as an inheritance for your children after you forever (1 Chr. 28:8). If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever (1 Tim. 5:8 NIV).

In the 1980s, commentators often called the younger generation the “Me Generation” or the “Now Generation.” They saw a disturbing attitude among young people that in essence said, “I want it all, and I want it now.”

Considering the greed and materialism the younger generation saw in adults, the cumulative effect of thousands of hours of exposure to “consumer” advertising, the loss of interest in history, the disintegration of the institutions of family and marriage, and the decline of religious values, it is understandable that they would be characterized by self-centeredness.

Contrast that with the attribute of altruism—unselfish concern for the welfare of others. When the Christian values of faith in an eternal God, compassion for others, self-sacrifice, and hope for the future disappear from the general culture, there is little chance that altruism will survive. In fact, most people today would likely have difficulty even defining the term altruism.

As the combined Scripture passages above indicate, people of the Word have a responsibility to provide for their children and to leave for them an inheritance of faith and the gift of good land—a creation respected and well-kept.

Christian farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry has written a number of books that underscore the broad meaning of community—community that includes our ancestors, our current family members and neighbors, our animals and land, and our descendants. These words from the book What Are People For? have caused me to consider more carefully the legacy I am leaving:

We do not need to devise a “world of the future”; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now; the only valid “futurology” available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at “the future of the human race”; we have the same pressing need that we have always had—to love, care for, and teach our children (p.188).

Berry elaborates on this last line in the book Another Turn Of The Crank:

I know of nothing that so strongly calls into question our ability to care for the world as our present abuses of our own reproductivity. How can we take care of other creatures, all born like ourselves from the world’s miraculous fecundity, if we have forsaken the qualities of culture and character that inform the nurture of children. . . . Whatever the reason, it is a fact that we are now conducting a sort of general warfare against children, who are being aborted or abandoned, abused, drugged, bombed, neglected, poorly raised, poorly fed, poorly taught, and poorly disciplined. Many of them will not only find no worthy work but no work of any kind. All of them will inherit a diminished, diseased, and poisoned world. We will visit upon them not only our sins but our debts. We have set before them thousands of examples—governmental, industrial, and recreational—suggesting that the violent way is the best way. And then we have the hypocrisy to be surprised and troubled when they carry guns and use them (pp.78-79).

This sobers me. As one who believes in Christ, I’d like to think he’s describing only non-Christian people. But I’m afraid I see many of these behaviors and attitudes among ourselves. We’re a long way from being the community that treasures our past, guards our present, and secures our future.

While we look for the any-moment return of Christ, we cannot use this expectation to excuse ourselves from the responsibility to leave God’s gift of creation to our children and their children well-kept and undiminished in its capacity to provide for them what it has provided for us.

[Landfill photos by Vera Sytch]

How can we celebrate the wonder of God in creation?
By doing everything we can to guard and protect its ability to provide for our children and their children the treasures we have enjoyed and received from it because of our parents’ and their parents’ care and concern.