Earth Grief – A Book After My Heart David R. Weiss – November 10, 2023 Book Review: Earth Grief: The Journey Into and Through Ecological Loss by Stephen Harrod Buhner, Raven Press, 2022.
Earth Grief by Stephen Harrod Buhner is a book after my heart. Purchased on a relative whim during Chelsea Green Publishing’s fall sale, I was (of course) drawn to the title which resonates so closely with my own intuition about what this moment requires of us. That whim proved providential as Earth Grief abounds with insight, wisdom, and love.
Buhner’s background includes a bit of everything. As the byline on the back cover succinctly summarizes, he is “the award-winning author of 24 books on plant medicines, Earth ecosystem dynamics, emerging diseases, and the states of mind and being necessary for successful habitation of Earth.” Not mentioned there but essential for this book: his knowledge of language and his study of death and dying.
Buhner defines Earth grief as “our feeling response to a communication from the heart of Earth urging us … to reinhabit our interbeing with the world.” (14-15) When we suppress this grief—whether in pursuit of scientific objectivity or pressed by cultural norms—we’re actually choosing pathology. Silencing the alarm we ought to be feeling in response to Earth’s wounds. If we instead allow that grief in, permitting it to move through us, it will awaken our deeper self and call forth our unique gifts as needed in this moment. Earth grief is thus a vocational compass, aligning our particular lives with the whole horizon of life.
Buhner writes with a sense of heartfelt urgency. Not because he thinks it’s still possible to avoid ecological-societal collapse (quite the opposite), but because he believes grief can guide us into and through that loss. The warmth of his writing reflects his intimate knowledge and infectious love of Earth, but also an equally genuine love of humanity. The grief he describes is personal grief. His for Earth; his for us.
Buhner says that we (in the West) learn to dissociate from an early age; we set our feelings aside as though we know the world better once we’ve silenced our heart. Taught to be wary of anthropomorphizing the world, we end up mechanomorphizing it instead (reducing it to a machine). He observes how many ecologists distance themselves from their feelings by moving from the immediacy of first-person voice into a more universal second-person voice or a yet more abstract third person voice when speaking or writing about the siege of nature going on all around us. Our world is daily being unworlded, but we are determined to remain calm.
First-person, Buhner would say. My world is daily being unworlded, but I’m being taught/pressured to remain clam. And that calm is killing me and my world. First-person speech owns the experience.
This is part of attending to a “climate of mind,” by which he means the defining ambience of a perspective—or a place. We can adopt a climate of mind that dissociates us from the unfolding disaster … or a climate of mind willing to feel Earth’s pain and grieve in response. Similarly, an old growth forest has a climate of mind that exudes its pungent complex harmony while a swath of clear-cut land has a climate of mind like an anguished scream of abandonment. At heart is the recognition that both people and place exist with rich emotional texture—and the erasure of that texture erases four billion years of evolutionary effort and wisdom.
But there’s nothing sentimental about that wisdom. Life longs to flourish (as whole): that’s what we sense in the old growth forest. But flourishing life involves, demands, simply connotes (without judgment) an abundance of death. That’s as true for us as for any ecosystem. So, let me resume Buhner’s preferred first-person voice. The core truth is that I live by the death of other things and other things will one day in turn live by the death of me. I might prefer to imagine utopias in which death isn’t necessary, but Buhner insists every deathless utopia is dystopian. “Death is not a flaw in the system, it is a feature. It is built into the system and it’s built into the system for a reason.” (201) So long as I refuse to embrace death as part of the bargain of life, I help drive the eco-crisis because that refusal tempts me to live without regard for finitude.
The crucial move happens when I admit that death is always at the table. From that moment on, I can begin to make choices that are responsible to the reality of life in which death is always inevitably present. I can begin to live wisely in a world that runs on the twinned—fully entwined—energies of life/death.
Unfortunately, for too many generations, and with far too much industrial inertia, human civilization has lived otherwise. While Buhner agrees the climate crisis is one consequence of this, he plumbs the depth of our dysfunction by looking at plastics and pharmaceuticals. Our unchecked reliance on both is just as ruinous for the planet’s ecosystems as the unchecked emission of greenhouse gasses. Both plastics and pharmaceuticals move through ecosystems with devastating consequences.
Plastics bond to rock, invade food chains, and take up residence in tissue across all manner of creatures from plankton to person. Most drugs leave our bodies (or animal bodies) or the crop/soil/water on which they’ve been applied without losing their potency meaning they continue to “work” elsewhere—disrupting in just decades finely balanced ecological harmonies achieved over millennia. The rampant use of antibiotics in particular has been teaching(!) bacteria how to survive modern medicine—learning(!) that gets passed from bacteria to bacteria. If the words “teach” and “learn” seem overstated for bacteria, Buhner might say that’s because the words “arrogance” and “folly” are understatements for human civilization.
Unsurprisingly, when he finally delivers his diagnosis, it’s terminal. Not necessarily for humanity, but surely for what we have come to call civilization. Human activity has so altered the systems we depend on that we’re headed for an entirely new normal. One that may well take centuries of upheaval before it finally settles in … so far from the normal we now know, that everything at present is at an end. Dying. An ending already underway. Reflecting on the image of a terminally ill spouse, he writes, “And maybe it is the same with Earth as it is with my beloved: if I am wise, I will reach out so that we can grieve together while there is still time.” (175) Only the warmth of his writing makes the heartbreak of such words bearable. Just barely.
To help orient us to the ending we face, Buhner explores the terrain of death from terminal disease to other instances of gut-wrenching loss. Death unmoors us. And the fact that this world—from ecosystem to social system—is ending, will do the same. Meanwhile, “Grief will be our companion on the journey because of what we have lost and because the losing will not end in our lifetime—nor will it end in the lifetime of our children or our grandchildren, or their children either.” (195) Ultimately, Buhner turns to the work of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross (with whom he studied) to find guidance for traversing the territory of Earth grief. He recounts vignettes that highlight the wisdom of choosing to love and to serve in the face of death, concluding that “She [Kübler-Ross] did not find despair or apathy to be the final state of being that occurs when a person truly accepts the fact of a terminal illness. She found it to be something else entirely.” (240)
In the last thirty pages of Earth Grief Buhner explores what that “something else entirely” might mean for those of us living with Earth grief on the far side of acceptance. These pages are impossible to capture in a few words; you really must digest the first 240 pages to receive the wisdom he offers here at the end. I’ll just say this. Buhner holds an almost mystical (he would perhaps say an ecological-minded and evolution-fostered) conviction that we’re in radical relationship with Earth. I don’t use the work “mystical” lightly. His conviction hearkens to Augustine’s exclamation in his Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” I’ve no doubt Buhner would trade “Lord” for “Earth” and say the same.
Because of this radical relationship the only way we can reclaim our fully human selves as we meet this approaching End involves learning once again to touch and be touched by Earth … opening ourselves to Earth grief. And perhaps even to something more. Indeed, in ways that will only emerge as this renewal unfolds, he suggests this renewal is healing for both people and Earth (and all the creatures in between). Not a healing that can alter this Ending, but a healing that can alter what comes next.
I was so moved by Earth Grief and felt such a kinship with Buhner’s work that even before I’d finished the book, I felt compelled to reach out and share some of my own writing with him. I found his website and as soon as I landed on the homepage I was met with his … obituary. Stephen died in December 2022. I was overcome—with grief. How fitting.
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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, “writing into the whirlwind” of contemporary challenges, joys, and sorrows around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, peace, and family. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in Writing into the Whirlwind atwww.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.
The fabric of our lives has frayed. Indeed, the fabric of life itself on this fragile planet has frayed. Globally, multiple societies and ecosystems are in peril. Countless humans, as well as flora and fauna, are at risk. But all these statements are deceptively … passive. Although change, even peril, is the way of the world, this change, this peril, is not the result of some evolutionary whim or random cosmic rancor. No, this rising ruin has roots … elsewhere. In us.
Welcome to the Anthropocene, that geologic epoch that echoes our name (anthropos: humanity) because, at last, in this epoch human activity has come to assert itself as a force of planetary scale. (Think “fossil fuel and friends”: soaring CO2, clear cut forests, melting icecaps, polluted waterways, ecosystems fractured and destroyed, and species seemingly racing—being run—toward extinction.) This is change and peril on steroids. But worse: it is unmistakably ecocidal in aim. It is change for the sake of destruction. Peril for the rapacious rush of adrenaline. It is madness. And ruin. Ours. Earth’s.
Indeed, the passive tense of that opening paragraph is dishonest. Human activity writ large is on a murderous assault across Earth. From at least the industrial age onward we have ripped that fabric ourselves—and done so with glee. We have pursued the peril of societies and ecosystems as though it were our life’s purpose. We have razed flora and fauna in a killing frenzy we call “progress.” How quaint.
“We” is loaded language, of course. It means mostly those members of the “developed” world, “developed” itself a misnomer, since that very development is bringing about the death of the planetary systems that support life. And even among this “developed” world, most of us are more accurately described as entangled actors trapped in the systems at the heart of the Anthropocene. Undeniable accomplices in an ecocidal assault that nevertheless profits us very little and over which we have no real power. And yet, this ruin will wreck us all. What irony: the Anthropocene, flying our species’ flag in its name, may end up being the epoch that ushers us … out.
The exact onset of the Anthropocene remains up for debate. It’s most often dated to the 1940’s or 1950’s, tagged to the dawn of the nuclear age or the post-war boom of industrial growth and consumer consumption. Both events can lay legitimate claim to tilting Earth’s axis off center. But neither came out of nowhere, and there are those who argue for dating the Anthropocene from the invention of the steam engine (1712) or more broadly the advent of the Industrial Revolution (around 1780), both of which are direct if distant forebears of the atomic/consumer ages.
Still others suggest that humanity first ran afoul of Earth’s aspirations for a mutually beneficial relationship already some 12,000(!) years ago with the Agricultural Revolution: that this first step into settled life and toward what eventually became civilization is where the earliest roots of our now approaching ruin started out. That planting crops was the opening move in a cultural chess match with Earth, of which the Bomb and the Market are simply the moments when we cried “Check!” and “Check Mate!” (Without realizing that this joyful cry effectively … existentially … meant that we lost everything. Oops.)
I don’t doubt that these various external factors—cultivating crops, building machines, splitting the atom, and selling ourselves all manner of things we don’t need—have played a role in bringing us to this fraught moment. But as someone who specializes in the power of our inner worlds, I want to suggest that the true roots of our ruin lie within.
In short, we fell apart. Three short words, brimful—of catastrophe. Spilling out in multiple directions.
Where do I begin? That, right there, is THE question. Posed not rhetorically but evocatively. Where do any of us begin? The central lie that has taken up residence in our inner world is that we “begin” somewhere other than in nature. That we are somehow above and qualitatively different than “animals.” That we move through this world as conquerors-yet-aliens destined for eternal life in some realm other than this one. This is the lie in which we live. The lie that threatens to kill us all.
