The self-absorption of our many man-made forms of security — locked up in a warm bed each evening, food from the shops, electricity in our walls, water from our taps, but above all the seeming independence locked up in our bunch of keys — has domesticated us and blinded us to the delicate fallibility of everything that guarantees comfort. Everything is so easy. We buy, we talk, we know. We come and we go. We have answers, we have solutions — conveniently easy and with no sacrifice required.

But what is our civility other than a thin little layer of technology, perfume and speed over barbarism? Because outward progress cannot take place at the cost of inward civility. A society out of kilter like that will in the end, like a cancer, fall back on its own tissue to digest it and restore the balance.

The calm dignity with which a tree, a mountain, or a lily anchor themselves upright against storms and time and weathering makes our man-made efforts to impress look watered-down and shallow. Wherever we have cut down in order to build or to plant, it hardly ever looks meaningfully beautiful any more. Bars, razor wire, Vibracrete — an all-encompassing sterilisation of fertility at the earth's most sensitive place: its soil. The same soil from which the first human being was formed. Soil that was more than the womb of the first human. Full of possibility, it upholds a divine order out of which food, shelter, precious stones, building material and energy are drawn. In nearly every inspiration we take hold of to serve comfort and progress, we do so without sensitivity or responsibility. And that is why weeds, anti-theft gates, and pollution have become the fingerprint of the restless modern society. Half-hearted efforts without effectiveness punish the senses wherever you go.

Moving beauty you find now only in nature — tamed or untouched. Everywhere where the Lord himself was the artist, the architect or the gardener. There everything harmonises in perfect instinct, full of oxygen, and lets your heart and your eyes breathe. As though He alone still loves His world. As though He alone still looks after it. A commission given to us. A commission that we have forsaken. Too clever, too prosperous, too hurried, we no longer yearn for the kind of wisdom that anchors itself in sound deliberation. Fearlessly fearful, we only build higher fences and take out better insurance. Like Ahab, we entrust our souls to the Lord, but our animals, our fields, our orchards and our prosperity we entrust to Baal.

It is in our confrontations with constant forces like life and like death that we feel our own dependent narrowness — close to our belongings, and right against our body. Are we going to go and ask for wisdom? Wisdom that meaningfully reconciles the intrigues of science and of the aesthetic with the commission to till and to watch over. We have tilled without conscience for a long time now. Now we are doing it without heart as well.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer