I thought it was, but apparently, it isn’t. As Bishop Colin Johnson tells us in this address to synod, it’s also about things like Occupy Toronto slogans and living simply.

This is not just about recycling or composting, although that might be a good start for some people. Most of us need to learn to live simply, so that others can simply live. The Occupy movement’s slogan, I think, might be more useful: “A few might be guilty, but all of us are responsible.” And so we spend time at this synod considering our environment, our place in it, our responsibility, how it is part of God’s mission.

Now he has inspired us with his address, I would like to encourage Bishop Colin to simplify his life by moving into a one room tent in St. James’ park where he will be able to continue his “long-standing work of advocacy and direct service regarding poverty, [and] homelessness” unfettered by the constraints of ecclesiastical bureaucracy.

Bishop Colin astutely notes that Occupy Toronto has managed to achieve something that has eluded the Diocese of Toronto for decades. It has:

touched something real and deep in the psyche of our world today, an anxiety and a disenfranchisement and a sense of huge loss, but what they also touched was really an active hope. That the world as it is, is not the world as it should be. One of the slogans that I saw at one of the tents really struck me. It said: “As you look around the world, does it feel right?”

The slogan was quite true, of course, although it would have been less so had the occupiers made more use of the toilets instead of the grass.