Go Green?

By Michael Heidt

Special to Virtueonline

www.virtueonline.org

Oct. 7, 2014

If you feel unsettled at the prospect of large groups of privileged

people from the developed world spending vast sums of money and fossil

fuel to listen to pep talks on climate change activism, then prepare to

be dismayed.

The Episcopal Church just spent a whopping $500,000 flying its House of

Bishops to Taipei, for their fall meeting. To what end? Expanding the

Apostolic Imagination, apparently, that being the theme of the event.

But what does this mean? If the Episcopal Church's Leaderene, Presiding

Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori, is anything to go by, it's code for

being "green." Here's an excerpt from her September 17 sermon to the

assembled prelates. Following an introduction about the life of St.

Hildegard von Bingen, from whom she gets the word viriditas (greenness),

Schori goes on to ask:

"Where do you meet viriditas? Where is joy and wonder in the world

around you? What creative ferment engages and transforms you? All are

signs of expanding possibility, divine creativity, and new green shoots

emerging."

Then, after referencing Sirach and the Psalmist, Schori goes on to

enlist St. John the Evangelist in the climate change movement, and even

Christ himself gets a mention (it's the one time he's named in the

sermon) -- as the "green man" of pagan myth. Remarkable:

"John's gospel speaks of those who love darkness as those who refuse the

encounter with God's creative, greening Word. Those who do what is true,

he says, are those who are willing to live in that fiery light that

burns and transforms like a laser -- perhaps a green laser that

enlightens or heals. The light has come into the world for life. The

Celts and others often imaged Christ as the green man -- the life-giver

-- the way, the truth, and the life."

The Lindisfarne monks and their co-religionists saw Christ as the green

man? The same nature spirit that Saint Rabanus Maurus described as

demonic in the 8th century? Who knew? And it's more than a little

worrying to note that Global Warming skeptics find themselves on the

wrong side of St. John. But the Presiding Bishop isn't finished

expanding the apostolic imagination of her bishops with the virtues of

viriditas.

"This Episcopal Church is in the throes of creative ferment, yearning to

find a new congruence that will discover emerging life in new soil, and

refreshed growth in the plantings of former years. Our gathering here

will offer opportunities to learn of greenness in different pastures,

and God willing, transform us to discover abundance and possibility in

more familiar ones."

Creative ferment? An interesting way to describe the interior workings

of a small and declining denomination that's reinvented itself as an

LGBTQ advocacy group with a sideline in aggressive litigation. But

still, Jefferts Schori isn't above a "call to action," green action, of

course.

"Viriditas begins in wonder, and emerges to motivate constructive,

healing connection between air and ocean, carbon and crops, hunger and

floods, Ebola and economic inequality. Bishop Michael Baroi of

Bangladesh challenged the bishops of this Church to find that connection

when we gathered in Puerto Rico in 2003. He told of flooding on his

coastal plains, and cried, 'save us from these curses!' He might as well

have said, 'show forth greenness.'"

She concludes by describing Saint Paul's viridic power as evidenced in

the Apostle's Epistle to the Colossians. He's part of the green movement

too, along with Sirach, the Psalmist, St. John and Jesus himself.

"As Colossians puts it, be at peace, let the creative word of God take

root within you and bear new branches, discover viriditas and truth, and

be not afraid. New life is springing forth -- be thankful -- and pray

for the gift of joy and wonder in God's good, green, creative

possibility."

And there you have it. In the whole address the word "green" appears 13

times, almost rivaling the word "the." The word "Christ" appears once,

in an astonishing sentence equating him with the "green man" of pagan

legend, and the word "salvation" appears not at all. We could perhaps be

forgiven for wondering if the whole thing was written by a U.N.

apparatchik, rather than a Christian. But that aside, there is an irony

in the Presiding Bishop's idea of what it means to expand the apostolic

imagination. I hope, for her sake, that it's unconscious.

In the first place, urging some 100 comparatively privileged bishops to

be green on the heels of who knows how much spent jet fuel, is at best

ironic and at worst, bald-faced hypocrisy. All at the cost of $500,000.

Climate change awareness doesn't come cheap, it seems, and so much for

the House of Bishops' brave attempt to minimize their carbon footprint.

This is bad enough but it gets worse. Schori's new-found green virtue,

viriditas, isn't original with her and she freely admits it. It's a word

used by the famous 12th century "Sibyl of the Rhine," Saint Hildegard

von Bingen, who was a reforming Benedictine Abbess, scientist, musician,

preacher and visionary, or prophet.

