Tag Archive | Climate Crisis

Collapsing with Care: An Introduction

Feb15

Collapsing with Care: A Field Guide to Meaning-Making as the World Unravels
David R. Weiss – February 15, 2024

This essay marks something of a new stage in my work. Since setting climate as the centering theme of my writing at the very end of 2015, I’ve been writing “occasional” essays around the climate crisis and, more recently, Collapse. “Occasional” here doesn’t mean “now and then”; rather, it means most of these essays have been sparked—occasioned—by a recent news story or an event in my life. They’re written in reaction to something. As a result, there’s been no larger overarching pattern; they’re more or less a kaleidoscopic set of reflections, each new one shaped by the latest turn of the world.

That’s about to change.

I’ll continue occasionally (in both senses of the word) to respond to happenings around me, but it’s time that the heart of my work shift toward a larger picture and a longer arc of my own choosing. Last August, when I introduced my current theme of “Writing into the Whirlwind,” I made clear my conviction that we are now irrevocably headed toward Collapse—the entangled unravelling of the ecological, social, and political foundations of our shared life. I’m now going to center my writing about preparing for and meeting Collapse.

Honestly, I rather intended for this shift to happen in sync with the beginning of my Second Tuesday talks last September. A handful of personal “life complexities” conspired to delay me. But now it’s time for me to reflect openly, directly, consistently, and coherently about how we meet Collapse. This is critical because, while we cannot avert Collapse, we can still choose how we meet it. And being active, thoughtful, and in partnership with others will make all the difference in whether Collapse tests our humanity … or altogether undoes it.

There are many persons better equipped than me to write about the science of Collapse, the technology that may cushion Collapse, or the creation of alternative social structures to help navigate Collapse. But I am well-equipped to write about the inward aspects of Collapse. So, I’m committed to focus on “Collapsing with Care,” offering something of a “Field Guide to Meaning-Making as the World Unravels.”

That is, I hope to help us understand the inward (psychological/spiritual) facets of Collapse that helped make it inevitable; grasp the inward attitudes and appetites that must shift if we are to meet Collapse with a chance at surviving it; and chart the inward dispositions and skills that will be essential as Collapse overtakes us.

There will, of course, be an abundance of external challenges to meet as Collapse unfolds. And we’ll need new knowledge and practical skills to navigate a most unfamiliar planet—but it’s my belief that unless we also do the inner work that sustains our capacity to care for each other and prepares us for meaning-making as the world unravels, we won’t be ready or able to fully make the changes in our outward behaviors or take up the challenging tasks that will be needed to make life livable. The infrastructure of our future life lies inward. And I believe I can help us in crafting that infrastructure.

There is, admittedly, a certain audacity in setting myself to this task. Even while confident in my ability to help craft that infrastructure, it’d be easy for me to name a dozen (or more!) persons who undoubtedly know more about this than I do. There’s also a measure of daring-balanced-by-doubt. Now that I’ve “announced” this project, the possibility of public failure-to-follow-through becomes real. There is a certain “safety” in holding back and keeping quiet. And yet I’m driven to do this. I believe I have something distinctive to say … and a distinctive way of saying it.

I read and listen and reflect with a poet’s perspective. Yes, I occasionally do, in fact, write in rhyme, but that’s not what I mean here. By poet’s perspective I mean that I have a rare gift to perceive unexpected connections and relationships between images and ideas that often produce rich insight for me—and for others. Whether across disparate disciplines or between disparate voices in related disciplines, I can bring notions together such that they “spark.” That gives me reason to believe that my writing around “Collapsing with Care” will do the same in worthwhile ways.

Additionally, I write with empathetic eloquence. I don’t simply craft words that read well together; because I listen well in between writing, I have a knack for crafting the words my readers have been seeking to name their own intuitions. In the two decades I spent focused on writing about welcoming LGBTQ persons in faith communities, I heard—countless times—from readers, that I had gifted them with words to hold the truth of the convictions that had been rumbling in their hearts. So I believe that my writing around Collapse—writing that by its very subject is unsettling—can also carry an anticipatory empathy for my readers.

I should be clear, neither poetic perspective nor empathetic eloquence are postures that I “adopt” for their usefulness. They simply reflect how I “naturally” encounter the world. As such they represent distinctive gifts I can bring to this most important, most existential conversation.

Lastly, I am undertaking this project for the sake of those I love. Of course, I hope my work benefits many, but my motivation has its deepest roots in my own children and grandchildren, in other family and friends, and in the communities to which I belong. As much as I am driven by the gifts I carry, I am equally driven by the names I hold in my heart. Convinced that Collapse is already dawning on planet Earth, with its repercussions set to ripple across the physical and social landscapes of our lives, how can I not invest my best energy, my most creative thinking, my finest words, on behalf of those I love? And so, this is what I will do.

I trust that my understanding will grow and deepen as I work on this. I expect some of the ideas I begin with will be recast along the way. All the more reason … to begin. Let me start by explaining briefly the choice of words in my (tentative) title, Collapsing with Care: A Field Guide to Meaning-Making as the World Unravels.

Collapsing: Simply put, from this very first word, there will be no more sugar-coating of tomorrow. We are collapsing and we will be collapsing for the rest of our lives. I can offer no more quiet assent to “hope.” Collapse is our future. (Obviously, “hope” is a loaded word, and I’ll have more to say about it along the way. But when hope is used to avoid facing the hard truth of Collapse, it becomes shorthand for denial, and we can’t afford that any longer.)

