Our holiday flat lay a few hundred yards from the ancient Greek agora and a few hundred more from the Parthenon. Both are further by foot but are still an easy walk even when you feel you’re breathing more water vapor than air. Just beyond our apartment, the western slope of the Acropolis rose sharply back up to the Pnyx, where in ancient times the demes of Athens gathered to debate public policy — hence, our word democracy. But that wasn’t my intended destination. Instead, I would follow a wide cobblestone road up the gully of the two hills toward a different place. If I timed it right, I would say my morning prayers with Athens spread out below me as the sun rose beyond Lycabettus Hill. But that wasn’t why I was going there. I wanted to say my prayers on the Areopagus where St. Paul once preached to the Athenians.

We had visited the hill in the late afternoon on the previous day as we reconnoitred the ancient sites before finding dinner. Ever since we’d planned our trip to Athens—piggybacked on the work of my wife, Sarah, as an external examiner at a local university — a visit to the Areopagus was high on my list of places to see. Up to that point, I had never stood anywhere that someone from the Bible had stood (assuming, of course, that the legends about Joseph of Arimathea visiting Glastonbury are fabrications). So, I approached the craggy hill with the excitement of a much-admired celebrity’s fan. I tried hard to feel something about the place.

The views from the top of the Areopagus are certainly stunning: one can see the ruins of the ancient Athens below, marked by a reconstructed stoa to the east and the Temple of Heracles poking out among the stone pines on the west. Modern Athens, a chaotic jumble of white flat-roofed buildings, fanned out in every direction. Behind us to the right loomed the Acropolis, swarming with crowds of visitors. I could enjoy the Areopagus as a vista, but the combination of chattering tourists, vendors selling bottles of water, and a rocky surface rubbed treacherously smooth by centuries of footfall made it impossible for me to do more. Still, I learned something from that initial visit: I’ve always pictured Paul’s sermon completely wrong.

An image search for Areopagus and will undoubtedly produce some old paintings of Paul addressing a crowd of men in a Greco-Roman forum against a backdrop of Greek columns and classical statues. In these depictions, he’s like a modern-day street preacher on High Street. That’s how I had always imagined him when reading Acts 17:16-34. But the Areopagus is nothing like that. Paul delivered his only recorded sermon to Gentiles on a rocky hill that stands high above the city. One should imagine him with the Acropolis above him to the east, the Pnyx with its outdoor assembly area to the south, Athens below, and a vista of worked fields beyond to the north. It was a dramatic setting for a sermon, much closer in parallel to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount than any street preacher in an urban setting. It must have been a daunting pulpit for the Apostle. From his vantage, he would have been able to see the synagogue, just below the Temple of Heracles, where he had first spoken about the unknown God. I wonder if Paul stopped to consider that he was introducing his audience to the King of Peace upon a hill dedicated to Ares, the god of war, surrounded by symbols of religious, political, and commercial power.

I loved my visit but felt quietly deflated. I knew then that I needed to return the next morning. And so it was with some eagerness that I set out in the pre-dawn darkness. As I walked up the avenue, I was surrounded by the loud chorus of cicadas accompanied by feral cats prowling along the edges of the road. I passed only joggers and a few elderly men enjoying their first cigarettes of the day as I luxuriated in the scenery. Now, the feeling I’d desired finally came over me. With the Acropolis glowing bronze amid floodlights, I could not but have felt the deep history around me. I wondered if the cicadas had sung to Paul like they were now singing to me.

The boy in me swept aside the middle-aged man. Here, the Athenians had cheered at the news of the impossible victory at Marathon. Here, they had despaired at reports of Xerxes and his mighty army crossing the Bosphorous, but also later rejoiced to learn of the steadfast defence of the Spartans at Thermopylae and the victory of their navy at Salamis. Here too had the Persian armies marched to destroy the abandoned Acropolis. The history was too much for me. So, instead of going straight to the Areopagus, I detoured up the Pnyx to wander in the distilling gloom alongside the ghosts of Solon, Pericles, Socrates, and the other great men of Athens. I had the enshrouding woods almost to myself. The scent of pine was heavy in the air.

