The following was written in response to statements of Sr. Clare McBrien, made at the annual Bishop Begley Conference on Appalachia in the Diocese of Charlotte, quoted in the Catholic News and Herald on October 28.  Father's critique is based upon what was quoted in the article, published in the diocesan paper which is sent to every registered household within the diocese.

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God and the World He Created (and the Strange Little World of Sr. Clare McBrien)

            One of the themes of our Christian faith that has always especially interested me is that which entered explicitly into the life of the Church through the teaching of St. Paul in his letter to the first-century Christians at Rome, his discussion of the state of the pagan world before the full revelation of God in Jesus Christ:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth.  For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.  Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.  So they are without excuse; for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened.  Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles.  Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever!  Amen (1:18-25).

In essence, St. Paul’s indictment of the pagan world is this:  that instead of seeing what is clearly evident in creation – the signs of the Creator, His “invisible nature” and “his eternal power and deity” – the pagans sinfully confused the two, Creator and creation, and ended up worshipping and serving that which was made by God rather than worshipping God Himself.  This is the source of all idolatry, so fervently denounced by the Hebrew prophets and after them by the Christian Church, which has always sought to proclaim to the world the one, true God. 

            Implied in St. Paul’s words above is one of the most basic understandings that Christians have of God – along with Jews and Muslims – and that is God’s transcendence.  “God is infinitely greater than all his works,” as the Catechism expresses it (300).  An earlier passage in the Catechism also warns us,

God transcends all creatures.  We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, image-bound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God – ‘the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable’ – with our human representations.  Our human words fall short of the mystery of God (42).

            Yet, if we are to speak of God, human words are all we have.  So we must be careful to avoid the incaution like that expressed in the words of one Sr. Clare McBrien, a speaker at the annual Bishop Begley Conference on Appalachia, where she delivered a talk entitled, “Environmental Justice and Living Sustainably.”  “God acts within creation,” Sr. McBrien announced, “Thinking of God as outside creation implies God as a ruler.  God is in everything, thus everything is holy”; and, “Now we are seeing that humans are part of creation, within creation, but not above creation” (quoted from the article, “Doing Justice to God’s Creation,” in the October 28^th issue of The Catholic News & Herald of the Diocese of Charlotte).  Here all prudence is thrown to the winds, and by these infelicitous statements, whatever the speaker’s intention, Sr. McBrien ignores, or at worst, excludes, the proper understandings of God as transcendent and of man as destined to share in that transcendence.

            But we have all heard this before – environmental concern wrapping itself in the mantle of religion.  It is one thing to challenge the faithful to good stewardship of God’s creation, but it is quite another to try to transform our religion into a kind of spiritual environmentalism.  This Sr. McBrien does with the now standard New Age approach, which is simply pantheism by another name.  For indeed, if “God is in everything” such that “everything is holy,” then this “religion” is exactly what would please any ancient Stoic or modern-day pilgrim to California or to Stonehenge.  Sr. McBrien, maybe unknown to herself, is explaining to us just why things like crystals shed divine energy into those who grasp them and how it is that one must apologize to a tree before he has to chop it down.  And if Sister will not go that far, it is only because she will not follow her premises logically down the yellow brick road of contemporary spiritualities.  They are all saying pretty much the same thing as she, and they say it with that same self-assuredness that Sister does when her expression presumes that no one could possibly disagree with what she deems so self-evident.  Quoting again from the article, “Thinking of God as outside creation implies God as ruler” (and we are now way too grown up to fall for that one), and, “Now we are seeing that….” (and if you don’t see it, you’re blind or stupid).  Fact is, I do know that God is ruler (or He is not God), and, no, I don’t see what Sister thinks is so obvious.  And far more importantly, nor does the Church.

            Yes, most of us have heard this line before.  Those speaking it often have the air of the progressive about them.  If they could only really hear themselves and understand, they would realize – perhaps they already do – that they are hardly ahead of the times or on the cutting-edge of the moment; they are, rather, harking back to religious views long ago tried and found wanting.  They are, often, Christians who have tired of the intellectual effort that the true Faith requires and so have coasted down into the fog-engulfed, mental featherbed of the old, earth-bound, God-is-everywhere-and-is-everything religion or spirituality.  (Take your pick, as a today’s college graduate would more or less express it:  “You know, like, I am not really into, like, organized religion, but I have a really deep spirituality.”)  David Bentley Hart, an Orthodox theologian, has aptly described this approach as the religion (or spirituality) of the boutique – a little bit of this and, yes, a little bit of that, whatever it takes to further “the Cause.”  Sister wields her salt and pepper shakers of New Age and pantheism over what she presumes is a Catholic soup, and we Christians are supposed to smack our lips in anticipation. No thanks, and now, on as to why….

