MASTERY AND MYSTERY
In our relation to nature, we have to walk the precarious path and live in the difficult rhythm between mystery and mastery. It is not technology and theology or science and theology that need to be reconciled. It is rather these two attitudes - mastery and mystery - which have to be held in tension.
Our mastery of the universe is like the mastery of our bodies; it is not that we may have it for our own use, but that we may give nature, as our extended body, into the hands of the loving God in the great mystery of the eucharistic self-offering. This is the mystery of the cross. Christ gave himself, with humanity and nature, to God, in self-denying love, and thereby saved humanity and nature. It is in that eternal act of sacrifice and love that we too are called upon to participate.
Technology is the way of humanizing the world of matter in time-space, and thereby of extending the human body to envelop the whole universe. But that humanizing and extension, if it is to be salvific, must find its proper culmination in man's offering of himself and the universe to God in love. A secular technology of mastery of nature for oneself is the "original" sin, of dethroning God, and claiming mastery for the sake of indulging our own cupidity, avarice, and greed.
The mastery of nature must be held within the mystery of worship. Otherwise we lose both mastery and mystery.
Metropolitan Paulos Mar Gregorios
The Human Presence: Ecological Spirituality and the Age of the Spirit
Page 93, Amity House, New York 1987
First Published by the World Council of Churches 1978
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