I didn’t tarry long.  Quickly returning to the avenue, I managed to reach the Areopagus as the sun was cresting Hymettos, the distant mountain range to the east of Athens. Although there were a few people there, they were spread apart, each quietly admiring the rising sun. I found a smooth outcrop of rock where I could sit and happily contemplate the scenery as the brightening sunrays gradually revealed the buildings sheltering beneath the shadows of the trees. A gentle peace settled over me and I began to pray.

I made sure not to rush. Trying to keep both God and my surroundings uppermost in my thoughts, I prayed my way through the canticles and psalms and took my time in reading the lessons. It felt only right to add Acts 17:16-34 after the Benedictus. I gave myself time to sit with the text, imagining Paul standing nearby as he addressed the skeptical Greeks. My reverie yielded naturally to prayers for friends and family, my congregation and colleagues, and of gratitude for the many blessings of this life.

“In him we live and move and have our being,” Paul preached from the Areopagus almost 2,000 years earlier. Held by God in prayer in the exquisite delight of my experience, I could not even begin to doubt his words. In that space and within a brief span of time, his words were as real and solid as the rock on which I sat or the heat of the sun that was now basking me with its rays. The God in heaven to whom I addressed my prayers was also in the elderly smoking men, the joggers, the cats and the cicada, the heat of the sun, the beauty of the landscape, and even the eagerness that had drawn me to the hilltop. I knew he would be in my memory too. Is it any wonder that Athens produces mystics?

Only a deep quiet of the mind can follow moments like this. I stood up, stretched my lower back, and ambled down past an old monastery, the remains of the Roman forum, and into the old city. I hardly noticed the shopkeepers setting out their wares and sweeping the pavement or the other early risers emerging from cafés with their coffee and pastries. I had the rest of the day to be a tourist. For now, I would remain in the presence of the unknown God who once again had made himself known to me.

Of course, he does so every day. But most days I hardly notice. Thankfully for one as blind as I, he occasionally grants me an Areopagus where I can just about see him face to face. It’s at such moments that I realize that God is not unknown like an undiscovered territory or a terrible secret. He’s unknown like something so familiar we never stop to notice it. “So obvious, it was staring me in the face,” we say when the scales fall from our eyes.

On that morning, God stared me in the face. And I had almost mistaken him for the heat of the sun or the beauty of the landscape. Until I had said my prayers.

Perhaps if, in a thousand years, the impressive victories for justice that have been achieved in the last hundred years stand, I’ll revise my opinion from the afterlife. But now it seems premature to assume any of our moral achievements will endure forever. Time, after all, is rather long, even in a world that seems bent on shortening what remains of it.

The simplistic self-righteousness to which I refer is our tendency to divide the world between those of us who want to ride the wave of enlightening history in the face of those who are trying to build dams against it. This can very often be a regurgitated version of 18th- and 19th-century view of civilized people surrounded by savages. But perhaps one good thing about social media is that it can disabuse us of this fantasy. We now can see that a salient characteristic of those most vocal about injustice is how unjustly they often treat those who disagree with them.

Be that as it may, let’s for the moment accept that the moral universe does, in fact, bend toward justice. What then do we do with the non-rectifiable injustices that it leaves in its wake? What can we do for those for whom the very mention of “justice” can only ever be an insult? Let me give you an example of what I mean.

During the past few weeks, I have been listening to The Rest is History’s 11-part podcast series on Custer’s Last Stand and the subsequent plight of the Lakota Sioux. Since I’m a Southerner with a great deal of sympathy for Native Americans, I’ve never cared much for George Armstrong Custer. Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s series offers nothing to change my mind. It’s a heartbreaking tale of how the Plains Indians were systematically (though often incompetently) bullied, betrayed, and butchered as they were driven off their lands and corralled into ever-more constricted reservations.

Amid this sordid history, smaller acts of injustices piled up as the power of the white man, armed with modern technology and drunk on capitalism, learned that he could act with impunity against Native Americans. The tragedy culminated in the massacre at Wounded Knee, where 300 Lakota men, women, and children were mown down by American soldiers, 19 of whom were awarded Medals of Honor for their drunken barbarism. Perhaps the most telling part of this tale was how many Lakota Sioux only escaped imprisonment by signing contracts with traveling spectacles such as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show — a peculiarly American way of adding insult to injury.

