Holiness and righteousness are terms used in the English Bible and throughout modern expressions of Christianity that hold a sacred place in religious use. I just wanted to comment on how I'm relating to these weighty terms right now.
It has been so obvious for me lately how sin, selfishness, evil, whatever you want to call it is polluting pure and good places across the planet. One expression of this made it abundantly clear to me when the Alberta government rolled back open pit mining restrictions that have been in place for decades to protect the Rocky Mountains. You can read about it here but make sure you're not close to the edge already or this will be the nudge that could send you free-falling (as it did for me) https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/bringing-coal-back
Since I spend a lot of my time in this space; reading, learning, working against pollution, I can easily become swamped by the criminality of it all and how obvious the violations are. I've been challenge though to spend some time thinking about why things in my own little world don't always go well...
Why I fight with my wife and kids, why I miss opportunities to save money when I get the chance, why my relationships always seem to be lacking depth.
My Christian life experience would suggest a lack of holiness or righteousness. I know for a fact that following the teachings of Jesus make my life better. When I do come up against conflict, righteousness is my best defense against accusations. When I'm stressed there's nothing quite like abiding in God's holiness to set my mind at ease and my heart at peace.
This is where blatant acts of pollution are cropping up in my thinking as imagery for my pollution of holiness. Why do I start fights with the people I love and I get all fragmented and dis-unity creeps in? Because I have polluted my "whole-i-ness". Why am I anxious sometimes? Because I'm worried about how my mistakes will play out in the future. My "rightness" is missing so I know I'm wrong and it's going to catch up with me. It's like Jesus is quoted as saying in Matthew 7:4-5
"How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye."
I can't see my own mistakes and end up pointing out other's errors. If I want to go against the removal of the rocky's to get at coal then I better have my ducks in a row. If I want to inspire my children and love my wife I better be whole myself. This is just a short commentary on my own attempts to use my passion for the environment to clean up my own act. I hope to use this drive to preserve the pristine, holy places in the world as a mechanism to pursue righteousness in my own life, thereby making it a pristine holy place where all the good things grow.