            As I said, Sr. McBrien is really offering us a whole other religion.  She speaks of God in ways incompatible with what the faithful, educated Christian mind holds to; for she speaks of God in terms of “outside creation” or “in everything,” as if either of these is conceivable, given, that is, the Christian understanding of God, in the light of which it is impossible to posit a location of God. God is not “located” anywhere in relation to His creation.  But then again, that’s assuming we are speaking of the God revealed in Jesus Christ – that is, all that is taught concerning God by the Roman Catholic Church.  And that may be assuming too much.  Nevertheless, whatever the beliefs of Sr. McBrien, the Church herself has ever employed far more careful and precise language to express this aspect of the Eternal and Infinite God.  Rather than speaking of God, in relation to the world, in such terms as “outside,” “inside,” “in” or “out,” the Church describes this relation in the following way.  God is Being Himself, Whose very essence and existence are one and the same.  That is, God’s nature is to exist – is being itself – and that infinitely, eternally so.  (Think of God’s words from the burning bush when He revealed His name to Moses – “I am who am.”)  Thus, God is the source and origin of all that is; and everything He has created, then, exists only by way of participation in His Being, something St. Paul preached so eloquently to the Athenians in the first century – a sermon he ended with a quotation from one of the Greeks’ own pagan poets which illustrates exactly what I am saying: 

Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious.  For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, “To an unknown god.”  What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.  The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything.  And [God] made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him.  Yet he is not far from each one of us, for “in him we live and move and have our being…” [Acts 17:22-28, emphasis mine].  

            “In him we live and move and have our being…”  Thus, the things of creation are not the loci of divine presence (a misconception that is the pathway to animism, idol worship, or in more recent terminology, crystal-gazing), but rather, created things are the signs of God’s Being, His creative power (just as St. Paul wrote in Romans 1), in that they can only exist by participating in God’s Being.  God is not located in things [1] ; things are because they share in His existence and so are signs of that existence. Thus the Catholic and sacramental view of nature:  every single thing that exists is an outward sign (not a locus) of a “hidden” reality – the reality of Being Himself, each thing existing by means of this participation, each thing participating according to its nature as God created it, participating, that is, according to different modes, as the creation story in Genesis portrays.  A human being’s existence, for example, is a participation in God that is far higher, more intense (for it includes intelligence and freedom of will) than, say, a rock’s, lying in the flowing waters of a river. If we were to explore this whole first chapter of Genesis more deeply, we would see clearly in the creation story  this hierarchy of goods, this difference in levels and degrees of sharing in God’s Being,  a story which with lyrical style crescendos up to the climax of man’s creation.  The ancient Scriptures, taken up into the Church’s life and teaching, proclaim this reality with those marvelous words:

Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.  So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them (Genesis 1:26, 27).

            Contrary, then, to Sister’s assertion that “humans are not above creation,” the Church, following the Scriptures, says otherwise, at least in this sense:  that God gave man dominion over all His handiwork and has destined him for something – eternal life – far beyond this world.  Thus man is the center and crown of God’s visible creation. Man (male and female) alone, was created in God’s own image and likeness. Yes, in the visible creation, there is something truly special about a giant oak tree; a tree is good, but a dog is even better, and a human being best of all by far.  And the greatest marvel is yet to be said:  as our Faith tells us, the Son of God did not come to us incarnate of an animal or by taking up the nature of a tree. He came into our world incarnate of Mary, His Mother.  Of all the natures of this created realm, He took to His divine Person human nature.  But Sister would have us believe that the whole world is the incarnation.

               Sr. McBrien philosophically and theologically traps herself – if she really does claim to adhere to belief in the God revealed in Christ – she has boxed herself in with her naïve proposition that “God is in everything.”  From this error flows her seeming rejection of God as transcendent, her distorted view of the human being and his relation to the rest of creation, as well as her ill-thought-out conclusion that “everything is holy.”  Given what we have seen of the Church’s teaching concerning the transcendence of God and the nature of man, we can now see more clearly why Sister’s conclusion about holiness is irreconcilable with our Faith and common sense. 

            Rather than “holy,” the Church speaks of everything that God has made as “good,” good because it is His handiwork (Genesis 1:31).  But let’s take Sr. McBrien’s statement as it stands:  if, indeed, “everything is holy” because “God is in everything,” then how can the Catholic distinguish the certain and undoubted holiness of the Blessed Virgin Mary from the so-called “holiness” of an apple or a snail? [2]   Or, to continue on further in this line of thought, how can we, as we habitually do in practice, now distinguish between the value of a human being and that of a cow or sunflower, if one grants Sr. McBrien’s simplistic generalization that “everything is holy”?  What distinguishes the “holiness” of a tuna fish from the sanctity of Francis of Assisi?  We see then the need for grasping the truth of the hierarchy of goods, described above (that though all things are good, some are higher or are of more value than others), as well as the distinction between thinking of things as “good” in contrast to “holy.” 