The Lakota, of course, were only one of the final instances of what happened across the United States. Every square inch of our beloved country was unjustly seized from those who had lived on it for millennia. At the end of the podcast, Sandbrook comments that the plight of the Native Americans has never incited the same passionate reassessment of our history as slavery — there has never been anything like the 1619 Project for them. I suspect there are two reasons for this. The first is that we’ve never afforded Native Americans even the modicum of political power required to influence our social agendas. The second reason is starker: there is no scenario in which the injustices committed against Native Americans can even begin to be rectified. Thus, the people whom E.L. Baum (of The Wizard of Oz) thought should be put out of their misery (i.e., “wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth”) remain the open sore of injustice that we dare not face.

The tragedy of the Lakota is but one example of the injustices that have been left in the wake of history. Europeans, whites, and 19th-century imperialists aren’t their peculiar perpetrators. Irremediable injustices stretch back to the beginning of time and are woven inextricably into human history. The blood of our brothers and sisters has been crying out to the Lord from the ground since Cain killed Abel.

Injustice has morally compromised every people who has ever claimed hegemony as assuredly as it has each of us when we fail to treat our neighbors with dignity. The injustices committed against categories of people (race, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.) are only the clusterings of the countless acts of injustices committed against individuals. Very often no level of reparation can even begin to pay adequate recompense for what has been done; and even when it can, it does nothing for the dead who never knew justice in their lifetime.

In the case of the Lakota Sioux, it appears the moral universe reached a cul-de-sac. In which direction was it bending for them before the white man came? We will never know. All we can do now is seek to make a place for them within our world. It’s impossible for us to give their world back to them. History can never be undone.

The obvious Christian response is forgiveness. One of the remarkably unnatural things about forgiveness is that it often begins with our acknowledging that some evils can never be healed, at least on this side of Judgment Day. It recognizes that harm is often permanent, that even after new life has been granted, the wounds remain visible in our hands and feet. To accept that and yet forgive is about the most heroic gesture one can imagine. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” is perhaps the most necessary and unmerited prayer ever uttered for humanity.

Still, forgiveness can never be demanded of the other. This is why Western claims to let bygones be bygones are risible, and our attempts to absolve ourselves invariably place us in the role of Pontius Pilate. We can’t so easily wash our hands of past injustices, especially while, at the same time, failing to acknowledge these evils we’re committing now. In either case, we pretend that our universe isn’t moral, which it is, even if it doesn’t necessarily bend in the direction we would want.

How then are we to respond to a world misshapen by injustice? I can offer no answer to this moral conundrum. This world is unjust. That is a fact with which we must contend. But perhaps I can offer a perspective. First, I take it as read that Christians must accept that, despite all evidence to the contrary, our universe is indeed moral. We cannot but speak about the things that occur within it as being good or evil, just or unjust, kind or cruel, reasonable or senseless. We sit in judgement over human deeds and usually find it impossible not to do so, even with natural disasters and calamities. I don’t know if that universe bends one way or the other, but I do know that it is moral.

In fact, my view is that history doesn’t have an arc, that our universe doesn’t bend. The Lord’s return is not a progressive process, as though his approach is heralded by waxing human enlightenment. John’s Revelation suggests quite the reverse, if we’re to take it on these terms. My view is that the disease of sin is such that no earthly achievements will prove more enduring than our evils and that utopias are even more fleeting than empires. The best humanity can do is engage in the struggle so that the world isn’t as evil as it might otherwise be and that at least some may heal. At the same time, we must also accept that all “earth’s empires pass away,” including our own. Our moral victories and failures may a thousand years hence be entirely forgotten. Perhaps it is just that they should be so.

I have just finished reading Janine di Giovanni’s The Vanishing: The Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East. Hers is a story about the Christians of Iraq, Gaza, Syria, and Egypt whose lives have for centuries (and especially since 2001) approximated those of the Lakota Sioux. They have never held much power under Islamic rule, and thus have regularly experienced the injustice of the vulnerable. For them, questions of justice must be altogether different from ours in the West. Theirs is a solidarity, not only with all who suffer, but also with him who suffered death upon the cross. I wonder how different public theology would be if it had been written primarily by Syriac or Coptic Christians? I presume it would be humbler than that of British and American theologians.