We fell apart. In one of Western culture’s defining origin myths (Judeo-Christian, but culturally omnipresent), Genesis 3 recounts the story we’ve come to know as The Fall in the Garden of Eden. There are many ways to interpret that tale, but today I’m mostly just borrowing that word: FALL. The story implies that once upon a time there was a perfect world in which there were perfect human beings who unfortunately, tragically, made a wrong choice—and fell.
I don’t believe there was such a past. I’m persuaded our origins unfolded much more slowly, as the life force in our genes inched slowly across eons toward greater complexity of cognition until humanity—homo sapiens—appeared. But the truth of the Genesis tale lies in its witness to the early recognition that things are not as we wish they might be. Whether or not a perfect world ever was (it wasn’t!), this world’s “imperfection” presses in on us. Inexorably and uncomfortably. Flood, famine, disease, tragedy, the hard labor of daily life, the pain of childbirth, and, ultimately, death. This is not the world we would’ve mapped had we been asked. But it is the world in which we find ourselves, nonetheless. It is a world that challenges us to make meaning.
And in that world, we chose to fall apart. That is, at some point, we chose to meet this beautiful but unpredictable, abundant but harrowing, life-giving but death-demanding world by choosing that our true home was elsewhere. That the flora and fauna around us were not family but fodder. Rather than seeking the wisdom to make ourselves at home here, we imagined we were ultimately not part of the cycle of life here on Earth, but merely biding time until we found our real home. Elsewhere. Apart. And there we fell.
We know better now. And yet by now we are so entangled in patterns of apart-ness that both our habits and our hearts resist the only truth that might guide us into and through the ruins ahead.
For instance, we know now that we are alive becausewe are ecosystems: interwoven with the world. Not apart. Primarily in our gut, but also in our mouths, lungs and on our skin, our daily vitality depends on over 1000 species of microbes whose lives are interwoven with ours. They number 100 trillion—in each of us. Altogether there are somewhere between seven and eight POUNDS of microbes living in me so that I can live. Whole metropolises of essential diversity. Because their cells are much smaller than mine, there are about ten times as many specifically nonhuman cells in my body as human cells. By this measure,I am, as it were, a minority presence in my own body.
Beyond this, we can trace elements on Earth and in our bodies to ancient stars. We realize that the oxygen we need to breathe and the food we need to eat is produced by other members of the Earth community. If we dare to think clearly about, we know that our very bodies are comprised of materials reused from those who came before us. My body might well contain matter that once walked as a dinosaur or towered as a tree or flitted as a bumble bee. I am … and you are … the living intersection of a cosmic, now Earth-bound, ecological saga. Far from “apart,” we are all more entirely together than we usually imagine.
But this knowing remains disconnected from our doing. From our speaking. Even from our dying.
We “know” (science tells us) we are consuming the planet at an unsustainable pace—a pace certain before long to crash the planet’s capacity to sustain human society in its present form. Yet we drill for more oil. We make more unnecessary stuff. We measure our success and satisfaction by standards that are scientifically and mathematically ecocidal. Because we fell apart. Because we found ourselves folded into a Giant Lie that told us we were somehow exempt from the laws of nature that govern everything else on this pale blue dot.
We “know” (science tells us) that ecosystems are comprised of subjects not objects. Of countless creatures and plants each pursuing their unique life—and each contributing to a larger communal life—with an agency that is no less real simply because it boggles our minds. The world teems with life; it vibrates with the energy of relatedness. From the quantum level to the macro level, life is less a matter of individual lives than a symphony of notes sounding in concert with one another. Bees are bee-ing; frogs are frog-ing; flowers are flower-ing; marshes are marsh-ing. And altogether everything is being its interwoven self. Nothing—least of all us, exists on its own. Subjects, every one of us, but held, cradled, caressed, “caught,” as MLK said, “in an escapable network of mutuality.”
But the very syntax of our language largely erases the subjectivity of our companion creatures. Almost as though it was designed to be complicit in colonization and exploitation—to shape our patterns of world-making at a subconscious level that sets us apart from the rest of our world. English (and most Western-rooted languages) prizes nouns over verbs. Linguistically, this provides us with a multitude of objects to manipulate rather than a community of subjects with which to relate. But wait, isn’t this just the very nature of languages? How could it possibly be otherwise? Well, most indigenous languages, reflecting a wisdom of with-ness rather than a “falling apart,” are verb-centric. They “require” of their speakers as they speak that they name the subjectivity of the world around them—an admission of the agency in every other being, a recognition of kinship with the whole of nature.
In describing “the grammar of animacy,” Robin Wall Kimmerer recounts her frustration-turned-to-insight as she struggled to learn Ojibwe words (Ojibwe being closely related to the Potawatomi language stolen from her ancestors). “Then my finger rested on wiitkwegamaa: ‘to be a bay.’ ‘Ridiculous,’ I ranted in my head. ‘A bay is most definitely a person, place, or thing—a noun and not a verb.’” And then her moment of revelation: “Suddenly, I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore and hear it sift onto the sand. A bay is a noun only if the water is dead. But the verb wiitkwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water and lets it live. ‘To be a bay’ holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with the cedar roots and a flock of ducklings. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too.” (Braiding Sweetgrass, pp. 54-55) From water to rocks, from places to drums, Native languages acknowledge the animacy—and the agency—of those beings that fill out the community around us.
Words enable us to weave meaning into the world in which we live. But most Western languages encourage (dare I say, they syntactically force us?) us to make meaning by rendering the world as other. They set human beings as the default subject and set every other “card-carrying” member of the natural world … as mere object. Our language fell apart. And that has played a role in the present wreckage of the world. It becomes so much easier to mistreat those creatures we objectify, those ecosystems we fail to recognize as thriving communities.
This is depth of our entanglement. How do we even discuss this in a language that is structured to hide the apart-ness that imperils us, to prevent it from even being named?!
Is it possible to “rehabilitate” English so that it allows the living world breath? Here is an analogy that captures the scale of the challenge. When the Hebrews wandered in the desert after the Exodus they fashioned a tabernacle—a great tent with walls of woven cloth and animal skins—to “house” the presence of the living God. The material structure of the tabernacle meant that its sides could swell with the movement of the air; it could, you might say, billow with the breath of the living God. The tabernacle’s structure “confessed” God’s freedom. Years later when the people of Israel built a temple of stone (a project challenged by early prophetic voices) those stone walls tempted Israel to imagine a captive deity. I’m not suggesting they did this on the conscious level. I’m suggesting that the material structure of a temple with solid unmoving walls permitted the human imagination to meet the living God on terms that no longer allowed that God to breathe.
In a similar way, indigenous languages offer a tabernacle to the world, a syntax that can billow with the breath of bugs, animals, plants, trees, rocks, rivers, and more. English, unfortunately, has a syntax of stone that doesn’t allow the living world to breathe. The question of “rehabilitating” the English language is the question of how to renovate stone walls so they can billow. I won’t say it’s impossible, but it is surely an imposing challenge. Audre Lorde believed “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” And in some ways English is BOTH: it is that tool by which we name-know the world and it becomes the house of meaning in which we live. So, I begin by admitting, I don’t know if our language can billow. And then I add, tentatively, what I have learned.
I do know it is possible to imagine, perceive, encounter the world as teeming with life. That truth actually announces itself on a wilderness hike, where the made-world recedes and the forest becomes again what, in truth, it always is: the living world. But even in the city it is possible to remind oneself relentlessly that the trees and grass, birds and bugs, rocks and squirrels, are beings in their own right. And that altogether they (and we!) are linked by an undulating—living—silver thread of relatedness. In my mind, I have seen-felt this at times. I am slowly teaching myself to acknowledge the woven flame of Life that joins all of us together. It is there, if we patiently and persistently invite ourselves to notice.
Yet that patience and persistence is anchored nonetheless in the uncomfortable awareness that the words of the English language which I have so loved all my life are, at best (at least at present?), ambiguous allies in the work of liberation. But perhaps they, too, are entangled in the service of an exploitation to which they never consented. So, I allow myself to wonder whether the words themselves are, like me, waiting for the opportunity to testify to life’s teeming vitality. Is it possible that English might be interested and able to become an accomplice in undoing our fall? I don’t know. But I dare to wonder.
Lastly, we die. Honestly, I suspect it was our dawning awareness of death that caused us to “fall apart.” So far as we can tell, animals near death—whether by injury, disease, or age—can sense in some nonverbal way that their end is near. Other animals in their group may sense this impending death as well. It seems likely that as the complexity of an animal’s cognition rises, so does its attentiveness to mortality. However, only humans seem to have a long-term anticipatory sense of death. Typically, from our teenage years onward we understand that everyone dies—including those we love, and ultimately including us.
As this awareness unfolded in the minds of our distant forebears, it proved a decisive evolutionary leap forward—at a precipitous cost. This awareness arguably amplified human creativity, technological drive, and social cohesion. If necessity is the mother of invention, then death is perhaps the mother of necessity. But there are legitimate ways to meet the challenge of death and illegitimate ones. “Falling apart” strikes me as illegitimate.
By wishing, imagining, declaring that we are more than animals—that we are somehow not really embedded in nature but somehow above nature and destined for eternal life, we may protect ourselves from the existential anxiety of death, but we do so by setting in motion a perceptual shift that fundamentally alters our relationship with the world. No longer regarding ourselves as PART of it (we “fell APART”!), we end up acting in ways that reinforce that notion of separateness. Even as science tells us from multiple vantage points that we are nature, to maintain our apartness we act in ways that deny what we know.
We know now how entirely cyclical nature is. From seasons to ecosystems, life moves forward in circles. Everything that arises in nature is fashioned from nature and returns (by death or other process) to nature to “birth” the next generation of life. As noted above, we carry in our bodies the “recycled”/”reborn” matter of earlier lives: from dinosaurs to daffodils; from redwoods to robins; from mammoths to microbes. We are the living past, the vital present, and the—
Oops. No. We ought also to be the “pledge of the future.” But when we die, we do everything possible to break the cycle. To insist, with our dying breath—and after that breath is gone—that we are NOT nature. We embalm our bodies, enclose them in caskets set inside concrete liners, to make damn sure that nature’s generosity ends with us.
Martin Luther defined sin as incurvatus se: the state of being turned inward upon oneself. To do so in life is regrettable. To be buried in ways that seek to place us incurvatus se in perpetuity is a monstrous denial of who we are: human beings wrought of humus. Sallie McFague defined sin as “being out of place.” Is there anywhere in the whole wide world that is more “out of place” than to be buried in a manner that preserves our rupture from the world for as long as possible?
My point here is NOT foremost to criticize burial practices. (Although you can bet, I intend to make plans for my body to be rejoined to the Earth community in all its parts and pieces upon my demise.) My point is to wake us up to the extent to which we have fallen apart. These practices are now deeply embedded in our culture, religion, and ritual. We are captive to them: it is far easier to bury a body APART from the very world that provided that body to us, than to bury a body in a way that returns it to the world in reverent gratitude.