… with Care: Whatever “hope” we want to claim now has to do with our character and compassion as we collapse. Cultivating a capacity to act with care toward ourselves, one another, our fellow creatures, and the planet itself, is the foundation of hope. In the midst of Collapse, hope can no longer be the belief that “things will get better.” It must become the conviction that compassion—the concrete practice of care—is worthwhile no matter what.  

A Field Guide: While I’d like to imagine this as a book that folks will read from start to finish, I also hope it becomes something of a prized reference that they refer back to again and again, like a “field guide.” Further, we often think of a Field Guide as a book that helps orient us to unfamiliar terrain; that’s precisely what I hope to do here: provide an orientation to the inner terrain of our hearts and minds as we move into Collapse … and as Collapse engulfs us, framing our lives.

… to Meaning-Making: For over 40 years, since my introduction to the work of James Fowler on Faith Development and to existentialist literature and philosophy, both of which happened during my last year of college, I’ve been persuaded that our capacity for (our hunger for) meaning-making is the quality that confers humanity on us. Our sense—even when desperate and doubtful—that meaning can be made is what enables hope or faith. And living with hope or faith is what anchors our humanity—our capacity for care. This “Field Guide” aims to point us in the direction of meaning-making when the terrain beneath our feet—and beneath our souls—becomes entirely unfamiliar.

… as the World: Collapse is all-inclusive. It will claim large swaths and multiple dimensions of the natural world. It will strain and eventually shatter the formal institutions and political structures as well as the informal cultural assumptions that govern our social world. And it will shake to the core the roots of our inner worlds: religious beliefs, moral convictions, and basic humanity. Collapse is coming for just about everything.

… Unravels: Collapse is not a singular event; it is a process that will be long, with predicable turns and unpredictable twists. Some aspects will be precipitous; others will unfold more slowly (across generations—if we’re lucky). Right now, we are “caught” in liminal time—unable to prevent Collapse, yet able in some crucial ways to brace and temper our outer and inner worlds for what is to come. Perhaps even to fashion the inward and outward skills that will assist us in preserving and transforming humanity for life in a Collapsing world.

All of that said, there are also a handful of things I should be explicit in saying I’m NOT doing. These include:

I am not planning to make any specific predictions about thresholds or tipping points in the natural world. I’m not a climate scientist or any kind of Earth scientist. Early on in the Field Guide I will review the science I find most compelling regarding Collapse but chronicling and anticipating the details of Collapse in our physical world is work best done by others. I’ll be reading along.

Likewise, I am not planning to make any specific predictions about societal/political breakdowns. I’m not a political or social scientist. While I do foresee real chaos on this horizon—as an unavoidable consequence of the physical upheavals ahead and the way they’ll stoke our fears and threaten our values—I’m not in a position to forecast the specifics.

I am not planning to offer any financial or real estate advice. I see people post questions in Facebook groups: What should I do with my retirement savings? When will the banks go under? Should I look to purchase property where I can grow my own food? These are real questions (or they will become real questions at some point), but I’m not equipped to address them. If I do well what I am able to do, you’ll be in a more grounded place inwardly as you wrestle with such outward questions.

I am not planning to offer any homemaking skills. It goes without saying that Collapse will carry away many of the conveniences we now take for granted. So, yes, reclaiming many lost or lapsed homemaking skills will be extremely beneficial (indeed, maybe lifesaving). But my focus is on the inner work that will allow us to reclaim such skills from a place of gratitude and joy rather than resignation and fear. My gut belief is that while the inner work often seems intangible and almost impractical, shifting our posture to welcome the radical simplicity that is coming our way may be the single most practical thing we can do.

Finally, I am not planning to propose or develop any alternative community models. Many of our current models (shaped/misshaped by capitalism) have proven destructive of our outer and inner worlds, so fashioning new ways of organizing our common life will be essential. It simply isn’t my particular expertise or focus, and I think it’s important for me to do what I can do, to do THAT very well—and to know those limits and not exceed them. There are others already doing this critical work, and I’d rather support their efforts than do an incompetent job of mirroring them.

There is always more that could be said, but that’s enough for an introduction to this project. I’m not sure whether this Field Guide will ultimately become a print book or an online resource; that will become clear with time. I’ll incorporate some of my best writing from the past few years, but I’ll write much of it fresh. This will be a living, organic project, unfolding in real time right now. It could easily become a never-ending project, but I believe it’s more important to bring it to completion in time to be useful to as many people as possible. I won’t offer a timetable; but, as I said, I’m driven, so I won’t be dawdling.

I’ve set up a dedicated page on my website to gather my writings around Collapse. Alongside my blog posts, this page will be my virtual “work bench,” where various pieces get fine-tuned and finally assembled. While I’ll continue blogging on a variety of topics, this project will be the center of my work, and I’ll use many of my Second Tuesday conversations to discuss this work as it unfolds. I’ll welcome your help!—whether in person on Second Tuesdays or in dialogue across my blog. My writing will be enriched by your questions, comments, and honest reactions. So I warmly invite you to join me in a living conversation about the things needed for our hearts and minds so that we might truly “collapse with care.”

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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 at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.

Interrupting the Anthropocene

Feb1

Interrupting the Anthropocene
David R. Weiss – February 1, 2024

At less than five ounces (and barely 100 pages), Roy Scranton’s little book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (City Lights Books, San Francisco, 2015), definitely punches above its weight.

