One might have entitled this article as "Crimes Against Nature" or "Crimes Against the Environment", but "Crimes Against Creation" gives it a more personal twist, because if we believe in a God who has created the world albeit through an evolutionary process which is still unfolding, a crime against nature is in effect a crime against God the creator which requires a final account.
I was walking with my wife in the Gozitan countryside and everywhere around us became an attestation of illegality. Bird calls galore, shooting of protected birds, buildings going up such as garages of a questionable nature, angry persons confronting one on right of passage through paths on questionable private properties. The list is endless. It seems that Labour is forgetting the lessons it had learnt after the Mintoffian era and was harking back to those times. The individual, not the common good; who you are, rather than the rule of law. One allows the digression of the rule of law to proceed unchecked to the benefit of blue-eyed boys to the extent that people become empowered to do as they wish to the detriment of others, and to the detriment of nature. It is not only love of nature that is at play here but also theological considerations. God has a plan for creation and we aim to frustrate it.
It is interesting to tell a little story of Celtic spirituality which has contributed so much to Western Christianity. Every time one goes to confession, one may remember that it was Celtic Monasticism that gave auricular confession to the Church. But Celtic Christianity has given us much more. Together with stories of St Francis with the animals and Seraphim of Sarov plus many others, the Celtic take on nature has tried to restore back to humanity an image of God's plan for nature before the fall, before man let his pride and blind thirst for greed become the main motive of existence thereby inverting God's original plan for creation. There is more than genuine affection for animals and love of nature involved here.
There is a beautiful story of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (an early saint of the Northumbrian church and Celtic tradition, a monk and bishop - 687 AD) who was living in a monastery in Coldingham Scotland. He used to disappear at night after evening prayer and return in early morning before morning prayer. Intrigued, a monk followed him at night and was surprised to see him pray and wade in and out of the sea all night. At dawn, the saint came out of the sea accompanied by two sea-otters who played about around him, then stopped to receive his blessing and went back into the sea. The monk realised that what he had seen was not a man playing on the beach with some pets, but a man transformed in prayer, alter Christus, ipse Christus, the face of Christ in a man, in whom the right order of creation had been restored!
God had created an original harmony between man and nature, which was destroyed by the fall and which Christ will restore on His return. However, the Kingdom of God is amongst us and it is our human action in line with Christ's teaching that can restore the right order of creation even now. The question is whether we really want to and if we will not there is an account to give.
Pseudo-Augustine, an unknown monk of Ireland (600AD) wrote that God's attestation in scripture that on the sixth day he looked at everything created and saw that it was good, he meant that to be, that everything was perfect. Therefore, this must have meant there could be nothing new which violated the order of creation. All new developments, including miracles, then had to be revelatory acts of a potential already present in a creation with a speeded-up time sequence. Time for God is part of eternity and very relative. Changing water into wine is a speeded-up emulation of nature where the vine takes up water and changes it into wine anyway. Nature is a harmonious whole whose integrity not even God himself will violate.
On the sixth day God also created man. There is the potential of the perfect man to achieve solidarity with God in prayer and act, then there is the man who wishes to do things as he likes. This government here unfortunately thinks in its strong-man like attitude of founding its policy on personal interest not the common good, not unlike some others around today. Not only is this a subversion of nature with its consequences but a subversion of man's real potential of acquiring human dignity itself.
This government's intention to limit or remove the right of individual petition for a magisterial inquiry flies in the face of the perfect inherent goodness of created nature with man at its peak. This is because there is a right to justice inherent in man's dignity and which when challenged by wrong deeds and maladministration, cannot now be challenged in any real way. This government is repeatedly showing that its intention is not the common good but the pursuit of power. Not the pursuit of happiness but the pursuit of money. Right order is and has been inverted here for a long time now. It is focused on self-aggrandisement and the protection of deviants rather than the empowerment of the man in the street, very much like Labour in the 1970's and 1980's.
This Labour government's approach to creation compares well with its approach to man himself. Definitely not an opening of the potential to real Act, but an Act of negation of any potential at all, just as had occurred in the Jean Paul Sofia case. In the end, always a negation of God's original plan for the dignity of man and creation!
Dr Michael Asciak MD PhD is a former Nationalist MP