Listen, this is personal. Barely a year ago the casket holding my mother’s body was set in a concrete vault alongside the vault that holds my brother’s casket from two decades earlier and next to the space that will one day hold the vault that will receive the casket bearing my father’s body. In the cemetery where many of the bodies of my extended family are similarly entombed. This is what it means to be captive to cultural practices dressed up in sacred ritual … that, in fact, betray us.
Even if we can’t practically alter this in the short term, we cannot afford to hide from this most uncomfortable truth: the way we bury our dead harnesses the energy of this most liminal moment and uses it to buttress the lie that is killing the planet that is our only source of life. The way we bury our dead reinforces a worldview that may well make life impossible for coming generations. What is holy about that?! I am asking less in anger than in anguish. Why do we—in this most sacred moment—continue to aid and abet the lie that will surely undermine life for those yet to come?
Ironically … insidiously is more accurate, the industrialization and commercialization of funeral practices have grown in their capacity to preserve our apartness almost in step with the science that has increasingly demonstrated our togetherness with nature.
So, what do we do?
Here is my overarching claim restating briefly and clearly. We are entangled in a grand lie. We did not invent it. It preceded us. It shaped us. We are not guilty for being entangled. But we are responsible for trying to disentangle ourselves (even if we fail). Because the lie has caused untold damage to beings past and present and poses an existential threat to all beings in the future. The lie claims that we are in some way “separate” from nature. Are we distinct, unique, diverse? Yes! But not separate. At all. We are interwoven with the rest of this world from before our birth until after our death. We fell apart. But that fall has festered into a mortal wound in our worldview. We need to live beyond the lie. We need to embrace our connectedness. But how?
One path is grief. As I suggested in Grief-stricken—and Grace, this is an essential path, because (in this present moment) any attempt to reclaim our connectedness while shielding ourselves from grief is doomed to fail. There is so much grief across this planet there is no avoiding it. If we aren’t grieving, we haven’t connected in any authentic way with the whole of life.
Nevertheless, as Rumi writes, “There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again.” So, alongside grief there are a thousand ways to reconnect. Choose to live (far) more simply; start small; go slowly; go far. Learn the names of the trees on your property or on your street; they are, after all, your neighbors. Give up industrial-produced meat; few processes objectify animals more horrifically than this. Choose to buy only free-range eggs. Avoid plastic like the plague it is; the planet will be grateful. Plant a pollinator garden; learn the names of the plants and try to identify the pollinators that come to visit.
Dare to push back against all the nouns; as you walk through the woods or the city, imagine that silver thread of flame linking everything together, including you. Imagine it until it becomes true for you. (Believe me, it’s already true for the world.) Be intentional about pausing to star gaze now and then, and remember that the iron in your blood in close kin to those twinkling lights. After you finish a meal, take a moment and thank the microbes about to play out a flash mob in your gut. Educate yourself on a green burial and decide if you can make a plan to give your body back to the earth when you die. And any of these ideas—and more—are done with deeper joy when done with others. Find a community and get reconnected to Earth—together.
We fell apart. But “there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again.” The entire Earth community is waiting. Look, they even left the light on.
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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, “writing into the whirlwind” of contemporary challenges, joys, and sorrows around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, peace, and family. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in Writing into the Whirlwind atwww.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.
We, we, WE!—all the way home David R. Weiss – August 25, 2023
I often read “at a crossroads”—turning pages in multiple books over the same days. The texts tease and entwine, occasionally taunt and entangle. Argue and affirm. Chorus or cacophony? Usually both.
Gil Rendle’s new book, Countercultural: Subversive Resistance and the Neighborhood Congregation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), is as evocative as it is underwhelming. Which, I suppose, explains both my excitement in turning the first page and my deflated relief in reaching the final page. I was excited because his basic project—fostering countercultural subversive resistance in local communities of faith and goodwill—is alsomy project. I suppose I was deflated for the same reasons. I wanted—needed—more than he could offer. And I knew this, not least, because of my company at the crossroads.
Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (North Atlantic Books, 2021 rev., orig. 2011) makes the case for how money has become misshapen and now misshapes us—while holding out hope that it might be otherwise. The writing is alternately insightful and opaque (I am lost in the economic theory), clear-eyed and naïve (a word I used advisedly because Eisenstein’s knowledge so clearly outstrips mine, but my gut tells me knowledge alone doesn’t get the final word). Were I not reading it in a book group, I would set it aside. Nonetheless, I am mulling money with extra attention these days.
Bill McGuire’s Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide (Icon Books, 2022) trades the relative comfort of opaque writing for a plainspoken heartbreaking travelogue of climate breakdown. I’ve read several dozen books on the ecological crisis—climate often gets centerstage as if to distract us from the multiple drivers of calamity that dance at the edge of our vision. McGuire—now Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards(!) at University College London—has a wide-angle awareness of what’s coming our way. Hothouse makes for grim reading, and yet when the truth is so damn grim, there’s something to be said for low-key clarity.
Finally, Sophie Strand’s just-published novel, TheMadonna Secret (Bear & Company, 2023), is an altogether different animal. Not quite historical fiction, the story peers into a hidden past seeking a person (Mary Magdalene) whose life and truth can only be fully excavated by imagination. Strand’s writing is loosely informed by scholarship; I say “loosely” not in judgment but in recognition that her commitments run elsewhere than the academy. A nature-mystic herself, she is determined to “recover” these impulses in both Mary (Miriam in her book) and Jesus (Yeshua). If she needs to go beyond the reach or between the lines of scholarship to do so, she does, with luminous self-assurance.
Strand’s book has the least to do with Rendle’s “church-help” text—on the surface. But these past days at the crossroads, hers is the voice that has been most alluring. Hers the pages I most eagerly turn to. Hers the writing that challenges me: find that pulse, shape those words, carry that tune. Hers the tale that feeds my soul.
So, from this crossroads, a few thoughts on Countercultural: Subversive Resistance and the Neighborhood Congregation. Rendle is an ordained United Methodist minister whose work as author and congregational consultant is abetted by years in parish ministry and a PhD in organizational and group dynamics. Here he is writing to the church at large, though hoping his words are heard—and held—by individual congregations.
His over-arching thesis—with which I agree—is that we (society-at-large, church denominations and religious traditions on the whole, and individual faith communities in particular) are on the cusp of a great cultural shift—a “hinge” moment, he says. And the choices we make in this moment matter. Immensely. Yes. And yet, I found his whole book oddly off-point. Despite the aspirations declared in his title, he doesn’t go (anywhere near) far enough in his text. As my title counters, it’s “We, we, WE!—all the way home,” and Rendle never gets there.
In developing his thesis he follows the work of generational sociologists who chart the course of unfolding (Western—this is crucial) cultures through “oscillating cycles”: an unending series of “course corrections”—recalibrating social values and cultural expressions from one pole (too much “WE”) to the other pole (too much “I”). From this vantage point, the 1950’s are an apex of WE values and expressions, with the turbulent 60’s and 70’s marking the start of a “course correction,” culminating in recent decades in an excessive I-culture, driven by individually-focused values and expressions. Which means we’re ready to turn back toward the WE pole over the next 60-70 years.
This perspective does offer some insight. It helps explain why church membership and social influence peaked in the post-war years, riding a larger cultural crest. Churches thrive in strong WE cultures—and understandably struggle (in declining membership and in a faltering social voice) in eras where individualism is at the fore. Based on this reading of cultural cycles, Rendle’s book is a rallying cry to congregations: Your (next) moment is coming. Be ready to seize the day!
For Rendle, this involves helping curate and cultivate the renewal of public space and the common good. This work is at the heart of the church’s role as one carrier of society’s moral wisdom (a role it shares with other cultural institutions), and it requires creativity and careful attention to context. The congregation of the 2020’s cannot (dare not) use the congregation of the 1950’s as its model of success. The world has changed, both globally and locally. So how churches carry forward the common good/ morality held (for them) by the gospel must be creatively responsive to this hinge moment and not limited by images of a heyday that will never be again. (Whatever heyday might be coming, will look very different than what was in the past.)
By calling on churches to be “countercultural” and practice “subversive resistance,” then, Rendle is encouraging them to become “early adopters” of the coming WE cycle. Anticipating the (inevitable) swing of the pendulum, they can subversively resist the (soon to be waning) I-culture and lead the way counterculturally back toward a WE era. This is all fine stuff. But is it truly countercultural when churches are merely among the first to jump on the next cultural bandwagon? Or really subversive resistance when you already “know” the present cultural era is fading away anyway? That seems a bit like choosing to “resist” daytime when the clock tells you twilight is just around the corner.
But my biggest disappointment with Countercultural is its failure to reckon the utter dysfunction of Western culture as a whole, which leaves much of his “inside advice” sorely beside the point. If Western culture has been unfolding in an oscillating cycle between “WE” and “I,” the much larger context is one that sets the whole of humanity as an “anthropocentric-I” over against the rest of nature. For several thousand years now, the dominant Western patriarchal viewpoint, echoed in all too many of the world’s religious traditions, has helped imagine humanity as distinct from nature, failing to recognize (and relish!) that humanity ONLY is within nature, as part of an interwoven ecosystem of living relationships.
From this perspective, the whole series of oscillations between “WE” and “I” have been mere variations on a singular Western theme: exploit, extract, consume, discard, lay waste to the world. Sometimes we’ve pursued ecocide more gleefully united; at others we’ve done so with individual desires at the helm. But our consistent failure to embrace the truth of “We, we, WE … all the way home”—that is, all the way home to Earth’s ecology—that failure goes unchallenged in Rendle’s book.
It’s a devastating omission because short of being truly and daringly countercultural to this Western motif of human separateness, and short of being subversively resistant to the current capitalist project of planetary destruction, the next WE cycle is going to culminate in … extinction. Research suggests these cycles run about 70 years from one pole to next. But if we go another 70 years without entirely rejecting human separateness and capitalism, we will not be around to oscillate another time.
Bluntly, Rendle’s entire project sits on top of a cosmic-theological-ecological-existential lie that goes unaddressed. He does acknowledge climate issues here and there as being among the pressing challenges of the moment. But he doesn’t begin to grasp the extent to which climate breakdown and socio-ecological collapse are THE defining challenges of this era. Is that too harsh a critique? Sadly not. Indeed, climate breakdown and socio-ecological collapse are now THE defining challenges of human history. Unmet, they will usher in the END of human history.
To be fair, Countercultural does carry some important insights—insofar as they’re reframed within the context of faith/human communities’ responding to socio-ecological collapse. (I’ll mention four of them.) But Rendle never connects these dots himself. And from where I sit—at the crossroads—it’s hard to credit any future-oriented church-help book that does not accord the challenges of climate/collapse the central place they will hold in ALLpursuits of meaning and morality in the next generation.