The Presiding Bishop likes Hildegard because she celebrated the creative

power of God in creation by using the word "greenness," which fits in

well with Schori's own climatic sloganeering. The Episcopal Church is

all about being green and so too, evidently, is Hildegard. The 12th

century abbess is also a woman, notoriously, who wasn't afraid to use

feminine imagery for God, which makes her a fit patron for Episcopalian

feminadoxy. To cap it off, Hildegard was a prophet, just like the

Episcopal Church imagines itself to be. Here's Schori reverently

touching on this last aspect in the introduction to her sermon:

"Listen to Hildegard the prophet: 'He Who Is says, 'I destroy contumacy,

and by myself I crush the resistance of those who despise me. Woe, woe

to the malice of wicked men who defy me! Hear this, king, if you wish to

live; otherwise my sword shall smite you.'"

Jefferts Schori is in favor of this and supplies her hearers with the

fact that Hildegard is rebuking the Emperor Barbarossa for fueling

schism in the church. We'll return to that, but first listen to

Hildegard the prophet speaking in a different context, one that the

Presiding Bishop doesn't mention:

"Diabolical seduction [by the Cathars] gives rise to criminals and

seducers, the hate and the crime of the devil, brigands and thieves; but

it is in homosexuality that the sin is most impure, the root of all

vices. When these sins have accumulated among the nations, the

constitution of God's law will be torn, and the Church, like a widow,

will be stricken."

This brings us to the point. Saint Hildegard, one of the few Doctors of

the Church, no less, was fiercely anti-schismatic, as we've seen, a

scourge of heretical Catharism and about as far removed from being an

LGBTQ champion as you could hope to get. In short, she was a zealously

orthodox catholic Christian of the 12th century, and while she was able

to use feminine language to describe God, she could only do so because

she was firmly grounded in his transcendent Fatherhood. We see something

of this in Hildegard's opposition to the ordination of women as priests.

"Therefore," she writes in Scivias, quoting God the Father, "just as the

earth cannot plow itself, a woman must not be a priest and do the work

of consecrating the Body and Blood of my Son; although she can sing the

praise of her Creator, just as the earth can receive rain to water its

fruits." Take it or leave it, that's Hildegard's view on the matter and

Schori is either unaware of this or conveniently ignores it.

Still, the Saint was a prophetic apocalyptic visionary. Listen to

another utterance made by the "Teutonic Seer," and ignored by Schori, in

which the Beast, as Antichrist, emerges from the womb of a wounded

church that has been raped by the Devil. It's worth quoting at length:

"The image of the woman [the Church] before the altar in front of the

eyes of God that I saw earlier was now also shown to me again so that I

could also see her from the navel down. From the navel to the groin she

had various scaly spots. In her there appeared a monstrous and totally

black head with fiery eyes, ears like the ears of a donkey, nostrils and

mouth like those of a lion, gnashing with vast open mouth and sharpening

its horrible iron teeth in a horrid manner... Lo, the monstrous head

removed itself from its place with so great a crash that the entire

image of the woman was shaken in all its members. Something like a great

mass of much dung was joined to the head; then, lifting itself upon a

mountain, it attempted to ascend to the height of heaven. A stroke like

thunder came suddenly and the head was repelled with such strength that

it both fell from the mountain and gave up the ghost."

After describing the fall of Antichrist and the woe of those who had

been deceived by him, Hildegard continues:

"Behold, the feet of the aforementioned female image appeared to be

white, giving out a brightness above that of the sun. I heard a voice

from heaven saying to me: 'Even though all things on earth are tending

toward their end, so hardships and calamities is bowed down to its End,

nevertheless, the Spouse of my Son, though much weakened in her

children, will never be destroyed either by the heralds of the Son of

Perdition or by the Destroyer himself, however much she will be attacked

by them. At the End of time she will arise more powerful and more

secure; she will appear more beautiful and shining so that she may go

forth in this way more sweetly and more agreeably to the embraces of her

Beloved. The vision which you saw signifies all this in mystic

fashion.'" (Scivias 3:11; Translated by B McGinn, Visions of the End,

pp101-102)

Hildegard's words speak for themselves and I'll leave you to consider

the extent to which they apply to Katharine Jefferts Schori's version of

God's church: a church which has come out of the church, and which

wounds the Body of Christ by its violently continued schism, heresy and

open immorality.

That a quasi-Cathar, such as the Presiding Bishop, should have chosen

such a Saint as the patron of her House of Bishops is irony indeed and

perhaps apt. Hildegard stands as a prophetic voice to the heretics of

her own time and to ours, a voice calling for repentance and a reminder

of the implacable will of God. A will that guarantees Antichrist

overthrown and the church beautiful and shining in the embrace of her

Beloved.

Herein lies true viriditas, or "greenness" if you like, the abundant,

procreative, life-giving power of God in His Bride, the church.

Fr. Michael Heidt is Editor of Forward in Christ magazine and a priest

in the Diocese of Fort Worth.

This article can be found at http://www.forwardinchrist.org.

END