But what if we’re asking the wrong question? What if the question we need to ask isn’t about injustice but about our worldly power? What if the Christian response to our participation in past justices is to forsake the power to rectify them? It seems to me that part of the problem in the West is that we refuse to recognize that we remain in charge. Be it Native Americans asking for land rights, the descendants of slaves for reparation, or others for decolonialization, each involves them approaching us with metaphorical hat in hand, to appeal to our better nature. In the end, only those in charge — and comfortably so — have the luxury of debating how to respond to past injustices. Can those who have barricaded themselves against the possibility of suffering injustice ever truly heal the injustices they themselves have committed?

Fortunately for us, the church is swiftly losing its secular power. However much our archbishops, bishops, and synods may pontificate or legislate against the injustices of the world, almost no one is listening or cares. But as our voice grows soft and our political strength wanes, perhaps we now have the potential to live more fully into our redemptive vocation. God never intended us to be the project managers of this world, nor has he offered us anything other than to take up our cross and follow his Son.

The Christian response to injustice is therefore very often simply to stand alongside those who suffer, to experience with them the frustrating impotence that is the human condition in a fallen and often senseless world. When we take that pain and those wounds and offer them to God — when even our failures and weaknesses are included in our “living sacrifice” to him — then we find the possibility of redemption, transformation, and even thanksgiving. In that joy, which can only come from the truly just God, can we then find healing. And experiencing such healing, even amid injustice and suffering, remains the surest way to find hope.

Just behind me stands the parish church. Its only companion is the old schoolhouse turned private home wrapped snuggly behind strands of wisteria, leafless in winter. The church is mostly Victorian: one of the first reordered according to Tractarian principles. Its beautiful décor was intended to herald a Catholic revival across Wales as much as a Gothic revival in architecture. Now, it sits by the lakeside like an elderly lady on a park bench — admired now more for her age-worn beauty than for any sins of vitality.

The churchyard’s circular shape, however, shows that it is far more ancient than the Victorian church. So does its name, Llangasty. In Wales, most places prefixed by llan are ancient. In the age between the retreat of Rome and the coming of the Normans, when Christianity baptized and transformed ancient myths or gave new life to legends and folktales, saints were apparently as common as sheep in Cymru. The places they chose for their home were marked so profoundly by their presence that they have been remembered ever since in the names given by those who venerated them. Llanfrynach, Llanddew, Llanhamlach, Llandefaelog, Llanfilo, and Llansantffraed are only some of the holy llans within a few miles of Llangasty, itself named after the otherwise forgotten fifth-century St. Gastyn.

Across the lake from where I am standing is a small island. Once it was crannog: a kind of Esgaroth from The Hobbit in miniature. It may have been the palace of the heirs of Brychan Brycheiniog, the eponymous ruler of Brecknockshire. Though he was a bit of a rogue, at least 12 of his sons and daughters became saints in Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany. If you’re to believe the legends, many were catechized by old Gastyn. According to those same legends, Brychan was born down the hill from my home and educated by a blind hermit on a site now marked by a church where my wife read a lesson last Christmas at a carol service.

You have to take it all with a pinch of salt. But only a philistine would rob this landscape of its saintly heritage. I am disposed to accept and delight in the most outlandish legends and stories that arose from a time when so little history has been preserved. My soul delights to recall that almost all of human history has been populated more by such folk memory than by skeptical empiricism. It was how we invited our ancestors to live with us in the present. These local Welsh saints influence my ministry, too. I like to think that their beatific piety is such that it might accept as fanciful a creature as an American vicar into the company of their prayers. On mornings such as this, when I look into a gray limbo, I can feel their presence around me. I’m more certain of them than I am of much I encounter in my church these days.

It’s easy to become melancholic on mornings like this. Places like Llangasty, lonely in a sparsely settled landscape, are reminders of how much the faith once meant to the people who lived here. These days we struggle to keep almost any rural church open, never mind fill their stone walls with spiritual life. Few show any signs of an imminent widespread revival; fewer still can resist settling into the secure embrace of their crumbling heritage. Like beggars in a historic city, they depend on the largesse of generous tourists or the goodwill of those in power. Consider for a moment that Llangasty has meant enough to successive generations to remain a holy site for 1,500 years. We don’t think in such terms these days. We lack the patience, the confidence, the faith to do so. Our secular hearts have grown too cramped for such enduring love.

