confess your green sins

A priest in Suffolk offered festival attenders the opportunity to confess their sins against the environment this past weekend. Yes, you read that right. People could go to a green confessional booth (made of recycled materials) at the Waveney Greenpeace festival and confess that they didn't recycle enough.

Of course I think it's great that the Catholic Church is encouraging parishioners to consider the impact of their actions on the environment. But I think it's ludicrious that anyone would feel the need for a separate, green-specific confession to acknowledge those types of sins. We ought to be confessing our green sins every time we confess. When did greed, materialism, and love of luxury stop being sins that we ought to continually confess?

That was a rhetorical question, but Father Stephen has an answer. This link is a somewhat lengthy compendium of a series of blogs he's been writing, and its particularly Eastern Orthodox perspective (Father Stephen is an Orthodox priest) might be uncomfortable to readers of other denominational backgrounds, but the central idea that he explains here--the Christian worldview as a one-storey rather than a two-storey universe--is, I believe, the answer to the problem of our modern separation of "environmental sins" into their own category. The trouble is that, ever since the Enlightenment, westerners have come to think of the universe as divided into separate regions: the sacred and the secular. In our minds, we have split God off from His creation. But the truth is that creation cannot be separated from the Creator. Not that creation is itself divine, but it is sanctified and imbibed through and through with God's presence. As the poet Hopkins said, "The world is charged with the grandeur of God." Or as Father Stephen puts it, "The whole world is a sacrament...All things have their meaning in relationship to God." This does not mean that we or rocks or trees or streams or the atmosphere are holy in themselves. But the rocks cry out in praise to God, and the trees clap their hands, and water is the element of baptism through which we are sanctified and consecrated to God. And air is the breath of life, and our life is God's Spirit in us. And the Kingdom of God is among us--not somewhere out there or up there, not somewhere far away that we hope to attain to someday, but right here, among us.

And that is why sins agains the environment are not a separate category of sin. They are no different from any other sin: anything we do to mar the presence of God in us, in others, or in the world is sinful. We are doing these things all the time. It's about time we confess them.

Thanks to the Green Lent blog for the link to the confession story.