1. So, for instance, this is surely a moment in which congregations (and other faith/human communities of committed goodwill) must speak truth and embody the truth they speak in their communal lives today. After decades of rising individualism, it has been easy for churches to despair of having a vital place in public space. Now, fortuitously, the oscillation of cultural values appears likely to offer churches a new window of opportunity. No one—neither church nor wider society—can afford for that opportunity to be missed. But to seize this day in a way that truly matters will mean something far more countercultural and subversive than Rendle describes.
2. Similarly, when he calls out anomie (from the Greek: to be without shared norms or morals) as the “spirit of the I-era,” he completely overlooks how climate/collapse will interact with this. Yes, the apex of our cultural swing toward individualism has been evident in the anomie of fraying of social safety networks, rising xenophobia, and the sense of freedom to fashion as “truth” whatever suits us. However, even as the pendulum may well be ready to swing back to a stronger sense of shared values and a re-blossoming of the common good (as it has in every previous cycle), this current hinge moment is going to be seriously destabilized—maybe entirely undone—by the twin forces of climate and collapse.
Chaos supercharges anomie, and human driven climate breakdown—now unleashed with a fury and an inertia wholly beyond our control—will threaten to maintain anomie in the decades to come. This makes for an extremely fraught moment. A return to—indeed a cosmic-ecological deepening of—WE-ness is our only hope to weather the coming storm. And yet the conditions of the storm itself (more than in ANY previous era) will be allied with anomie and work against WE-ness. Especially so long as WE-ness remains (as it does throughout Countercultural) rhetorical sleight-of-hand for an Anthropocentric-I.
3. We often think of morality as a set of principles by which we gauge dilemmas and reason our way to right choices and good deeds. Rendle argues—and I agree—that moral compasses and the overarching human hunger for meaning in our lives that animate them are most often story-bound: held by narratives that live in our imaginations. He’s also right that new moments (hinge moments, in particular) call for new stories. Sometimes they simply recast ancient wisdom for the mindset/heartset of a new era. But sometimes they need to re-true tales and themes that no longer work for the common good.
Many religious stories carry themes of humanity set above or apart from the rest of nature (as well as stories of dominion, patriarchy, and all manner of xenophobia). Such stories, beginning long ago, paved the path that now carries us faster and faster toward an existential cliff. So, we desperately need new stories. Tales creatively and warmly spun to carry truths that can take root in the imagination, that place where heart and mind touch. Tales that speak of the deep connection between all things that are. A connection that is life-giving, ennobling, humbling all at once. The science (both hard and soft, that explores the webs in which we live) is dense, but the stories must reach for a “simplicity on the far side of complexity,” as Rendle names it.
My children’s book, When God Was a Little Girl, is one such story. Simple, but deep and evocative in its reach toward a more diversity-embracing, Earth-honoring cosmology. The Madonna Secret is another. Regardless of how much objective history it echoes, the story it tells is of human holiness that is wholly Earth-held. Even Eisenstein’s often opaque book directly addresses and critiques what he calls “The Story of Money,” “The Story of Separation,” and the “Story of People,” insisting that if we wish to live in new ways, we must fashion new stories in which to live. And Hothouse Earth is, in many ways, a field guide for the future that is being written by the dysfunctional stories (cosmological, ecological, economic, and more) that have been the dominant theme of both the WE- and I-poles of Western uncivilization.
Stories—sacred and simple—are the infrastructure of human existence. The stories we need today must run countercultural and subversive in ways deeper than Rendle seems to grasp. And—they must be “hardened” (wizened?) to hold against (or bend with) the seismic shifts of collapse.
4. Rendle zeroes in on the neighborhood as the space where congregations must do their best work. While acknowledging that “community” takes many forms (and will continue to do so, especially in a digital age), he is nevertheless persuaded that it is the neighborhood—embodied and shared space, materially inhabited by real people and woven of real relationships, the radically local sphere—where WE-ness will re-emerge. And thus, this is where congregations should invest their best energies, try out their most vibrant visions, learn their biggest lessons.
I agree, though with two important notes. First, the local is also where collapse will finally hit home. Yes, it is already hitting hard; we catch the images and can read the news of other lands, other states, other communities, other homes undone by climate disasters. But, whether by full-on disaster right here or by the slower unraveling of supply chains, when collapse reshapes the way we live in our homes, in our neighborhoods—that’s when it becomes real to us. Thus, the WE-ness congregations sow in neighborhoods—the experiments in living they undertake—ought aim to vividly anticipate the stresses neighborhoods will bear in collapse, forming practical networks of care to meet these stresses … as well as postures of mutual flexibility to meet other stresses we can’t yet anticipate.
Second, the only WE-ness able to ground a truly common good is one that reaches all the way to the ground. To the dirt beneath our feet—in our neighborhood. The radically local WE-ness congregations bear witness to must include the very local (and often very unknown-to-us) ecology of where we live. Our neighbors must include the plants and animals, the ground and air, the watersheds and geological history of our place. Complex? Yes! But these relationships used to be intimately well-known; these diverse and deeply interdependent neighbors used to be held as our kin. Unless we reclaim that kinship, any (merely human) WE-ness recovered will be far too little. And far too late.
Okay, that’s enough. Perhaps the merit of Countercultural (for me at least) was in its ability to provoke often irritated rejoinders. Discontented that Rendle’s context seems too small and that his project—audacious in its own way—lacks the audacity demanded by the day, he nevertheless drew me—and my literary companions at the crossroads—into conversation. Compelling me to clarify my own thinking … for my own project … for the days to come … for all of us. And reaffirming my intuition that the WE that matters most of all is the one that runs “all the way home,” linking us from the ground up, to Earth and all that is.
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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, “writing into the whirlwind” of contemporary challenges, joys, and sorrows around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, peace, and family. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in Writing into the Whirlwind atwww.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.
Inner Transition: Where the Given Meets the Gospel David R. Weiss – September 7, 2019
The Gospel in Transition #40 – Subscribe at www.davidrweiss.com
I have to be honest. There are days when the latest climate news hits hard. Actually, there are weeks and months like that for me. The science is not encouraging. The math is simply unforgiving. And the physics has no empathy.
Consider: the lag time between releasing CO2 (and other greenhouse gasses) into the atmosphere and when we actually experience the impact of those raised CO2 levels is 30-40 years. That means we are just TODAY experiencing a climate shaped by the 350ppm (parts per million) of CO2 in the atmosphere 30-40 years ago. And (maybe you’ve noticed) it’s NOT pretty.
And because current CO2 levels are now well above 400ppm, the next 30-40 years are pretty much locked in as a “pre-paid” immersive learning experience on the impact that raising CO2 from 350-400ppm will have on our world. We like to think we can (somehow) swerve back from the edge of disaster just in the knick of time. But the choices we make (or fail to make) today are not so much about the next 30-40 years but what comes after that.
In other words, my own (grown) children’s climate future is NOT at the center of discussion. Their climate future was settled over the past three decades. We don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like (because if/when the positive feedback loops kick in things will get precipitously worse), but wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, droughts, sea level rise, global food insecurity and political insecurity all seem certain to increase—accompanied by an unimaginable number of climate refugees.
That’s the given. Our choices today will not alter that. But they do matter in other ways. They will determine whether we manage to lessen the worst impacts of global heating, which are still 40+ years ahead of us. And whether we endure the coming crisis—the next 30-40 years a reeling climate that’s already bought and paid for—with integrity and compassion. But there’s a catch—and it inextricably links these two sets of choices. Even if we make all the right choices for that four-decades-off future we can barely imagine (but which will become our grandchildren’s and great-grandchildren’s daily life), even if we act with supreme wisdom and restraint now, things will continue to get worse. For many of us, for the rest of our lives. Even if we do the right things. All the time.
Which means, both for our own well-being and for the sake of persons not yet conceived, we must resolve to cultivate compassion and nurture integrity without expecting it to save us. On the one hand, the emergence of such deep character is the only thing that will save us—preserve our humanity. But it will not have any significant effect on the increasingly hostile climate conditions most of us fifty-and-older will face for the rest of our lives. And the sooner we acknowledge that, the more focused we can be on the character we need to survive.
In a sense, this is what the Transition Movement has always been about: recognizing the extent to which our present lives are hitched to unsustainable—indeed deadly—practices, and choosing to transition away from them and toward truly sustainable practices before we are caught off guard, and as a matter of communal choice. And—with a measure of good spirit; because these deadly practices have not only been eroding the planet’s ecosystems, they’ve also been steadily eroding our humanity, so making different (albeit unfamiliar) choices has the capacity to re-humanize us.
At the macro level the window for orderly transition away from a fossil-fueled societal collapse is fast closing. (Indeed, a growing number of well-informed folks say the window has not only closed, it’s been padlocked shut.) And while Trump is a convenient scapegoat for this—his administration has gone out its way to damn future generations to a living hell—nonetheless our dilemma reflects decades of inaction by politicians of all stripes. Generations of fixation on profit/wealth/money/stuff as the measure of meaning in our life. And the collected energy of corporations, the wealthy, and those bought off or tricked into doing their bidding. There is plenty of blame to go around; our current president is only the latest, loudest, most brutish and clownish manifestation of a cultural infatuation with an ecocidal way of life.
In the face of this, the Transition Movement—without dismissing the value of street protest or political action—opts to place its energy in building fresh patterns of community. Because only by remaking our notion of humanity itself will we find patterns for living that can sustain us through the coming decades and (perhaps) sow the seeds of a fundamentally more ecological form of human life in the future. For all its practical focus on transportation, food, energy use, and the like, this is ultimately “religious” work—though by no means necessarily tied to a religious tradition. But beneath all of this it is about fashioning … inhabiting … a different cosmology, one that sets us more accurately and more compassionately within the web of creation. The immediate payoff—against the backdrop of the climate emergency—is that in the process we will recover the humanity that we barely remember was once ours.
This cosmology-crafting is at the heart of Inner Transition: tending to the neural paths and emotions that comprise the infrastructure of personal choice, shared community, and culture. It sometimes happens implicitly, the spontaneous result of pursuing outward habits that happen to produce corresponding inward life-giving rewards as well. And sometimes it transpires as the result of careful intent. Inner Transition is the place where—most directly—faith communities contribute to the character-shift, the cosmological revolution necessary in this moment.
The practices evident in how we hold and share power in faith communities (even in how we conduct our committee meetings) can easily echo the top-down power dynamics that are killing our planet. But they can also experiment powerfully with ways to embrace shared power, ways that echo, adapt, and amplify the model of Jesus. The shape of our worship, from the language, songs, and visual imagery we choose to the way we embody our rituals, these things, too, are cosmology-craft at work. Our willingness to endure (welcome) truth-telling in our midst and our commitment to fellowship that pushes past polite company into authentic relationship frame the crucible in which a new cosmology might be born.