And they’re gut punches. Four pages in he sums up the state of the world: “We’re fucked. The only questions are how soon and how badly.” (16) Now, a lot has changed since 2015, but much of it tilts toward “sooner” and “worse.” In 2024 it might be time to throw those two sentences into ALL CAPS and italics. Roy Scranton is not optimistic about our future, but there are some shining gems hiding beyond the title that, if hardly salvific, are going to feel good in your pocket a decade from now.

Epiphanies often occur in strange places. During his time as an Army private in Baghdad, Iraq in 2003, he experienced the debilitating stress of facing daily the threat of death. But it was there that he found unexpected power in the advice of an 18th century Samurai manual: “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.” Each morning then, he paused to imagine getting killed in a flurry of ways. Then, as he began that day’s mission, he discovered, “I didn’t need to worry anymore because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive.” (21-22)

In Learning to Die Scranton suggests this is precisely the unsettling wisdom we need to embrace—collectively, as a culture—to have any chance of living into the future that’s headed our way. In his view (and mine), multiple and now unavoidable collapses are going to unmake our physical and social worlds in the coming decades. As he puts it, “Carbon-fueled capitalism has proven astoundingly virulent but also toxic, cannibalistic, and self-destructive. It is unsustainable, both in itself and as a response to catastrophic climate change.” (23)

We’re caught, Scranton says, in a most wicked problem. Here, “wicked” is not a moral term. It names problems that have multiple-and-entangled roots-and-solutions. Problems for which the causes are many, for which any singular “solution” is illusory, and for which any coordinated set of solutions is simply too complicated to be technically, socially, or politically realistic. The wicked problem we face is global-wide carbon-fueled capitalism. The climate crisis and a host of other ecological and socio-political crises are symptoms of this fundamental (and finally fatal) expression of human living. The “wicked” comes forward when we realize that (by now—because we’re so far into the game) every possible response—whether technological or political, and regardless of how “green” it is—will inevitably exacerbate other dimensions of the crises we face.

One particularly jarring face of this wicked problem is what Scranton calls “Carbon Politics.” He traces the way the shift from coal (much more labor intensive in production and transportation) to oil and gas largely eliminated the ability of labor to threaten any shutdown of energy production. With the political process itself distorted to favor monied interests and insulate politicians from popular outcry, Scranton argues that even large-scale protests have lost any real capacity to make meaningful change. That’s hard to hear.

I don’t think it’s necessarily a call to cease agitating for better policies. However, it is, at the very least, a sobering view that encourages stark self-critical reflection on which grassroots-citizen actions (if any) might bear real leverage in such a twisted political landscape. Absent such gritty strategic consideration, Scranton may be correct that despite the media coverage garnered by well-planned protests, they accomplish little more than to divert/disperse public energy while those who own the means of production—and a good share of the political process as well—keep up production and profits even while the planet creaks and groans.

Those creaks and groans, increasingly accompanied by outright screams of ecological anguish, announce the impending and inescapable death of carbon-fueled capitalism—and the civilization that is wholly entwined with it. Thankfully, humanity has lived—even thrived—under systems other than carbon-fueled capitalism. Our ancestors have shown that it’s possible. Still, if humanity survives this present unmaking of our world, we’ll do so on a planet altogether unknown: different from anything we or any of our earliest relatives encountered over the 200,000 years that Homo sapiens has been around. And that “we” that finds itself in an altogether unknown world?—that likely includes some of us, some of our family, and some of our friends … anyone “fortunate” enough to be around for the latter half of this century.

The challenge before us collectively—before our culture—is learning to die well as a civilization. To let go of this way of life, and the no longer sustainable (were they ever?) notions of identity, freedom, success, and progress, that went with it. And to do so while maintaining character, dignity, courage, and wisdom. While the various hard sciences might buy us a brief window of time (there is no way they can do more than this), learning to die is ultimately the business of the humanities: philosophy and the arts. These are the cultural traditions that have offered paths to meaning amid the tumult of the lived human experience. And meaning is what anchors character, dignity, courage, wisdom.

For Scranton this means it is imperative that we turn to the humanities—especially philosophy and literature—in order to fashion a self-reflective posture toward life that prizes depth of meaning in the face of finitude and mortality. This is what it means to “learn to die.” One of the ironies about this is that all you can do is practice—until you do, finally but just once, die. But if we do this learning well, if this persistent practice becomes our way of life, it is just possible that we might find that it allows us to live well into the Anthropocene. Into that altogether unknown world. Pulling out some of those shining gems from our pockets.

This is not a happy ending smuggled into an only seemingly tragic tale. No. Whatever life we might live as the Anthropocene unfolds (and not over the coming centuries, but over the coming decades and years) will be life on the ruins of carbon-fueled capitalism. But—if it is to be human life, life in which our humanity prevails rather than collapsing into barbaric savagery—we will need new stories to hold and fashion our humanity in that new (fractured, broken, wounded) world. All the great existential questions will need to be considered afresh. We will need to ask again what it means to be human … to live … to work … to love … to die … in that world. As human beings.

Learning to die well is a gift to a future that we may or may not see ourselves. In order to make that gift we’ll need to embrace, preserve, and plumb the multicultural wisdom of meaning-making from around the globe. Today. If we do, then tomorrow that same multicultural wisdom might help renew humanity with a humbler, more mortal self-understanding that could perhaps support a common life on the far side of that death.

Scranton’s perspective is certainly … austere. Isn’t there anything we can do today besides learning to die? Yes, but it isn’t something we can do instead of learning to die; it’s something we can practice alongside that other most essential learning. We can choose to interrupt. For me, this is the most insightful, provocative, challenging (and intellectually dense) idea in the whole book. (Sorry.)