The preservation of such sites is even more astonishing when you consider the communities they have served. Rural churches are testimonies to humility. They have drawn their strength to endure almost entirely from the domestic sphere rather than from flashy initiatives, new models of ministry, or grand schemes. The time that our forebears wasted in committee meetings, training programs, and workshops was minimal. Around 40 generations of local Christians would have known little more about the content of their faith than perhaps the Paternoster and Ave Maria. Their descendants probably differed only in what they learned by heart: the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed, and the comforting words of the prayer book. Still, they believed enough to look after their families, care for their homes, and sustain their little churches. Their imperfect love of God and neighbor is memorialized by the venerability of their holy sites.

In Wales these days, such churches now typically cling to life. There are churches near me where the infrequent worship includes only three or four people. They are symbols of neglect by governments that don’t value their historic buildings, by people who trivialize their heritage as much as religious faith, and by a society that appreciates the countryside for leisure more than the culture it supports. The campground across the lake from Llangasty and the nearby outdoor activity center thrive while both churches and farms struggle. Good sense suggests it would be much better to close the church or sell the farm than to face the continual toil of subsistence. Each Sunday that people gather for worship, therefore, is an act of astonishing faith.

Yet, for all my nostalgia, I must recognize that the faith practiced in these humble churches has proven not to be enough — not enough to hold onto the people who live in the rural towns and villages today and not enough to resist the forces of modernity arrayed against them. People who prefer the thrill of sport to “the silence of eternity, interpreted by love” are not likely to prize their churches. Too many souls have lost the poetry that versifies their lives with heavenly meaning. Besides, the death knell of many rural churches was rung when agricultural workers were run off their farms by machinery.

Is my standing, therefore, a graveside vigil? I pray not. I’d like to think that the mere idea of places like Llangasty has sufficient beauty to move people to care for them. How can anyone not be deeply touched by these ancient sites? The babes christened, the couples wed, the people who have gathered to partake of bread and wine or listen to God’s Word preached, the wept-over bodies commended to their gracious Lord — all these (and far more) give even our most neglected churches a moral weight that nothing in our modern lives can touch. They have the power to recall us to our creaturely humanity if we but notice. In this way, they are not unlike masterpieces of art that awaken our hearts to the deep currents of meaning that flow through our God-given world. If so, then in their cases the Artist has taken his time, making sure to include the full range of absurd humanity in crafting his artworks. These churches remind us that God works with the patience each of us requires.

So, as ever, I leave with a hopeful heart. Yes, I long for a world in which our society prizes such places over flashy cars, exotic holidays, and expensive gadgets. And I pray for an institutional church that isn’t so mystified by a rural Christianity that resists its restructurings and is left utterly unmoved by its visions of reform and renewal. I pray too that more the people who live near these churches will become as loyal to the “faith once delivered to the saints” as they are to their married and buried memories. And yet I have often stood quietly on flagstone floors of rural churches and felt the company of saints memorialized in brass plaques around me. Those plaques are almost always polished, and their sheen reveals a devotion greater than I’ve ever mustered. That gives me hope.

So, I always leave these places glad of this world that God has fashioned and redeemed. I have stood in the silence of these humble holy of holies and have heard and accepted their message of endless hope. “Know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain,” they seem to whisper, quoting 1 Corinthians 15.58. That’s exactly what ancient churches like Llangasty teach me: that, indeed, my labors of love can never be in vain.

If you would like to visit Llangasty yourself, you can stay at Llangasty Retreat House, once run by Anglican nuns, and discover something of the tranquility and holiness of this ancient locality. Visit www.llangasty.com for more information.

I can’t tell you how many times someone has said something along those lines to me. In some places where I’ve served, this clerical inattention was understandable enough due to the size of the parish or the number of churches combined into one. But in most cases, the speakers have been elderly churchgoers who had spent a lifetime faithfully attending a church that seemingly had never returned their devotion. I’m not sure we esteem highly enough those who continue to attend church despite years of priestly neglect.