We have largely and tragically imagined the Gospel—that declaration of God’s unconditional and unnerving love for every bit of creation—as a message-with-the-means to carry us from this world to the next. I am here to tell you that the only Gospel that is truly good news—that bears the message-as-means of God’s awe-full love—is the one that can carry us to the heart of this world. And inspire us to make it once again our home.[1]
And it is our home. No less so on account of the wounds we’ve inflicted on it. No less so on account of the decades of wounding that we’ve already loaded in the atmosphere. This IS our home. We die, endure, or heal right here. But our tradition is clear, God loves this world. Embracing that truth with all of our audacious creativity, courageous compassion, and practical wisdom—in every corner of our personal and communal lives is what Inner Transition looks like. It is Gospel wrapped in all manner of flesh. As it is always is.
PS: I’ve set up a Patreon site to help fund my work in this area. I hope you’ll invest in my thinking and writing. You can learn more about how to support me here:www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith
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The Gospel in Transition by David R. Weiss is a year of reflections on facing our climate crisis, finding hope, and the alchemy of Christian community. My weekly essays consider climate change, Transition, and faith—using biblical images, liturgical seasons, science, and theology, as conversation partners. Writing in a voice a bit too restless to call “devotional,” I aim to be insightfully evocative and usefully provocative. I’d be delighted to have you join me on this journey. In fact, I hope you’ll subscribe (go to the top right sidebar!) Thanks for reading and see you next week! Contact me at: drw59mn(at)gmail.com.
[1] I believe many—most!—faith traditions can support a cosmology in which we are fully wed to this world. My work is within the Christian tradition because this is the tradition I’m writing out of—and into.
Permaculture: Breathing Earth … Finding Home David R. Weiss – May 27, 2019
The Gospel in Transition #27 – Subscribe at www.davidrweiss.com
“Then the LORD[1] God formed a man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” (Gen. 2:7) Forget Jesus’ breath in John’s Easter scene (GIT #26), this is the moment when the Judeo-Christian tradition first affirms permaculture.
In my last post, I said Christian communities were “commissioned” as it were to be permaculture communities all along. Of course, that’s a bit of a rhetorical claim—permaculture as an intentional movement appeared nearly 2000 years after the first Christian communities. But my point stands. John’s Gospel links Jesus so clearly with the Biblical figure of Wisdom (who the Bible links with the wisdom inherent within creation) that Christians ought to enthusiastically embrace the core insight of permaculture: that nature itself is a repository of lived wisdom useful in shaping human life as well.
Not that nature dictates how we live, but our capacity for reflection, self-transcendence, and choice doesn’t set us above nature any more than the capacity for flight, parthenogenesis, underwater breathing, or photosynthesis sets any other bit of creation above nature. Permaculture, the infrastructure for the Transition Movement, suggests it’s both wise to learn from nature and ethical to seek to live in harmony with nature because we are nature. We’re simply nature with elevated cognitive, emotional, cultural, spiritual capacities.
That most Christians find this idea quite foreign reflects how far we are from the truth of our own tradition. Worse, given the way scientific-industrial progress has raced forward largely unbridled by ethics in a culture self-identified for generations as “Christian,” the church has been (at least!) complicit in the reckless advances that now threaten to wreck the ecosystem that sustains us. Permaculture argues that other paths were, and perhaps still are, available to us. So does this creation account in Genesis.
As a creation myth it oozes truth (not fact) in a story about how creation came to be and where we fit within it. However, it’s a myth made for people in another time and place. That doesn’t mean it has nothing to say to us, but it does mean we’ll need to listen carefully to hear across cultures, languages, and whole eras of understanding. Still, for those of us who continue to draw meaning and life out of this faith tradition, that extra care is worth it. And as we meet the climate emergency in front of us, there’s an added urgency to pay attention. Because some of the things we’ve often missed just may become lifelines in this moment. I’ll suggest several.
English translations have always told us “God formed a man from the dust of the ground.” The exact words vary, but every translation I’ve seen BURIES the truth of the Hebrew where God fashions an adam from the adamah. Later on, these translations render adam as the man’s name, Adam. But it is Hebrew for “earthling” fashioned from earth, or “dirtling” made from dirt, or “humus being” formed from humus. The truth intended by the original teller of this tale was that we are dirt. Enlivened by divine breath, but nonetheless still—forever and always—kin to the ground beneath our feet. The claim isn’t intended to humiliate us. Rather it tells us, on this ground we are home. No small truth for beings who have evolved our way into existential loneliness.
In this tale, God’s breath brings one particular bit of humus to life by breathing into it. We become humus beings—living soil. Later on the Hebraic Wisdom tradition begins to intuit what both science and permaculture confirm: we aren’t the only soil that is alive. Whether you call it the breath of God or the ferment of microbes, the black dirt under our feet is fairly crowded with animate energy. Permaculture begs us to honor it; this Genesis creation tale says no less.
This creation account goes on to describe Eden, the garden planted by God into which the humus being (adam/Adam) is placed. We do an injustice to the peoples who first heard this tale when we presume they regarded it as a divinely-relayed newspaper account of an anthropomorphized God, who acted like a supernatural botanist in setting up Eden. AND—we do an injustice to ourselves when we presume we’re either beholden to read the verses that way today—or entitled to be embarrassed by verses so unembarrassed about narrating divine activity. Ancient peoples were “fluent” in myth. They felt no need to decide between fact and fiction. Myth told truth—and it moved freely across these less important distinctions in telling its truth.
With the garden in place, we learn that God set the adam [that is, “the humus being”—as yet single and ungendered] in the garden of Eden “to till it and keep it.” (Gen. 2:15) This, then, is the paradigmatic human vocation according to this account: to work the land and sustain its abundance—in other words: to practicepermaculture. There is no talk of being imago Dei (“in the image of God”) or “having dominion” in this account—I’ll discuss that in a future post.
Almost as soon as the humus being begins tending the humus, God observes, “It is not good for the adam [the single “humus being”] to be alone.” (Gen 2:18) So God fashions all manner of animals, none of whom provide quite sufficient companionship, until God splits the adam itself into two: man and woman. (Gen. 2:19-23) One might consider a host of (worthwhile) gender issues here, but today I simply want to note that in this story God invites the humus being to name each creature. The invitation and the act are significant because throughout the biblical text names are not used to establish the power of ownership or exploitation, but to carry the truth of relationship.[2]
In Eden, naming is a vocational act alongside tending the garden. It is a prototype of ecology. Indeed, once we see the purpose of naming as placing ourselves and our companion creatures into appropriate relationship, then naming and tending become essentially one interwoven vocation. We cannot tend the humus well if we do not attend as well to the ways that all life is humus-borne.
From creation to Christianity, authentic biblical faith anticipates permaculture (and Transition). To understand ourselves as humus beings—“breathing earth”—places us firmly within this natural world. And not as punishment or burden, but as home and calling. We were not made to be masters of this material world. Rather, we were intended for intimacy with it. Facing a climate crisis of apocalyptic scope, that intimacy will mean allowing ourselves to feel unfathomable grief. But it will also mean catching glimpses of revelatory joy. Perhaps most of all, it will mean holding earth in our hands and feeling the goodness of home.
PS: I’ve set up a Patreon site to help fund my work in this area. I hope you’ll invest in my thinking and writing. You can learn more about how to support me here:www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith
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The Gospel in Transition by David R. Weiss is a year of reflections on facing our climate crisis, finding hope, and the alchemy of Christian community. My weekly essays consider climate change, Transition, and faith—using biblical images, liturgical seasons, science, and theology, as conversation partners. Writing in a voice a bit too restless to call “devotional,” I aim to be insightfully evocative and usefully provocative. I’d be delighted to have you join me on this journey. In fact, I hope you’ll subscribe (go to the top right sidebar!) Thanks for reading and see you next week! Contact me at: drw59mn(at)gmail.com
[1] In many English translations of the Old Testament you’ll often see the word LORD printed in upper case letters. When you do, it indicates that behind this word lies the Hebrew word often viewed as the name of God: YHWH. Jews consider it too sacred to speak aloud, so when reading their scriptures they replace it, by saying the word Adonai, which means “Lord.” (It actually means “Lords”—plural—which is itself a fascinating detail, as though in the midst of Judaism’s strict monotheism, a bit of the God’s ineffable “moreness” leaks through here.)
[2] Just a few examples: “Eve” means “the mother of all living”; “Isaac” means “laughter”—the child whose unexpected birth brought laughter; “Israel” means “one who wrestles with God.” There are a number of ways to convey the sense of YHWH: “I am what I am”; “I am who I am”; or “I will be who I will be.” Because the most vivid account of God’s self-revelation comes in the scene with Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:1-15), linked to a series of future promises, I find it evocative to hear the name as “I will be who I must be for your liberation.”
Permaculture: Becoming Friends with God David R. Weiss – May 25, 2019
The Gospel in Transition #26 – Subscribe at www.davidrweiss.com
“Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.’ And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (John 20:21-22). This is the moment of “Pentecost” (the sending of the Holy Spirit) in John’s Gospel.
Luke’s much more vivid Pentecost narrative (rushing wind, tongues of flames, and speaking in other languages—in Acts 2) happens on the fiftieth day after Passover. (Hence, the name Pentecost: Greek for “fiftieth” and the Greek name for the Jewish harvest festival of first fruits celebrated on this fiftieth day. In John’s Gospel “Pentecost” happens about fifty seconds after Jesus makes his first resurrection appearance to the disciples on Easter evening.[1] Seriously, he appears in the room—seemingly moving through walls and locked doors—announces himself by saying, “Peace be with you,” shows the disciples his wounds, and then we go immediately into verse 20 as quoted above. Breath, Spirit, Pentecost. Bam.
I propose, though, that we call John’s version of Pentecost, the Permaculture Moment of Easter, because John shows Jesus establishing the post-Easter community of believers as a permaculture community. I can’t say whether those first Christians fully appreciated that, but I will say that the very meaning and purpose of the church today hinges on recognizing its call to be a permaculture community today as we meet the climate emergency on our doorstep.
Permaculture? You won’t find it in your catechism or creed; it’s not exactly a theological term (though I’d argue it ought to be). Permaculture is a design philosophy for thinking about agriculture … and human culture.[2] It emerged in the late 1970’s as a way of critically rethinking (and rejecting) the steady growth of industrialized agriculture. Seeing a multitude of problems connected with an agricultural model that was increasingly determined to enslave the soil by means of machinery and chemicals, permaculture, in essence, chose to listen to the land instead.
Permaculture begins with the presumption that most (if not all) of the challenges we face in producing food (or, ultimately, in the other aspects of our lives) have already been faced—at least analogously—by nature. And, having the benefit of a timescale far beyond us, nature has found solutions to these problems. Nature may think slowly, but it is utterly undaunted, and it holds within it, quite literally, the wisdom of eons. So permaculture developed twelve design principles—drawn from how nature approaches problem-solving—as a framework for our own way of being in relative harmony with nature.
Besides the twelve principles (which are more complex than we need to know for this column), permaculture has three core tenets: (1) Care for Earth—treating the soil (and really all ecosystems) in ways that promote flourishing for all creatures in the Earth community; (2) Care for People—that the necessities of life (both material and social) be available to all; (3) Return of Surplus—that we take not more than our fair share and reinvest the surplus back into the system or within our community.