Scranton places our capacity for symbolic meaning at the heart of what it means to be human. Language and math undergird the scientific learning and technological advances that gave us critical evolutionary advantages early on. Additionally, through the humanities, symbolic meaning has been foundational in allowing us to be human-across-time: to create notions of self-awareness and meaning that persist and extend from distant yesterdays into the ferment of present possibilities. Symbolic meaning allows us to explore both outer and inner worlds—and to make choices about how we will act. Lifting us above mere instinct and impulse, symbolic meaning is the seat of human agency.

Carried first by gestures, images, and rituals, then by written symbols, today symbolic meaning is also carried digitally across multiple media: television, computers, internet. And because of the extent to which digital devices now define our lives—what we know, how we know, and how we respond to that knowing—symbolic meaning has been made captive to the interests and impulses that drive our media. And with it, human agency.

Scranton likens the contemporary human community, so digitally networked as to be almost like a hive, abuzz with the movement of symbolic meaning: cognition and emotion. But powerful interests today, some of them discrete (owners, corporations, politicians, special interest groups), others structural (marketing, algorithms), have harnessed media—especially social media, but also entertainment and marketing media—to effectively set emotion above cognition. In effect, this reduces human agency to reactive feeling.

With social media echo chambers, algorithms, and incentives to “like” (or “hate”) and “share” posts on emotive impulse, it is as though we are (left, right, and center) largely self-contained bubbles of awareness being mutually massaged by all the emotional energy we channel. The images and messages that carry a significant portion of our symbolic meaning today no longer invite us into self-reflective awareness and thoughtful, ethical agency. Rather, they reach into our amygdala (lower brains) and stoke our feelings, diverting our energy and eliding our agency on a rush of emotion. We have been brought from Namaste, a Hindu greeting that roughly means, “The sacred in me recognizes and honors the sacred in you,” to “The lizard (brain) in me pokes and jabs the lizard (brain) in you.” Ouch.

Most of us are well aware that social media (as well as entertainment and marketing media) are more interested in monetizing us than connecting us. But Scranton suggests that perhaps their primary role today is to domesticate us—to keep our minds so awash with emotion that actual human agency is an afterthought that we humans never get to. We are, as it were, fiddles being fiddled by the media while Rome burns. Oof.

Unless we interrupt the echoes. Choose to PAUSE long enough to breathe, reflect, and only then act with intention. If you thought learning to die was going to be hard, just imagine noticing every “managed” emotion sent your way by all manner of media. From meme to rant, from ad to endless entertainment. (By “managed” I mean to distinguish media-driven emotion from authentic emotion that emerges from your own life.) Can any of us really afford to actually notice and consider all of this? Can any of us afford not to when every unaware reaction we make only further empowers the algorithms that disempower us? To even contemplate the daily practice of interruption is to become immediately aware of how domesticated our lives have become.

But that domestication has given us the Anthropocene. If we don’t interrupt it, we just add fuel to the fire. And the planet is already plenty hot. This means more (much more) than just PAUSING before you toss an emoji on a Facebook post or share a meme to affirm or antagonize others. But it is not less than this. It also means checking in with yourself as you channel surf and attending to the way ads affect you. It means feeling your feelings at a higher level than your lizard brain. Simply put—and now we’re right back to the humanities—it means humanizing yourself, reclaiming your agency. For the good of humanity and the wellbeing of the planet. And part of that means learning to die (well).

So, please, put this at the top of your “to do” list: Interrupting the Anthropocene. And then do it. 🙂

*   *   *

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 at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.

HEATED: The Climate of Politics in a Collapsing World

Jan9

HEATED: The Climate of Politics in a Collapsing World
David R. Weiss – January 8, 2024

I am unsure where or how to begin. I’ve made multiple false starts over the past four days. Partly it’s how much I have to say—so many disparate (but ultimately related!) threads—and I know I can’t fit it all into a single short essay. So, I fret and overthink. But it’s more than that. It’s also—likely more so—the heaviness I hold inside. Altogether, for four days now, I’ve found myself restless and distracted almost to the point of frenzy. It’s a strange place to be. I love writing, and I have plenty of time to write these days. But sometimes I dread what I feel driven to write about.

My sense is that climate is rewriting the state of American politics (and possibly this election) in ways most people can’t even imagine. Of course, most people realize that climate is going to be a primary topic in this election cycle. After all, 2023 was the hottest year on record for global surface temperature, and 2024 promises to give it a run for its money. How could anyone run for office and not address the climate crisis—even if only by denial? But my concern in this piece is not with what the candidates may or may not say directly about the climate. It’s that climate (and collapse) will produce an entire politics that is HEATED in ways that will make this election—and each future election—a referendum on the very character of human community.

This scares me. Not least because even among those folks with whom I usually find common cause (the progressive flank of the Democratic Party) I fear there is as yet little real appreciation for how thoroughly climate/collapse are going to foster campaign rhetoric and public mania that will make for an unrecognizable political landscape. The Left will easily be caught between dismissiveness and disbelief right up until democracy closes its doors altogether.

This essay is about that dread.

Three years ago, late on the afternoon of January 6, 2021, I was struggling to make sense of what I’d just watched play out on national television: an insurrection against the government of the United States. I scribbled words in real time into one of the spiral notebooks where I gather thoughts—some of which later find their way into essays. Here are three sentences I wrote down that day:

  • “This is inverted ecological demographic anxiety: the militant even irrationally fanatical denial of what your subconscious knows to be true.”
  • “Make no mistake: the [January 6] assault on our very imperfect democracy had no interest in perfecting it, but in annihilating it, and therewith it hoped to annihilate any claim that finitude and diversity are twin poles of our reality.”
  • “This [January 6] mayhem is the eruption of ecological extractive demographic anxiety.”