            We can do the latter (and throw more light on the former) by simply reflecting on what we believe as Catholics and how we practice our Faith.  As is obvious from Genesis, a tree is indeed good, but the tree upon which Christ died is holy, consecrated by His blood; that’s why on Good Friday we bow down or genuflect to kiss the symbol of His passion and why we preserve as most precious the relics of the true cross.  Another example:  the kitchen table, the place where we share our meals in fellowship, is good; the Church’s altars, the place of consecration, are holy.  Water is good, but blessed water is holy water.  The struggling, but believing and practicing Christian is good (both as to his nature created by God as well as to his growth in virtue); but the Saints are holy.  Fresh bread stored in the cupboard is good; the Bread of Life of the Eucharist is most holy (being as It is substantially Christ’s Body and present to our senses under the outward accidents of bread).

            But Sister has got it all backwards.  She “locates” the infinite in the finite and proclaims the finite thus holy.  But God is not in things; He transcends them, and they exist by way of sharing in His eternal, unchanging, infinite existence in differing degrees according to each thing’s nature.  He made them all by speaking them into being, by bequeathing to them a share in His Being.  Thus things are good; otherwise they would not be.  But they are made holy by special means and for special ends.  That is, something’s goodness inheres in the thing by virtue of its very being, but holiness is what something is raised to beyond its natural state and use.  Again, the example of the Saints.  Left in his natural state, a man or woman is not holy.  Human nature, as created by God, is good by the very fact that God made it (even if people deface and deform it with sin); but a human being only becomes holy by the special operations of supernatural grace, by which – with the human being’s cooperation – he is raised to holiness for the purpose of God’s glory and of enjoying for all eternity the vision of God.

            And here, from the Catholic point of view, is revealed to a further degree the stark implausibility of Sr. McBrien’s reductive “everything is holy,” for such a formula cannot account for what Catholics take for granted – the different levels of holiness among the holy:  the supreme holiness of the Eucharist (of Christ Himself), Our Lady alone among the Saints bearing the title of “most holy,” the Saints themselves ranked in a hierarchy of sanctity, the higher and lesser holy things used in Catholic worship and ritual, and so on.  All this complexity, gradation, hierarchy, and distinction are far too much for Sister’s leveling of the “holiness” of “everything.” It is like new wine being poured into old wine skins, and the age-old, creaking pantheism bursts at the seams.  This is all telling too of the nature of modern tendencies toward this pantheism:  they are movements of half-thought driven by the desire for easy solutions, movements allergic to demands on the intellect that are not immediately comfortable and “rewarding,” the speculations of those ill-equipped to take up the subject of theology and philosophy.  There are exceptions among those swimming in the tide of these movements, I grant, but I do not think Sister is one of them. 

              By ignoring basic principles and by failing to make the proper distinctions, Sister manufactures all kinds of irreconcilable problems… unless, that is, she is a pantheist, then all is resolved – except as to why she speaks as a member of a religious order of the Catholic Church.  She would “raise” the things of creation to the status of “holy” only by destroying the very meaning of true holiness, for if “everything is holy,” then nothing really is.  It’s like saying that all the students in the world are “above average” – a generous appellation, perhaps – but if they are all above average, then there is no average.  Pronouncing that “everything is holy” by way of God’s presence in everything is perilously close, as I have said, to pantheism; it is, to repeat, to turn back to wayward religions that located the divine within the things of nature (animism) and to tempt the religious supplicant with the corruption of idols, with what St. Paul condemned in his letter to the Christians at Rome:

Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles.  Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever!  Amen.

            I have argued against Sr. Clare McBrien’s statements, assuming that she remains at heart a Catholic Christian, but I think her mind is elsewhere.  I cannot judge her heart – that is for God to do – but she has publicly spoken her mind, and that stands under the judgment of the teachings of the Church.  And even though it seems obvious that she is deeply concerned about the physical environment, subject as it is to abuse and degradation that so marks our present time, nevertheless there is also the “environment” of the intellect, the human mind which is made for truth.  To knowingly feed another’s intellect with any thing less than truth is also a kind of abuse, a pollution.  And to fall back on the twilight musings and gropings of bygone pagans and of their contemporary, and often clownish, followers, because what they have to say seems more immediately conducive to the triumph of a present-day cause, is a kind of “intellectual” swindle, not to mention an abandonment of the Faith.  No, the environment will not be saved by deifying it, by sacralizing it, but much else will be lost, which is, I submit, far more important:  the truth about our Maker, revealed in Christ, God in whom we live and move and have our being, both on this earth He created and in that glory yet to be revealed.