This comes from our holiday away from just about everything. We are privileged to be travelling through the far North of Norway experiencing peace and beauty in abundance as well as a surprising amount of sunshine.
Climbing mountains and wandering along deserted coastlines turned my mind towards our relationship with creation, the earth – that which God has given us.
This is THE issue for all of us and for the church.
I have pondered the meaning of the phrase in Genesis about ‘having dominion over living creatures’. God trusts in the human race to preserve something but dominion appears to have been taken as licence to destroy. Here in the Arctic Circle people can see first-hand what it means for the icecaps to be melting.
Read on in Genesis and the responsibility is clear. An article in the Theology of Work puts it thus:
‘We were meant to tend and care for the garden (Gen. 2:15). Creation is meant for our use, but not only for our use. (Gen. 1:4-31) reminds us that we are meant to sustain and preserve the environment. . . Dominion over all living creatures is not a license to abuse them, but a contract from God to care for them.’
Sadly, that doesn’t seem to go far enough. Sally has been reading about the Inuit people whilst we have been away. They have a better perspective they simply replace ‘dominion over’ with ‘at one with’.
An essay she read is entitled Upirngasaq (Arctic Spring). The Inuit writer Sheila Watt-Cloutier puts it like this:
‘In our language we have no word for ‘nature’, despite our deep affinity with the land, which teaches us how to live in harmony with the natural world. The division the Western world likes to make between ‘man and nature’ is in the traditional Inuit view both foreign and dangerous. In Western thinking, humans are set apart from nature; nature is something to strive against, to conquer, to tame, to exploit or, more benignly, to use for ‘recreation’. By contrast, Inuit place themselves within, not apart, from nature.’
Andrew Caspari