I recently was sitting by the bedside of a dear lady nearing the end of her long life. Despite the imminence of death, she was in a cheerful, reflective mood, telling me stories about her life as a farmer’s wife and her involvement in her local church. But then her face clouded over. I asked her what was wrong, and she replied, “You know, Father, the day I became useless to that church was the day the clergy stopped taking any interest in me.” She then confessed to me that though her faith in God remained unshaken, she had long since lost any faith in the church.

I have in my library a delightful little book, Pastoral Work, written in the 19th century by the Bishop of Bedford. It was taken from a series of pastoral charges he gave at Cambridge and contains such gems as “a house-going parson makes a church-going people.” In it, he reminds them of the importance of pastoral work and the etiquette involved in conducting it.

Overall, I find its somewhat dated foolishness wiser than the wisdom of much that’s written today. But the part that has always stuck with me is the standard he sets for a sustainable level of pastoral work: “I think … an active earnest parish priest in a large town parish ought not to be content to pay less than thirty-six to forty visits weekly.” He encourages clergy to spend every afternoon visiting people in their homes.

In all the talk about how to reverse the Church’s decline, there is rarely much about the need to revive dependable, effective, and attentive pastoral visiting among clergy. Invariably our debates center on styles of worship or models of local ministry (usually limited to structure and governance), as though what clergy do outside of Sundays or within their office is immaterial. Indeed, when pastoral visiting is mentioned it’s often as one of the more obvious jobs that can be done by the laity and so is left for them to do alone. This is fundamentally to misunderstand the purpose of pastoral visiting.

In one of my former guises, I taught pastoral studies at a couple of British theological colleges. Much of what I was supposed to teach was nonsense derived either from pop psychology or (worse) corporate management, as though what my ordinands’ future parishioners desperately required was a therapist or an HR consultant. I tried as much as I could to avoid all that and instead had them read Gregory’s Pastoral Rule and George Herbert’s The Country Parson with a little Ken Leech and Thomas Oden thrown in. I preferred these old authors to the current textbooks because I found in them the combination of pastoral love, faith, and prayer that I hoped would underpin my ordinands’ future ministries.

“Being a good priest isn’t rocket science,” I used to tell my ordinands. “You simply need to love your people and be seen to love your people.”

I was, of course, being both hyperbolic and trite. Gregory the Great, a man much wiser than I, warned against undertaking pastoral care lightly: “No one presumes to teach an art till he has first, with intent meditation, learnt it. What rashness is it, then, for the unskillful to assume pastoral authority since the government of souls is the art of arts!” Because the consequences of the “government of souls” are so great, he believed that instructing clergy in the ars artium responsibly and fruitfully was of the highest importance. They needed to know how to bring theology, prayer, and wise counsel to bear in order to advance the souls under their charge toward God. Pastoral care wasn’t chiefly about making people feel better or even loved but about the salvation of their souls.

In order to practice the ars artium well, clergy needed not just to know their people, but to know them well.

Sadly, the modern ministry does not lend itself to attentive pastoral work, even for those so disposed. In many cases, clergy have too many churches under their charge to entertain anything like Gregory’s “government of souls.” Many are forced to devote their attention largely to baptism, wedding, and funeral visits — in most cases, with people they will hardly if ever see again. As a result, our churches are filled with people so neglected pastorally that it hardly ever crosses their minds that faith is something that ought to shape their daily lives and inform even their mundane decisions.

Good pastoral care requires knowing the people under our care well. It is built on trust. It shouldn’t, therefore, be restricted to moments of crisis or major life events. We must visit people in their normal lives as well — “To the sick as to the whole” is how the Ordinal puts it. Often dismissed as “social calls,” these visits allow clergy to cross the threshold of homes, meet and get to know people in their own household, and build the trust — perhaps even the bonds of affection — that prepares the spiritual soil for faith to grow and develop. In that way, too, when crises arise, the priest can minister to parishioners’ needs as a friend rather than a stranger.

None of this precludes or devalues the role of the laity. A healthy church should have clergy and laity working together to ensure that the congregation is properly cared for. Indeed, the traditional emphasis on corporal acts of mercy has long served as a reminder that all Christians have a duty to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, give shelter to travelers, visit the sick, visit the imprisoned, and bury the dead. The value of a layperson showing up to pray cannot be overstated. I think the laity also have a role in holding their clergy to account — if they’re active, they’ll know if their priest isn’t.