Now, fast forward to just last month, when Trump bragged that he was only interested in being a dictator for his first day in office: “On Day 1 we are closing the border and we are drilling, drilling, drilling. After that I am not a dictator, OK?” But these two goals—closing the border and endless drilling—express precisely what I identified three years ago as the roots of the January 6 insurrection: ecological extractive demographic anxiety and the attempt to annihilate any claim that finitude and diversity are twin poles of our reality.

This is HEATED campaign rhetoric intended to stoke public mania. And, thus far, among Republican voters, it is carrying the day. Behind the fury of the MAGA/Far Right crowd—and the candidates who play to them—lies a deep and growing anxiety over the inescapable (and increasingly undeniable) finitude of our world and the inexorable press of diversity that results both from shifting internal demographics and external migration patterns.

But it’s more than just building a border wall and drilling for oil. And it’s the “more than” that we really need to wrestle with. And the “more than” gets complicated fast. And the “more than” drives my dread. This is not to say that there’s nothing we can do with respect to this HEATED political climate. But there’s nothing easy or simple to do. And if we don’t grapple with the complexity even some of the harder things we attempt may miss their mark. So, in keeping with the tagline of my current work, “writing into the whirlwind,” here’s sort of a whirlwind tour of (just some of) the complexity behind my dread.

Migration isn’t going anywhere. Migration patterns are themselves driven by socio-political stresses (such as famine and war) exacerbated in recent years by the worsening climate crisis—but those current stresses are also the long-term result of U.S./Western foreign policy decisions (including covert actions) made decades ago in service of insatiable U.S. material appetites that (often intentionally!) eroded the socio-political conditions in countries of the Global South.

Specifically, those decades old injustices assailed the political aspirations and frayed the civic fabric of the same societies whose worsening conditions now lead desperate persons to flea northward—while those same injustices were, decades ago, busily enabling our patterns of consumption that sowed the very seeds of climate collapse that furthers migration today. Migration and climate are inexorably intertwined—they have been throughout human history and no less so in recent decades.

This means no “immigration reform” will be just or workable unless it reckons with our past complicity in creating the roots of the crises in other countries—and recognizes that as climate breakdown progresses, the migrants crossing our borders are fleeing unlivable conditions in their homelands that our patterns of consumption right here have created for them.

Collapse is here. Already now. This is a hard bleak truth we can’t entirely grasp yet—because the same history of injustices that has now made collapse inevitable, has also insulated most of us in the U.S from its first immediate effects. Thus, many on the Right continue to deny the ecological crisis altogether, while many on the Left accept the reality of the crisis but continue to believe we can still sidestep catastrophe. The unnerving but essential truth is that ecological collapse is now an unstoppable force shaping our future. We may yet be able to mitigate the degree of catastrophe (although even that window is closing—fast!) but collapse itself now has an inertia that is beyond our capacity to stop. And the longer we wistfully imagine otherwise, the less time and energy we have available to meet the reality of collapse with civic creativity and community compassion.

This collapse will be physical, the result of human-driven ruptures in our climate and other planetary systems. But it will also be social, the result of cascading stresses on civilization systems that cannot (or will not) adapt to the new, fractured world that is now our home. I believe this unfolding collapse is sensed (subconsciously, but viscerally) even by those who deny it—and it shapes their anxieties and actions. As a result, during this election year, collapse will be a “silent partner” with an uncredited but oversized voice in political rhetoric. (This is already in evidence.)

Although no politician will likely campaign on a platform of preparing for collapse, the stakes of this election cycle, especially at the federal level, will be decisive in determining whether as a nation we are merely ill-prepared or acting with stupendous malevolence over the next four years—and beyond.  

We have “entered the bardo.” This is a notion from Tibetan Buddhism recently invoked by Joanna Macy. The bardo is the liminal (threshold) space in between worlds. To say we have “entered the bardo” is to recognize that the world we have known is now effectively closed off from the world that awaits us. There is a chasm between present and future—between this year and the next, more decisively between 2024 and 2034—that will not be crossed by merely flipping calendar pages. There exists “in the bardo”—between worlds—a moment when nearly everything is up for grabs. Freefall or paradigm shift, calamity or transformation. Likely a mix of both.

What’s critical in the bardo is that we not cling to the past, to the supposition that somehow what came before can reliably predict what comes next. This has often been true. But no more. Indeed, as we cross planetary systems tipping points, Earth itself is entering its own bardo (like it or not, we’re going along for that ride). But, for us, to acknowledge we have entered the bardo in our present socio-political context, is to confess (to hold with conviction) that tomorrow (next year, next decade) will be radically disconnected from today—because of unfolding ecological collapse and the impact that will have on every facet of our lives. Knowing we are in the bardo confers a certain freedom, even as it guarantees nothing. Many possibilities imagined in our past will be foreclosed, while a handful of unforeseen possibilities may present themselves. The bardo does NOT make collapse avoidable; it does mean that we might position ourselves (at least in some ways) to encounter collapse rather than simply finding ourselves swamped by it.

Our democracy is at the edge of eclipse. We could vote it away in the next election. It’s easy to blame this on Trump, and he has amplified this danger like no other American political figure in recent history, but the roots of this fraught moment go back further and deeper in our past. Still, Trump, his political allies, and his popular base pose the largest threat to U.S. democracy in my lifetime. If they have electoral success in 2024, they will set out to dismantle civil rights, social justice, and environmental progress for years to come. And they will seek to effectively guarantee rule by a corporate-backed, white-interested minority for the foreseeable future. This is far from certain, but it is dreadfully possible.