Permaculture began as an agricultural movement (it was first known as “permanent agriculture”), but rather quickly became a way of thinking about the whole of human culture since all agriculture sits within a broader social-cultural context. I’m thinking about permaculture today because it’s the philosophical infrastructure for the Transition Movement. Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Movement, was himself a permaculture instructor, and, in many ways, he imagined Transition Towns as adaptations of permaculture principles to a more urban (or at least a village-neighborhood) context.
But where does Jesus fit in? We begin with the Hebrew Scriptures where Wisdom is acknowledged as a divine attribute (at times even a divine feminine person) present at creation. In Proverbs (8:22-31) and Sirach[3] (ch. 24), Wisdom is the presence of God that patterns Itself/Herself into creation. In other words, Hebrew Scripture affirms that Wisdom is at work in the patterns seen in nature. The language is far more spiritual than permaculture uses, but the intuition is the same. Moreover, the Hebrew notion of Sabbath rest for people-animals-land anticipates the holistic ethic of permaculture core tenets.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus is deliberately likened to Wisdom. Described as “the Word” (Greek: logos) in John’s prologue, Jesus is linked both to God’s creative word at creation, and also to Wisdom present with God during creation. In Greek, logos means not simply “word,” but also the “wise principle” or pattern behind something. John 1:1-3 clearly aims to evoke Proverbs and Sirach in the ears of its Jewish audience. And when John writes (1:14), “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” his readers likely heard Baruch 3:37, “Afterward she [Wisdom] appeared upon earth and lived among men.”
Elsewhere Wisdom invites her followers to feast (Proverbs 9:1-5, Sirach 24:9-21); promising that she alone provides bread and drink that satisfies. When John has Jesus offer living water (Jn 4:13-14) and the bread of life (Jn 6:31-35), he is again telling his community that Jesus is God’s Wisdom in their midst. Finally, in his long Last Supper discourse, John has Jesus announce a new relationship with his disciples: no longer servants, he calls them “friends” (Jn 15:15). Which brings us back—almost, to the Easter-breath scene. In the book of Wisdom (likely written in the century immediately before Jesus lived) we read, “Wisdom is a breath of the power of God and … In every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God” (Wisdom 7:25-27).
Throughout John’s densely symbolic Gospel, he is convinced that one way to understand Jesus is as the embodiment of the Wisdom of God. And in his “Pentecost” moment, John shows Jesus passing the breath of that Wisdom on to his followers and through this Holy Spirit making them friends with God.
Today’s climate crisis is the direct result of humans (many of them “Christian”) failing to discern the wisdom present in creation and instead choosing to treat nature as devoid of wisdom: mere raw material for meeting human desire. But—like permaculture—the Wisdom tradition in Hebrew Scripture sees nature as bearing Wisdom’s imprint. And, by linking Jesus to that tradition again and again, John’s Gospel tells us: to be a follower of Jesus is to become a friend of God, to recognize the echo of Wisdom in Jesus’ life, … and to discern the pattern of that same Wisdom in the natural world around us.
In John’s Gospel, the first thing Jesus does in meeting his disciples on Easter evening is breathe on them—stepping directly into the Wisdom tradition and breathing his followers into friendship with God and God’s world (seeing God’s Wisdom writ within nature is inescapably part of friendship with God).
It would be our moral duty to embrace permaculture principles (and become Transition communities) in response to the climate crisis, if only because these things best position us to preserve what we can and to grieve for what we cannot preserve. But John’s Gospel makes clear that, for those who follow Jesus, something more than “mere” morality at stake. Permaculture is how we befriend God.
I cannot imagine a greater act of joy. So take a deep … breath, and let’s get started.
PS: I’ve set up a Patreon site to help fund my work in this area. I hope you’ll invest in my thinking and writing. You can learn more about how to support me here:www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith
* * *
The Gospel in Transition by David R. Weiss is a year of reflections on facing climate change, finding hope, and the alchemy of Christian community. My weekly essays consider climate change, Transition, and faith—using biblical images, liturgical seasons, science, and theology, as conversation partners. Writing in a voice a bit too restless to call “devotional,” I aim to be insightfully evocative and usefully provocative. I’d be delighted to have you join me on this journey. In fact, I hope you’ll subscribe (go to the top right sidebar!) Thanks for reading and see you next week! Contact me at: drw59mn(at)gmail.com
[1] John describes an encounter between Mary Magdalene and Jesus in the garden outside the empty tomb on Easter morning, but the evening scene is the first time John describes and encounter with the rest of the disciples.
[2] Rob Hopkins, a permaculture instructor himself, admits the concept is “notoriously difficult to explain in a single sentence.” My portrait here is drawn from Rob Hopkins, The Transition Handbook (Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008, pp. 60-61, 136-141), and augmented by www.permacultureprinciples.com/principles/.
[3] Sirach, Baruch, and Wisdom (both mentioned below) are apocryphal books: among a handful of ancient Jewish texts that are pre-Christian but are not considered part of the Hebrew Scriptures. Though not regarded as sacred by Jews, these writings helped form the context against which John was interpreting Jesus.
Threatened with Resurrection David R. Weiss – May 16, 2019
The Gospel in Transition #25 – Subscribe at www.davidrweiss.com
“They have threatened us with resurrection.” The words come from a poem written in 1980 by Julia Esquivel, a Guatemalan poet-theologian and peace activist.[1] Penned in a time of fierce persecution of peasants, human rights activists, and church workers, the image evokes a holy irony: for Christians, to live under near constant threat of death is to be … threatened with resurrection.
This wasn’t glib optimism. During Guatemala’s civil war (1960-1996) some 200,000 persons were killed. Death squads were common, as were torture, assassination, mutilation, rape, and ‘disappearances.’ To suggest that living under such conditions was, in fact, to be “threatened with resurrection,” was an act of revolutionary inward defiance. It declared: Because we do not regard death as the end of our story—for it was not the end of Jesus’ story—therefore, even in times like these, “we go on loving life” (the last five words are drawn from the poem itself).
Climate change is NOT state-sponsored terrorism. But it will (in some places it already does) mean living in the face of daily unpredictability, chaos, suffering, and grief. And it will require a posture of revolutionary inward defiance (one aspect of the Inner Transition that is central to the Transition Movement goal of resilience) to cultivate both the inner and outer resources to embrace life in this new world. Which is why, especially after my last post summoning us to embrace ecological grief, it seems a good time to remind us that as Christians, climate change threatens us with resurrection. Which in turn invites … compels us to live in the holy irony of meeting the prospect of radical uncertainty with an undaunted love for life.
This, too, is not glib optimism. The science around climate change is too unforgiving for that. The media spin is often shaped alternately by a foolhardy thirst for one more round of profits, or a fear-laden denial convinced it can’t be that bad, or the naïve belief we’ll invent our way out of this without needing to deeply(!) re-work the misshapen appetites and assumptions that got us here. But once you push through the spin, BLEAK is what stares back at you. And bleak doesn’t blink.
Part of our problem, however, is that unlike in Guatemala, where Esquivel’s poem was read against the lived experience of brutality (no one doubted they lived under immediate threat)—today both society and church remain largely in denial of the peril still mostly unseen in front of us. Even as anxiety over climate change creeps into the background of our daily lives, the immediacy of the threat is seldom felt. Not here. Not yet. But it is inexorably on the way. So I tend to shout. Sorry. (Not sorry.)
I get it. ‘Bleak’ isn’t good for the market, for one’s career path, or for our widespread consumptive addictions, so we find ways to push it to the side. But ‘bleak’ is what science tells us today, so my task is to be unrelentingly imaginative in making that bleakness real.[2]
For some it already is. The Agenda, a Canadian public television current affairs show recently hosted a 30-minute segment on the emotional impact of climate change on those directly involved in the research.[3] Scientists, whose work places them before any spin, are increasingly wrestling with deep grief as they see an Earth unmade by human folly—sometimes first hand in habitats they’ve come to love, sometimes in climate models made by math they’ve learned to trust. While objectivity is crucial in collecting and assessing the data, when that objectivity announces existential crises for habitats and for humans even scientists are given pause.
It’s what comes after the pause that counts. Rob Law, a longtime Australian climate activist, writes, “to truly tackle the climate and extinction crisis we also need to give ourselves permission to grieve, personally and collectively.”[4] Why? Not as an exercise in self-defeat, but as a means to clear the way for action. Acknowledging our grief, Low continues, allows us “to create new ways of connecting to one another, to mourn for what we all love and are losing day by day … and to galvanize what is most important.” Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist, agrees, commenting in the Agenda segment, “It’s not a matter of are we ‘effed’ or not [as though it’s a simple binary either/or], it’s a matter of how ‘effed,’ and that is left for us to determine—and that requires us to become active participants in reducing whatever carbon burn we can.”
We don’t gain anything by denying the bleakness of our present situation. In fact, denial—as well as a too-easy optimism—only heightens the risk for all of us … for all of Earth. But we need not be paralyzed by it either. As Christians, the more we dare to really hear the science, such as the IPCC report from last fall or the IPBES report from last week,[5] the more we will find ourselves threatened with resurrection.
Our response should be to manifest an undaunted love for life. The Transition Movement offers us uncanny (even providential) insight into the shape of that response, and I’ll explore Christian adaptions of Transition in a series of posts over the summer. But fundamentally, to be threatened with resurrection—as those living in Guatemala in the 1970’s and 1980’s knew firsthand—is to begin from grief. It is to recognize that the wellspring of our action (which must be manifold) is the grief we dare to feel for the whole of creation.
Moving into this grief, making it part of our faith and witness in the twenty-first century, is our foremost calling as Christian communities today. (And there is more that must be written about, too.) But calling for grief is, in a sense, good news. Biblical faith has never been afraid of grief. It is the ground out of which resurrection comes. And if there is hope for a restored future on the far side of calamity that is yet to be weathered, it will be because we dared to grieve.
If we believe in a God who works miracles with mustard seeds, then grief is the mustard seed we must sow today. We, who are threatened with resurrection.
PS: I’ve set up a Patreon site to help fund my work in this area. I hope you’ll invest in my thinking and writing. You can learn more about how to support me here:www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith
* * *
The Gospel in Transition by David R. Weiss is a year of reflections on facing climate change, finding hope, and the alchemy of Christian community. My weekly essays consider climate change, Transition, and faith—using biblical images, liturgical seasons, science, and theology, as conversation partners. Writing in a voice a bit too restless to call “devotional,” I aim to be insightfully evocative and usefully provocative. I’d be delighted to have you join me on this journey. In fact, I hope you’ll subscribe (go to the top right sidebar!) Thanks for reading and see you next week! Contact me at: drw59mn(at)gmail.com
[1] Julia Esquivel, Threatened with Resurrection: Prayers and Poems from an Exiled Guatemalan (Brethren Press, 1982). You can find the whole poem here: www.how-matters.org/2012/08/31/julia-esquivel/
[2] Walter Brueggemann considers the primary task of the Hebrew prophets as poetic. Initially (pre-Exile), that meant finding images—sometimes spoken, sometimes embodied—sufficient to carry the grief of God and visceral enough to break through the numbness of God’s people. Later (mid-Exile) it meant finding images able to awaken hope in God’s people in moments when their capacity to hope was all but extinguished by the circumstances of their lives. See TheProphetic Imagination (Fortress Press, 1978) and Hopeful Imagination (Fortress Press, 1986).