So, the laity play a vital role within the overarching pastoral ministry of our churches. But few of them have the theological training to guide those whom they visit and none of them has the authority that’s vested in the priesthood. Though the cure of souls depends on their help and support, it remains the personal charge of the incumbent and as such requires personal commitment. In fact, I don’t think pastoral visiting can be outsourced by clergy without cost; it’s in the conduct of that ministry that we are strengthened to bear the cross of our priestly ministry. It is in feeding our flock that we ourselves are fed.

“Make your life a sermon,” advises the Bishop of Bedford when describing the tools required for clergy to perform their pastoral work. The equipment he enjoins them to use are personal holiness, prayerfulness, and devotional reading, including the study of Scripture. If we want to begin to revive our churches, following his advice wouldn’t be a bad place for us to begin.

 One of the themes for this summer’s Lambeth Conference is ecology. We have invited authors to reflect on what they hope the bishops will take to heart and keep in mind regarding this theme as they meet.

By Mark Clavier

Little is more fanciful than a medieval bestiary. The imaginations that drew delightful theological and moral lessons from the natural world were only matched by bright illuminations that depicted its creatures. For example, in the Aberdeen bestiary, one finds the following:

The lion is the mightiest of the beasts; he will quail at the approach of none … If it happens that the lion is pursued by hunters, it picks up their scent and obliterates the traces behind it with its tail … Thus our Saviour, a spiritual lion, of the tribe of Judah, the root of Jesse, the son of David, concealed the traces of his love in heaven until, sent by his father, he descended into the womb of the Virgin Mary and redeemed mankind, which was lost … [W]hen a lioness gives birth to her cubs, she produces them dead and watches over them for three days, until their father comes on the third day and breathes into their faces and restores them to life … Thus, the Almighty Father awakened our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead on the third day; as Jacob says: “He will fall asleep as a lion, and as a lion’s whelp he will be revived.”

Here, the author demonstrates both scientific and theological interests — he seeks to understand lions in and of themselves but also to relate that knowledge to his Savior. Although we may now think his conclusion fatuous (if charming), we shouldn’t be blind to what it reveals. There’s nothing here of the division between science and religion that we’re so familiar with today. Creatures exist in their world as much as they do in ours, but because they are part of a divinely ordered creation, each of them also relates to its Creator morally, even sacramentally, in its own right. Thus, the lion isn’t just an animal, it’s also a bearer of divine truths. To see what I mean, we first need to note that in the Aberdeen bestiary the lion is associated with the Incarnation and Resurrection as much as any human being. While the nature of the lion’s connection may be different from ours — there’s no sense here of leonine redemption — its meaning as a lion has been sanctified by Christ’s coming: its symbolic power has been transformed into a direct and explicit icon of Christ’s incarnation and resurrection.

Similarly, in the ancient Ascension Day hymn, “Salve Festa Dies,” nature itself shares in Christ’s triumph over the “devil’s dominion” and it proclaims that victory through its own beauty:

Christ in his triumph ascends,
who had vanquished the devil’s dominion;
bright is the woodland with leaves,
brilliant the meadows with flowers.
Daily the loveliness grows,
adorned with glory of blossom;
heaven its gates now unbars,
flinging its increase of light.

Here, beauty isn’t simply an aesthetic value; it’s also a theological truth that responds in its natural glory to Christ’s cosmic crowning. Anyone who has seen nature reclaim an old industrial site or replenish a once foul river knows what a deep truth is being sung here. As with the bestiary’s lion, the beauty of the world has been sanctified and now has the capacity to raise faithful hearts and minds to ascend with Christ to heaven.

Even something as horrific as the cross wasn’t beyond redemption. In another hymn by the prolific hymn-writer Venantius Fortunatus:

Faithful cross, above all other:
one and only noble tree!
None in foliage, none in blossom,
none in fruit thy peer may be:
sweetest wood and sweetest iron,
sweetest weight is hung on thee.
Bend thy boughs, O tree of glory!
Thy relaxing sinews bend;
for a while the ancient rigor
that thy birth bestowed, suspend;
and the King of heavenly beauty
gently on thine arms extend.