The Right’s agenda is driven by inverted ecological demographic anxiety. Unwilling to face a world with finite limits and diverse others, the Right—whether in Trump’s transparently vengeful and authoritarian rhetoric or in the more “nuanced” extremism of his competitors—has no viable political strategy other than to stoke these anxieties and then simultaneously promise false (self- and other-destructive) solutions to them. To be honest, while Democrats by and large have more “humane” messaging, their overall economic agenda remains unequivocally ecocidal, and their immigration policies fail the tests of justice and workability given earlier.

Here’s the difference, though, and it does matter. Establishment Democrats, while clearly beholden to monied interests, have not targeted democracy itself. And so long as (small d) democratic practices are in place, there is at least room to maneuver; at least opportunity to exercise politics as harm reduction and perhaps, if we are wise and savvy enough, to use it to imaginatively experiment for the common good. The GOP, however, which is increasingly entangled with if not undifferentiated from the Far Right, seems poised to dispense with democracy altogether. And that difference matters: it has consequences for us, for our global neighbors, and for flora and fauna across the planet.

It isn’t just us in the bardo. Our political adversaries are in there with us.

The age of information anomie is upon us. Anomie means lawlessness. Few of us have yet realized how fragile—fractured—information has become in recent decades. Information is the infrastructure of the world itself: the patterns revealed in physics, the structures and relationships observed in chemistry; the DNA maps discerned in biology. The material world IS matter given form by information. Similarly, the infrastructure of organized human community rests on reliable social information—commonly held data regarded as trustworthy. The stability of our society is built on this. And our capacity to press the case for improving—further humanizing—society (deepening understanding, expanding rights, etc.) hinges on being able to use the relative solidity of current information. But today information itself is under assault. To be blunt, this assault amounts to humanity unmaking itself. When information fails, language itself teeters on noise.

Just in the past few days Donald Trump and then Elise Stefanik (New York representative and Chair of the House Republican Caucus) began referring to those arrested for their violent roles in the January 6 insurrection as “hostages.” This is nothing other than an attack on information. Not a war of words, but a war on words. Trump has done this “in plain sight” from his first campaign, throughout his presidency, and right up into the present. His “charisma” is fashioned out of disinformation—and its lure on some significant portion of the public.

Propaganda has a long, storied history. It has thrived—for centuries—in government messaging and hate-group narratives. That’s not new. What is new is the extent to which the digital age has made disinformation at once a cottage industry accessible to anyone with the internet and a state/corporate program capable of being scaled up to an overwhelming force. We know that as early as the 1970’s U.S. oil corporations began promulgating disinformation regarding the climate with the sole goal of sowing doubt about science. For sake of profit, they chose to weaken the infrastructure of human community. In the 1980’s the Soviet Union (and now Russia) expanded its disinformation efforts globally. Driven less by profit than the lust for power, the express purpose of these streams of disinformation was ultimately less about making false stories believable than about so flooding the world with fiction-as-fact as to render Americans (and others) incapable of sense-making. To transform information into confusion.

More recently social media companies—driven by a thirst for both profit and power—have found that algorithms can process information about us in ways that undo us. It isn’t just that these media create “echo chambers”—perfect storms that exponentially amplify bias into prejudice into hate into action. It’s also that these echo chambers “work” by employing algorithms (as well as both cottage-produced and corporate/state produced disinformation) to throttle our amygdala (“lower” brain) into a frenzy of fear and anxiety. Which is to say, they “succeed” when they dampen (or even shut down) the frontal lobes of our cerebral cortex, our “higher” brain where critical thinking, creativity, and compassion are born. AI-generated content, including deep fake technology, will make this even worse. This is what I mean when I say social media employs algorithms to process information about us in ways that undo us. Social media weakens our access to our higher brain; it lessens our humanity.

There is an eerily relevant reference in the 2016 movie Arrival, which features a plot about first contact with intelligent alien life that has come to Earth. As a small circle of linguists around the world work feverishly to decipher this alien language, they encounter an ambiguous phrase that might be understood as referring to a “weapon”—or a “tool.” Of course, for the humans and their response to the aliens, everything hinges on whether the aliens are speaking about a weapon or a tool. In an even deeper irony, what the aliens are speaking about is language itself.

The stark reality we face, as we grapple with other steep challenges and as we enter an election cycle with enormous stakes, is that today language, images, and information are all rapidly being turned from a once trustworthy tool into a high-tech weapon—to be deployed against the human community itself. As if there weren’t already enough dread on my (and your) plate!

But we dare not stop at dread. The task now is to ask, how does it help us to recognize the core anxieties beneath the tremors that rock the HEATED political landscape in front of us right now? What insights does this offer as we navigate our choices—and personal relationships—in 2024? How do we respond strategically, creatively, compassionately, and humanly to those whose anxieties over finitude and diversity are being used to unmake democracy and lessen humanity? I don’t know. But that’s what I’m leaning into in the weeks ahead.

I’m leaning into my dread, so I can discover what’s on the far side of it. I hope you’ll lean with me.

*   *   *

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 at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.