When the Gospel Comes as Grief David R. Weiss – May 14, 2019
The Gospel in Transition #24 – Subscribe at www.davidrweiss.com
It’s been a week now since the United Nations released a new report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).[1] The Global Assessment Report, the result of three years of work by 145 researchers from 50 countries, reviews some 15,000 scientific and government sources and offers the most far-reaching appraisal to date of nature’s overall health. It is not encouraging.
The IPBES media release opens with a gut punch: “Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history.” How do you quantify that? The report has a statistic to offer from almost every angle; I’ll mention just one. Of the approximately 8 million total species of plants and animals (including insects) on Earth, one million are in danger of extinction, each one a cathedral millennia in the making.
The threat isn’t entirely due to human-driven climate change. The report names the top two causes as (1) human impacts on land and water habitats and (2) direct exploitation (e.g., over-fishing). Then comes climate change, followed by pollution. But each cause reflects human activity that’s been repeatedly indifferent to the needs of the natural world. This is not “creation groaning in travail” (Romans 8:22); this is creation being relentlessly executed by the ecological inertia of our choices.
Whatever the author of Genesis meant by according us “dominion” over creation, killing off better than 1/10 of Eden’s abundance does not count. Indeed, a careful study of the word “dominion” in the Hebrew Scriptures shows that it always refers to power-exercised-with-wisdom-and-justice.[2] What we’ve done as a species—exemplified by certain “advanced” civilizations and cultures—is not dominion. It’s mere—sheer destruction. In fact, by biblical standards (and in the report’s judgment!), indigenous peoples living far more simply than us are perhaps the best examples of dominion on the planet today.
How do we respond to a report that is simply overwhelming in its bleakness? That catalogs so much life—habitats, ecosystems, and species—at risk? I recall a line in a film I saw decades ago (Mass Appeal, 1984). One character, a young seminarian, tells a story about his tank of tropical fish. One night the heater went bad and they all boiled. He recalls, “I woke up the next morning and went to feed them, but I found them all floating at the top. Most of them split in two, others with their eyes hanging out. It looked like violence, like suffering, but it had been such a quiet night. And I remember wishing I had the kind of ears that could hear fish scream.”
We need those kind of ears today. Neither undaunted optimism nor debilitating despair are useful now. We face a moment when, for people of faith, the gospel comes as grief. (I think this is true in secular terms as well, although it would be described somewhat differently.) Grief will be fundamental in any pursuit of the transformative change the IPBES report says is necessary: “We mean a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals, and values.”
Yes, there is much to be done: changing individual choices, exerting political pressure, pursuing technological breakthroughs, and altering corporate agendas. But in the midst of all that doing, we need to root ourselves, as it were, in grief. And because our culture as a whole avoids grief, communities of faith may have a unique responsibility in this precarious moment: to work feverishly to facilitate grief.
Grief, by itself, is not nearly enough to save us, but it is a fundamentally spiritual undertaking (tapping into our emotions on an existential scale) and if we do not embrace it, everything else done by ourselves and others is little more than banter on the way to oblivion. Read that sentence again, if you have to. I’m not saying that politics and technology and industry (and more) have no role to play. I am saying—shouting if need be—that grief is the most important entry point and the most neglected one in addressing climate change. And every week of worship that we delay in giving voice to ecological grief as our primary work as the church today, we fail to be the people of faith that God and the whole of creation need us to be today.
But not just any grief will do. Professor Josef Settele, one the IPBES project’s co-chairs, observes, “The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed. This loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world” (emphasis mine). I absolutely agree, but I worry his tone remains too anthropocentric. As though we must now care because WE are in peril. I disagree. For grief to be gospel, it must be larger than this.
In fact, grief expressed as our felt response to the threat now posed to human society and to our particular human loved ones, while still an honest emotion, is more like throwing an adult temper tantrum over a world whose physics and math have sorely disappointed us. It’s venting grief because the finite yet overall abundance of our home does not meet the baser appetites we’ve allowed to take root.
As a theologian, I have to say quite clearly: any response rooted in human self-interest is doomed. Many seem to believe the exact opposite: that we must somehow activate and leverage self-interest, our own survival instinct, to respond to this ecological crisis. I think that assumption makes two critical mistakes. It presumes we are somehow ‘separate’ from the rest of the world. But from the macro level of ecosystems to the micro level of intestinal biomes, to be self-interested is both theologically and scientifically dishonest. There is no human ‘I’ or ‘we’ that is not intrinsically more-than-me and more-than-human.[3]
Second, to regard it as overly idealistic (unrealistic) to call for grief on behalf of flora, fauna, and even terrain for its own intrinsic value is an error rooted in primal arrogance believing that our deepest energy comes from love of self rather than love of that which is other. If we grieve for the rest of creation only on account of its transactional value to us, we preclude ourselves from tapping into the oceanic energy of the cosmos, which alone might grant us the transpersonal power necessary for this moment.
On the other hand, grief that arises in response to our willingness to feel our connection to all that is imperiled, that grief—even as it threatens to undo us because of its intensity—can also connect us to the sacred energy that even now courses through the cosmos. In this sense, that grief is gospel, because it is born of our recognition that, along with all the rest of creation, we are at home on Earth.
But will even that grief be enough to save us? Quite frankly, I don’t know. But anything less will not save us; of that I’m certain. And whatever solutions politics, technology, and economics might provide, if they—if we—are not schooled by grief, they’ll be of marginal value. (Whatever short-term gains they offer us, will be only short-term if we have not done the deep work of re-rooting ourselves in the whole of creation, work that will be done first by waves of grief.)
I understand, we like our gospel to come with a ‘guarantee.’ As if anything worthy of the word ‘gospel’ must be able to produce news that is ultimately ‘good’ on our terms. But overall we have not yet done an honest cost accounting of the peril in front of us. Just this weekend the atmospheric CO2 measured Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii crested 415 ppm for the first time since … three million years ago. That’s since before our earliest, most distant, pre-human ancestors. As far as our future goes, all bets are off. To say that today visceral creation-wide grief is gospel doesn’t guarantee anything except a slender possibility of life with integrity. Which, if you really think about it, is all gospel has ever promised.
PS: I’ve set up a Patreon site to help fund my work in this area. I hope you’ll invest in my thinking and writing. You can learn more about how to support me here:www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith
* * *
The Gospel in Transition by David R. Weiss is a year of reflections on facing climate change, finding hope, and the alchemy of Christian community. My weekly essays consider climate change, Transition, and faith—using biblical images, liturgical seasons, science, and theology, as conversation partners. Writing in a voice a bit too restless to call “devotional,” I aim to be insightfully evocative and usefully provocative. I’d be delighted to have you join me on this journey. In fact, I hope you’ll subscribe (go to the top right sidebar!) Thanks for reading and see you next week! Contact me at: drw59mn(at)gmail.com
Doubting Thomas … Climate Change and Touching Hope David R. Weiss – May 3, 2019
The Gospel in Transition #23 – Subscribe at www.davidrweiss.com
If you were in church last Sunday you probably heard the familiar story (John 20:19-29) of “Doubting Thomas.” John places it exactly one week after the original Easter account, and most churches use it as the Gospel text on the first Sunday after Easter. It’s one of those stories that’s so familiar (it’s even given us “Doubting Thomas” as a idiom) that it becomes easy to think we know exactly what it means—until we realize we don’t.
Here’s the way it unfolds in John. On Easter evening the disciples are huddling in fear in an upper room. Suddenly Jesus appears to them. Except Thomas misses it. And when the disciples report it to him afterwards, he replies, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” Sure enough, one week later Jesus appears again, this time with Thomas present, and he invites Thomas to indeed place his fingers into the wounds. He tells Thomas, “Do not doubt, but believe.” (Thereby sealing his nickname for history.[1]) And the scene ends with Jesus seeming to make Thomas an example of how NOT to be: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”
It seems pretty straightforward. But consider a couple things.
Nobody in this account believes without seeing, so Thomas gets more than a bit of a bad rap. All the other disciples saw Jesus the first time, so it seems a little unfair to single out Thomas as though he was the only one who needed to see in order for his belief to take hold.
Second, Thomas reacts exactly like any of us would. By now some of us have been so conditioned to believe Jesus was raised from the dead we affirm that without even thinking about it. But how many of us would be as quick to accept a tale told (even by a good friend) about a man who died last week in a near by town, and three days later was seen walking about? How many?! I thought so.
Third, even Thomas, while seemingly scolded for his need to see, still gets to see. But none of us do. And that’s who this passage is really aimed at. John’s gospel was written, at the earliest, around 90 CE (others date it 10, even 20 years later). So John is writing for people living now sixty years after Jesus did. In other words, everybody in John’s audience from his first readers right on through us, is in the same “predicament”: we all have to choose whether to believe or not—without seeing. Which only heightens the tension. Does that mean all John offers us is a scolding of Thomas—who still gets to see—and a “blessing” for the rest of us if we can manage to do better? No.
Which brings us to climate change. It often feels as though the more you know about the dire straits we’re in, the harder it is to muster hope. To actually read the reports and study the science—even as a layperson—well, you begin to feel like those disciples huddled in that upper room. The world as you knew it has ended. And the world opening up in front of you is fringed round about with fear.
For Thomas—who, after all, is our example in this text—the crucial thing is not that he gets to see, but that he gets to touch. And not that he gets to touch the arms, the cheeks, etc.—but the wounds. His hope comes from touching the worst that the world dealt to Jesus and realizing that there is still life to be had.[2]
In a sense this episode in John’s gospel is an “Easter echo” of Jesus’ words in Matthew about “the least of these” (Mt 25:31-46). In that passage Jesus suggests the place where faith is found is precisely in deeds that meet the needs of others: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned. Here, in John’s gospel it isn’t mere sight that makes resurrection real for Thomas, it’s the tender touch of Jesus’ wounds. And John’s subtle wisdom to us—who can neither see Jesus in our midst nor light at the end of this climate crisis—is that if we wish to believe, it is less an act of will than a deed of compassion that will bring it to pass. Hope lives in the habits we form … provided those habits hold compassion.
This intuition is at the heart of Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone’s book, Active Hope,[3] an offering of practical wisdom for meeting this perilous moment. They distinguish between two meanings for hope. The first is hope rooted in likelihood. There’s at least a reasonable chance it will be sunny tomorrow; I sure hope so. That type of hope was beyond the reach of the disciples huddled in the upper room after the crucifixion—and beyond the reach of anyone who wades very far into the current data on climate change. Reasonable likelihood is no longer on the table.