This remarkable image isn’t the dead, cruel cross of modern-day sermons but an active personality imbued with nobility, beauty, and even motherly tenderness. One is put in mind here of the Old English poem “The Dream of the Rood” in which the tree retains its arboreal nobility even after being turned into gallows. It may have been “hewn down” and “dragged off by strong enemies” to be violently turned into a “hoist for wrongdoers,” yet it refuses to be anything less than the unshakable throne of “mankind’s brave king.”

Images such as these abound in medieval literature. Certainly, many of them are guilty of anthropomorphizing, but that seems to be a requirement for human respect. A better perspective is to recognize them as the product of rich imaginations taught to see the world as creation: the theatre of God’s glory and an integral part of Christ’s commonwealth. Every creature plays its part within that sacramental world, relating to each other (as in our own “cycle of life”) but also to the Trinity; in turn, this allows each creature through its very own nature to be a revelation of divine purpose and activity. Implicitly, these creatures through their beauty and dignity even sit in judgment on humanity’s failure to be symbols of God. Indeed, their dignity is so powerful that it overcomes even the cruel exploitation of human wickedness, as seen in the wood of the cross. In each case, we are pushed to open our eyes to creaturely dignity, contemplate God at work in them, and so learn wisdom.

With the Copernican revolution and the rise of modern science, we have lost much of our capacity to imagine our world in this way. Creation has become Nature, a morally-neutral world subject to human exploitation and tinkering. In this new world, we’ve gained tremendous new insights into the observable nature of things, but we’ve also robbed creatures of their own dignity apart from us. No longer able to relate to their Creator, each creature has simply become an object, even a commodity, to be admired, studied, experimented on, exploited, eradicated, or conserved. Creatures have been robbed of their capacity to relate through their own nature to God (never mind Christ) or to contain within that nature fundamental lessons about God from which we might draw wisdom. They have become objects of examination rather than contemplation; their meaning reduced to use and function instead of reverence. Increasingly, God has been separated from his creation, relegated to a sphere of existence only accessible by the human mind, for that is essentially what the God of revealed religion, mysticism, and self-expression is. The creatures themselves have been left to the often cruel mercy of science whose authority in that realm now reigns supreme. Instead of a temple of God’s grandeur, the world has become a factory, a laboratory, or simply the stage for human self-aggrandizement.

We Christians may still think of the world in some nominal way as creation, but we currently live within that creation less as servants, students, contemplatives, and creatures than as consumers and would-be tyrants. The transformation that separates us from the Aberdeen bestiary exemplifies Wendell Berry’s oft-quoted line, “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” Inasmuch as our world has been disenchanted, it has also been profaned. Insofar as we continue to think of this world as our own, we continue to desecrate it. To the extent that we profane and desecrate creation, we fail to be Christians.

This year’s Lambeth Conference offers an opportunity for Anglican bishops from around the world to call for repentance and to articulate how we might begin to save an over-exploited Nature by reclaiming it as sacred Creation. They can do this not simply by jumping on the ecological bandwagon but more profoundly by calling all people to recognize the dignity and sacredness of all creatures each of whom bears the capacity to be an icon. In many ways we’re late to this renewed mission and, therefore, can only follow the lead set by Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ and the global movement it has inspired.

But our own Anglican tradition preserves a wealth of often poetic theology that can inspire people to grasp for a more Christlike vision for human and ecological flourishing. We have Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Rosetti, Lewis, and many others to help open our eyes to hallowed commonwealth inhabited by all God’s creatures. Lambeth can encourage Anglican theologians from around the world to engage with our own Anglican tradition, in dialogue with our ecumenical brothers and sisters, to evoke a creation rooted in the enduring love of God. At this late hour, Lambeth must promote a mission to the world based on the relationship all creatures have with their Creator that trumps any use or benefit they may offer us and imbues them with their own dignity and worth.

If we can undertake this task in love and with firm resolve, then we can demonstrate to the world what a truly holy life looks like. Share that task with our fellow Christians around the world and we can also demonstrate how the Church can exemplify that life to the benefit of all within our care and service. Fail in this task, what is now the primary vocation of the Church, and we may discover what a merciless executor of divine judgment God allows creation to be.

God and his creation yearn for us to rejoin their company in love, reverence, and service. By articulating a vision of human flourishing based on delighting in the dignity of our Creator and his creation, Lambeth can offer the world that most precious of gifts: hope.