Grief-stricken—and Graced

Oct7

Grief-stricken—and Graced
David R. Weiss – October 7, 2023

If you follow my blog, you’ve likely noticed I mention grief a lot. My writing can be witty, even humorous. Touchingly poignant. Powerfully insightful. But sooner or later the thread of my words wends its way back to grief. Most often, to Earth grief. Yes, the ecological news is bad these days, but no one is eager to sign up for sadness. So why do I persist in hawking a ware no one wants? Because I’m convinced it’s the only “cure” for what ails us—whether we realize it or not.

A couple opening vignettes.

1. Grief, it seems, is best (maybe truly only) communicated in first-person language. I can speak my grief. Not yours. And the moment I try to discuss grief in general, well, whatever words hit the page are but distant echoes of the reality itself. There is no “objective” grief; no grief in the abstract. Patterns, to be sure. But ultimately, each of us navigates grief for ourself. With a knot in our gut. Tears on our cheeks. Words caught in our throat. And yet, there is grace, because nothing says we cannot meet grief … individually-together. And, of Earth grief, this much is true: if we meet it entirely alone, we are lost.

2. I know more than I can tell. Brilliant thinker (yes), eloquent writer (yes), and passionate lover of Earth from nearest family to distant desert (yes!). And still I have not yet found the fullness of my own words around Earth grief. I sense that what reaches the page barely skirts the surface of that knot, those tears, the words still caught in my throat. I’ve barely begun to speak my truth. Some of this is because my own journey into genuine Earth grief is relatively young—a few years at most. More of this is because even these past years, I’ve stepped carefully along the edges, not quite ready to leap. Most of this is because what I know even faintly(!) threatens to undo me if I allow it to know me in return. Which is where the other grace lies—on the far side of undone.

3. Sunday night Margaret and I attended the “In a Lifetime” farewell tour concert by Clannad, an Irish Celtic band that’s been a favorite of hers for years. The music—both instrumental and vocal—was hauntingly beautiful. I found myself deeply moved. I wrote in my notebook, “How do I make my words on grief soar like Clannad’s music?”

After the concert, I posted on Facebook:

From the “I am the nightmare you haven’t yet dared to dream” bin … Had an ethereal experience at the Clannad concert last night — between Margaret’s (finally relaxed!) nearness at my elbow to the vocals and music soaring from the stage. Such beauty in their music, often woven from very mundane folk songs. It was their “Once in a Lifetime: The Farewell Tour” concert. Sometime shortly after intermission it hit me (hard): For ALL OF US, this is our “Farewell Tour.” Most of us just don’t realize it yet.

Sunday afternoon I read a peer-reviewed paper, “Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture, and uncivilization.” The paper reviews climate models indicating that Earth could warm by 3-4 C by 2100 and eventually by 6-8 C or more in the next couple of centuries, rendering agriculture impossible. It then proposes some key policy initiatives for today that could help “make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating … and improve the prospects for our hunter-gatherer descendants … two to three centuries in the future.”

That’s SOME Farewell Tour. I hope we make some beautiful music along the way.

Well. How do you make words like those, soar? Overstated? I’m afraid not. I’ve read too many papers with similar perspectives. There are reasons they don’t make the evening news. How much do YOU feel like buying a new car after learning that?

One last vignette.

4. My friend S. has cancer. A lot of cancer. A boatload. More cancer than you can count on your fingers and toes. He has Fanconi Anemia, a rare genetic condition that makes him a cancer magnet. He’s had over 150 skin cancers removed. As well as two on his lips; two on his tongue; two in his throat; four on his gums; one on his inner cheek; one in a lymph node. He’s lost his entire bladder to cancer, and his prostate as well. He’s awaiting surgery for a new cancer in his esophagus. Just last week, because of pre-cancerous spots on both of his lower eyelids, each one had about a half-inch length cauterized. You probably can’t imagine cancer on this scale. I can’t.

Not yet 45 years old, married, and father to a daughter in her senior year of high school, S. has no room for “hope” in his life. It’s not “in stock” at ANY of the stores, clinics, hospitals he goes to. And yet S. hasn’t given in to despair either, though I know there are days he comes close. But somehow, he still laughs and cries. He loves. He savors moments of joy even as he’s hit far too often with episodes of pain, fear, terror, grief.

What is the word for life on the far side of any realistic hope that nevertheless stalwartly-stubbornly-wearily-faithfully refuses despair? I don’t know that word yet. Grit? Resolve? I wrote an entire ten-essay series under the heading “dark hope.” Maybe that’s the word. I’m still unsure what word names this best. (I’d love to hear your thoughts!)

But this is what I do know: human “civilization” has no more reason to be hopeful than S. My friend’s body is a stark metaphor for the multiple planetary systems that support life on Earth. They’re failing. Though not the result of a genetic mutation—unless you count Western humanity as a mutation. Which might be fair. But this is the point: we must find a path forward that is not built on unrealistic hope nor hemmed in by overwhelming despair.

And that path, I believe, is grief-stricken—and graced.

*       *       *

First the grief. This is not about treating yourself to a mind-numbing litany of planetary woes. Believe me, it’s there if you go looking. But that knowledge will only get you as far as despair. To go further, you need in-your-gut feeling. And in our current state the feeling you need is grief.

It is absolutely, critically, crucially true: you need gratitude as well. But even though the busyness of our lives makes bathing ourselves in gratitude a challenge, we do not run from gratitude the way we run from grief. We find a thousand reasons to avoid grief, minimize it, or get over it because there’s “real work” to be done. I’m telling you, grief is the real work of this moment.

Specifically, Earth grief. Which is, to be clear, grief for all that is being lost right now. It is not devoid of grief for us, but it is perhaps least of all grief for us. It is most of all grief for all that is other-than-human which is being lost because of human choices.

