Creationtide, oikophilia, and Harvest Thanksgiving
This description on the Church of England website of the theme for Creationtide 2021 caught my eye for two reasons. The first is that it is suggestive of a response to those who might portray Creationtide as part of a 'woke' agenda in the churches. In his How to Think Seriously about the Plant: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism (2012), the late Roger Scruton invoked the idea of "the love of the oikos" - "the shared love of a shared place" - as the basis for a conservatism serious about the environment:
That, it seems to me, is the goal towards which serious environmentalism and serious conservatism both point - namely, home, the place where we are and that we share, that place that defines us, that we hold in trust for our descendants, and that we don't want to spoil ... it is time to take a more open-minded and imaginative vision of what conservatism and environmentalism have to offer each other. For nobody seems to have identified a motive more likely to serve the environmentalist cause than this one, of the shared love for our home. It is a motive in ordinary people. It can provide a foundation both for a conservative approach to institutions and a conservationist approach to the land ... It is, in my view, the only serious resource that we have, in our fight to maintain local order in the face of a globally stimulated decay ... I describe this motive (or family of motives) as oikophilia, the love of the oikos, or household.
Similarly, Paul Kingsnorth - the convert to Orthodoxy whose writings have received considerable conservative attention - has said in a recent essay:
But we are, I think, desperately in need of real culture. We want to go home again, but if we even know where home is to be found, we see that we can’t return ... When a plant is uprooted, it withers and then dies. When the same happens to a person, or a people, or a planetful of both, the result is the same. Our current cultural - and spiritual - crisis comes, I think, from our being unable to admit what on some level we know to be true: that we in the West are living inside an obsolete story. Our culture is not dying - it is already dead. We turned away from a mythic, rooted understanding of the world, and turned away from the divine, in order to look at ourselves reflected in the little black mirrors in our hands. Now, we are living in a time of consequences.
Both Scruton and Kingsnorth, in other words, point to the significance of oikos for the Church's thinking on environmental matters. Kingsnorth points to the absence of a love of and reverence for oikos as part of the spiritual crisis which has led to the current environmental challenges. Scruton also goes on to indicate that religion has a role to play in fostering and nurturing such love and reverence through "the concept of the sacred":
This care for sacred places is part of the domestication of religion - a process that has for two millennia worked on the Christian faith, attaching it to local saints and shrines, to towns and civic ceremonies, even (as in the case of the Anglican Church) to a nation and its law.
There is, then, an important conservative reading of the theme for Creationtide 2021, a recognition that 'home' necessarily embraces the environment and that oikophilia must include a spiritual reverence for our environment.
Secondly, the theme of oikos is good to bear in mind as we are now in the time when the Festival of Harvest Thanksgiving is celebrated in parish churches across these Islands, as our Canadian friends prepare for Thanksgiving on 11th October, and, with the arrival of Fall, friends in the United States begin to look ahead to 25th November. Harvest Thanksgiving is a celebration of a rich understanding of oikos, in which gratitude for land, weather, environment, and natural beauty combines with gratitude for food, labour, and human creativity.
Harvest Thanksgiving roots us, joyfully reminding us of our dependence upon land, weather, and soil, that the good life cannot be lived apart from these, that they are intrinsic to the experience of beauty and goodness. The Festival of Harvest Thanksgiving brings us to rightly see our oikos, re-rooting us in dependence, beauty, and goodness. As such, it calls us to a renewed and wise stewardship. Words from Scruton capture something of how Harvest Thanksgiving can do this:
The solution, it seems to me, is to care for one's home, meanwhile living not frugally but temperately, not stingily but with prudent generosity, so as to embellish and renew the plot of earth and community, to which one is attached.
The homely nature of Harvest Thanksgiving - the oikophilia which it embodies - is, thus, not reactionary nostalgia to be patronisingly dismissed but a significant characteristic of this popular festival which can exemplify both the very purpose of Creationtide and how to ground a Christian approach to the environment, celebrating and encouraging what Laudato si' called the "ecological virtues" which can sustain the "ecology of daily life". And, indeed, Laudato si' also suggests the importance of the local, an important feature of the imaginative appeal - parish, landscape, hymns, folk memory - of Harvest Thanksgiving:
Together with the patrimony of nature, there is also an historic, artistic and cultural patrimony which is likewise under threat. This patrimony is a part of the shared identity of each place and a foundation upon which to build a habitable city. It is not a matter of tearing down and building new cities, supposedly more respectful of the environment yet not always more attractive to live in. Rather, there is a need to incorporate the history, culture and architecture of each place, thus preserving its original identity. Ecology, then, also involves protecting the cultural treasures of humanity in the broadest sense. More specifically, it calls for greater attention to local cultures when studying environmental problems.
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