The second meaning has to do with desire, independent of likelihood. The disciples knew he was dead and buried, but even in their fear, they could have told you they wanted him with them once again. So, what do you hope for, for your children? Push “pause” on “now be realistic,” and just ask, “What do you hope for, for them?” Chances are, the answers aren’t buried very deep.
But there’s yet one more distinction to make. When it comes to hope as desire, it can be either passive or active. Passive hope waits for outside forces to bring something to pass. As a result, passive hope can easily feel hopeless. Active Hope is participatory. It’s a deed. Macy and Johnstone call it a practice—a habit of deeds, if you will. They liken it to tai chai: a set of movements that may seem to accomplish very little, but are nonetheless done with focus and intent … and become like water shaping rock. Far from a disposition you try to “have” as a ground your actions, Active Hope begins as an action-by-action habit that eventually grounds our disposition. Perhaps most significantly for us, Active Hope doesn’t presume optimism. It simply asks that you honor the desire of your heart and act with sincere humble focus.
It’s worth being clear: Macy and Johnstone don’t claim Active Hope will turn things around. They do believe it will turn you around—especially if embraced as a communal practice. That is, by choosing to actively align our energy, in even small ways, with a larger story (vision) that matches the desires of our heart, we invest ourselves (and, ideally, it is a WE doing this) in actions that “help us restore our sense of connection with the web of life and with one another.” Broadly speaking they describe this dynamism as the Work That Reconnects. I think John might describe it as the Work That Resurrects.
As Macy and Johnstone relate, this work “comes from gratitude” (begins with awe at what is) and “honors the pain of our world” (feels loss: let grief have its way with us). During Jesus’ ministry his disciples learned to come with gratitude; we hear that in the stories of wonder and surprise that swirl around Jesus. After his crucifixion they’re overwhelmed by the pain of their world. Initially they’re too overwhelmed even to hope. But when Thomas, in spite of his dis-belief, dares to touch the wounds, he chooses to honor the pain in the pain rather than turn away from it. And in that choice, resurrection occurs. John offers wisdom to the first Christian on how to fuel their movement: by touching the wounds of the world.
It’s essential that we honor the world’s pain and touch it with tenderness—which may include full on anguished lament. Honestly, it may or may not “save” the world. But I’m willing to bet my whole life it can “save” us and our children come what may. Which is to say, it has the ability to root our lives in Active Hope—no matter what. That’s resilience. And that’s good news, even to people huddled in fear.
PS: I’ve set up a Patreon site to help fund my work in this area. I hope you’ll invest in my thinking and writing. You can learn more about how to support me here:www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith
* * *
The Gospel in Transition by David R. Weiss is a year of reflections on facing climate change, finding hope, and the alchemy of Christian community. My weekly essays consider climate change, Transition, and faith—using biblical images, liturgical seasons, science, and theology, as conversation partners. Writing in a voice a bit too restless to call “devotional,” I aim to be insightfully evocative and usefully provocative. I’d be delighted to have you join me on this journey. In fact, I hope you’ll subscribe (go to the top right sidebar!) Thanks for reading and see you next week!
Contact me at: drw59mn(at)gmail.com
[1] Actually … Thomas never doubts. The Greek word for doubt is distazo. Jesus uses apistos; it means, rather more bluntly “without belief.” But it came into English as “doubt,” and that word got paired with Thomas ever since.
[2] I don’t think this is about physical resurrection. Maybe it is, but I think John is making a much more nuanced assertion here, one intended to spark our belief in the value of compassion, love, life itself.
[3] Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2012). In this post I’m drawing primarily on the Introduction, pp. 1-7; I’ll return to this book again.
Maundy Thursday – Meeting the End with Love David R. Weiss – April 16, 2019
The Gospel in Transition #21 – Subscribe at www.davidrweiss.com
John 13:34-35 – “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are followers of the Way: because you love one another.[1] Part of Jesus’ long farewell discourse in John’s gospel, these words have given us the name for Thursday in Holy Week: Maundy. The Latin behind “commandment” in this verse (echoed again in 15:12-17) is mandatum (from which comes our word, mandate. This is “Mandatum Thursday”: “Commandment Thursday.” It might better be called Love Thursday, since Jesus calls his friends[2] to love many times more than he uses the word “commandment.”
Overall John’s gospel is noteworthy on several counts. Considered by scholars to be the last of the biblical gospels authored, his telling is often regarded as the least historical and most theological (which is not to say that he ignores history, that the other gospels ignore theology, or that the others present history the way we think of it today). But, even a surface reading of John reveals no parables, multiple lengthy discourses, and a self-focused Jesus (as opposed to a focus on God’s kin-dom), all of which place him in stark contrast to the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke, so-called “synoptic” because they view Jesus through the same lens).
One might make the case that John is thus less interested in historical fact, but he remains supremely interested in Truth. John’s gospel—which, like the other gospels aims to communicate good news to his original readers/hearers in a way that fosters the experience of good news in the hearing itself—is finely crafted and reflects both the lived experience of his community and John’s own nuanced theology. Of particular note is John’s commitment to “realized eschatology,” a fancy theological mouthful for saying that John believes that the redemptive/liberatory impact of Jesus on us and our lives begins right now—in all its fullness. Whether John regards another layer of fulfillment in an afterlife is not the point. He believes that the full power of the gospel is unleashed in the world through the Spirit moving in our lives today.
Two features of John’s Maundy Thursday narrative stand out to me. First, contrary to the Synoptics (and likely contrary to history), John does not have Jesus eat the Passover meal on Thursday night. He pushes Passover back by day: a small bit of “historical license” with theologically seismic implications. Not much is changed about Thursday evening, but the absence of a Thursday Passover means that on Friday afternoon throughout Jerusalem Passover lambs are being slaughtered in preparation for the meal … a slaughter that aligns with Jesus’ death on the cross. It is John’s way of profoundly linking Jesus to the Passover lamb (whose blood, in the original Passover tale kept Jewish homes safe during the final plague in Egypt).
It’s a symbolic connection that (in my mind) has disastrous echoes in atonement theology for millennia to come: in assertions that say our forgiveness/redemptive hinges on the spilling of Jesus’ blood. Given the scandal of Jesus’ death on the cross—which surely rocked his friends’ and followers’ worlds in way we cannot imagine—John’s daring interpretation of the death is understandable. His logic, I suspect, is quite different from ours. We often begin the story of Jesus with the assumption he came to die and skip over the very messy theology that undergirds that assumption. The earliest communities of believers began with the inexplicable fact that he DID die—for which they were utterly unprepared—and then find themselves making daring efforts (that are hardly consistent across the gospels or the early church!) to reconcile the profound goodness of Jesus’ life to the irreconcilable(!) character of his death.
It’s possible—in light of John’s realized eschatology (where redemption happens NOW, among the living)—that he identifies Jesus with the Passover lamb not to make his blood key to redemption, but to include his bloody death in the redemptive power of his life. As though by finding a place for Jesus’ death within the Passover story of God’s liberating work, John insures that the cross cannot become a cause to doubt the power of Jesus’ life. Like the Passover lamb, his death is one piece of a much larger tale of liberation.
The other intriguing feature of John’s Maundy Thursday account is this. We commemorate Maundy Thursday as the night when Jesus instituted Holy Communion at the end of his last supper and before his arrest and crucifixion. But, although Thursday in Holy Week gets its name from John’s gospel, in his telling Jesus nevercelebrates Holy Communion. He has a final meal followed by a famous foot-washing scene, but there is no lifting up and breaking bread, no pouring and sharing wine. How can it be that this meal—so emblematic of our faith … so sacramental … is simply missing in John?
No one knows for sure, but I’m persuaded by a suggestion I heard decades ago (alas, uncredited because my memory recalls the insight but not the origin): in John’s community they gathered to read aloud pieces of this gospel each week. And each week they did this while celebrating communion, themselves taking and breaking bread, pouring and sharing wine. John wrote for their lived experience, so he wrote a gospel to compliment the meal already at the heart of their gathering. No need to describe the meal itself.
Whether that’s the real reason or not will likely never be known. But it fits with how I see this night in this week intersecting with our experience of climate change. Put yourself, even if just momentarily, in Jesus’ sandals. He sees the end—his end—rapidly approaching. It’s not that he wants to die, but that he will not compromise the power of compassion that dwells in him. And he sees the rising powers of the world determined to preserve themselves at the cost of his life. This isn’t divine foreknowledge. It’s simply the sober commonsense insight accessible to most every person who’s been a prophet/martyr.
But Jesus’ primary concern on this night in this week is to ensure that the compassion birthed in and through him continues to be realized in the world after his death (that’s realized eschatology). And how does he do that? He tells his friends to love one another. Relentlessly. Fiercely. Even at great risk. Love. Jesus’ death would seem to undermine the usefulness of this counsel. But before we race ahead to the resurrection and see there some miraculous overturning of death, before we do that—just wait. Because on that first Maundy Thursday there is as yet no resurrection. No gospels have been written. No Sunday School lessons learned. No Hallelujahs hurled heavenward. No Easter lilies bought. None of that is “real” yet. There is ONLY a daunting, messy, chaotic end racing toward Jesus. And he meets that end by sharing a meal and asking his friends to persist in loving one another.
Perhaps that love is central to what happens on Easter morning. (I happen to think it is, though in a very unorthodox way.) But I want to hold us in the shattering uncertainty of Maundy Thursday for a moment. There is a strand of eco-awareness today that looks at the unnerving science and the damning math and assesses it with the same sort of sobering certainty that Jesus did on Maundy Thursday: we’re screwed. And who knows whether it is alarmist (as we like to hope) or just … inconveniently honest. But I ask you, today, to put yourself in an ecological Maundy Thursday moment. What if there’s ONLY a daunting, messy, chaotic end racing toward us? If so, how will we meet that end? Here is the thin, profound, powerful good news of Jesus: Let’s meet it gathered with friends, sharing a meal, and pledging love.
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The Gospel in Transition by David R. Weiss is a year of reflections on facing climate change, finding hope, and the alchemy of Christian community. My weekly blog posts will consider climate change, Transition, and faith—using biblical images, liturgical seasons, science, and theology, as conversation partners. Writing in a voice a bit too restless to call “devotional,” I aim to be insightfully evocative and usefully provocative. In fact, I hope you’ll subscribe (go to the top right sidebar!) Thanks for reading and see you next week! drw59mn(at)gmail.com
[1] This is mostly NRSV translation, but I have replaced “my disciples,” which is certainly what the Greek says, with “followers of the Way,” which is what the church came to understand and which resonates with my sense that Jesus never saw himself as having a monopoly on “the Way.”
[2] There’s a whole theology behind this one word, which links Jesus directly to the Hebrew notion of God’s Wisdom. Jesus says his ministry will be (can only be?) carried on, not by followers or disciples, but by friends.