Grief, not guilt. Are we guilty? Sure, in some ways, and to some extents. In particular, the wealthy and the powerful. Also, those scientists, technology innovators, and religious leaders who act without moral regard for the whole Earth community. Most of us, though, alongside whatever guilt is ours, are also entirely caught up in systems that render innocence impossible. Without dismissing it altogether, guilt is a distraction from what is needed right now: grief. And that grief will be immense. It will threaten to undo us. Because our collective systemic cultural multi-generational choices have undone so much. Our grief will be near limitless. Because the damage to Earth is near limitless. We will need to steady one another, or this grief will be too much.

It would be so much easier NOT to embrace Earth grief. To count on green technology instead. To delude ourselves that “the people in charge” will figure it out. To distract ourselves with pleasures. To lose ourselves in spiritual journeys. Except then, I swear, EVERYTHING IS LOST—including our humanity.

Now, the grace.

It is unfortunately possible that so much damage has been done by now that everything is lost no matter what we do. This is a real and bitter possibility. But if we dare to do this—take a deep dive together into Earth grief—we will at the very least preserve our humanity. At the very most, we might preserve humanity itself (as a species—“might”!), as well as preserve a biosphere able to support some multitude of other living creatures.

Here is the grace. Life is one. We have lived all our lives against this simple truth. We were born into a world (a society-culture-religion) that severed us from the unity of all life in the name of making us “special,” uniquely situated above-outside and other-than nature. I’ll write more about that great lie another time. Grief is its healing. And grace is the deep cosmic truth that even our arrogance cannot undo the unity from which we came and to which we still belong. And if we dare—though it will cost us nearly everything we have believed!—if we dare even to try to grieve for all that has been and is being lost, we will discover that the unity beneath us has never fractured. And we will rekindle the embers of an all-inclusive empathy for life itself.

We will weep! And weep some more. And then some more. And yet, those very tears will be the opening of our hearts toward the kinship with nature that has always been our birthright and continues to be so. And that kinship, held now in grief (because how else to hold kinship with a wounded, dying world?)—that kinship is the only power capable of holding us while the world unravels. Tendered through tears, that kinship is alone able to ground our spirit and guide our actions on the far side of hope. That kinship, (re)claiming us unconditionally—as grace—is all that is sufficient to stave off despair. Likely, only just barely, and only as we hold onto each other. But sufficient is enough. And enough is that word we have never really known. Until. Maybe. Now.

As I near the end of this piece, I will confess, I have sensed some (many!) of you shifting uneasily as you’ve been reading. “Hunter-gatherer descendants?! He can’t be serious. And if he is, I can’t take him seriously!”

I am serious. It is this bad. I hope you do take me seriously. And while I won’t pretend to know exactly how quickly or how entirely our world will unravel, I will claim to know that of all the things we must do today, opening ourselves fully and irrevocably to Earth grief is of singular importance. Everything else is negotiable. Everything else “matters” … in that it will make our future better or worse. But Earth grief alone will make our future … possible. Apart from it, there is no better or worse. There is only a slow slide (or precipitous plunge) into inhuman brutality and then … nothing. It is that stark.

I know these are hard words. But I didn’t shift gears in my writing to “lighten things up.” I did not frame my next work as “Writing in the Breeze.” I framed it as “Writing into the Whirlwind.” I shifted gears to become more fully honest. We have limited time to prepare ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren for what’s coming our way. And polite conversation won’t cut it.

Yes, there is a bunch of “practical” things that need doing. But to the extent that we busy ourselves with all those “important” practical things—as though the grieving can wait, that impulse is rooted in the very othering of Earth that brought us to this point. It betokens despair because that inward attitude and outward frenzy of activity is the ongoing denial that any other paradigm is possible.

Listen, we have limited time. But limited time is not no time. I promise, if we dare to be grief-stricken, we will be graced. And whatever we do once we are grief-stricken—and graced—that just might be … enough.

* * *

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 at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.

We, we, WE!—all the way home

Aug25

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 also my 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, The Madonna 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.

* * *

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 at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.

For Crying Out Loud

Jul15

For Crying Out Loud
David R. Weiss – July 15, 2023

I am in favor. (Of crying out loud.) As the title declares, I am for crying out loud. I’d almost go so far as to say, in this moment of ecological crisis / climate breakdown, that if anything can save us now, it’s tears.

It’s more complicated than that though. And “save us,” seems like overreach. We’re in this for keeps. And by “keeps,” I mean collapse. There is no turning back at this point. You could make the case that back around 1970, had we dared to throw the emergency brake on fossil fuel burning—and also on our rapacious consumption—we might have averted the catastrophe that now passes for our children’s and grandchildren’s trust fund. But it’s at least equally possible that by 1970 the forces at play—industrial, technological, economic, political, and not least cultural and religious—had achieved so much interlocking inertia, that the emergency brake wouldn’t have budged, even if someone had tried to throw it. No, we’re in this for keeps.

There is no green tech coming along fast enough (or without its own nightmarish ecological costs) to save us—not to mention no coalescence of political will anywhere on the horizon. And, to date, every great green hope paraded in front of us, promises to sustain unfettered growth on a finite planet, the single biggest lie in all of Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history. Hence, by “keeps,” I mean collapse.

There is no saving us—if by that you mean the restoration of some semblance of the bright future we imagined in our youth. And there is no saving us—if by that you mean the smooth orderly transition to a simpler way of life that aligns with the planet’s abundant but oh so finite capacity. Oh, we will transition to that “simpler” way of life, because ultimately Earth will align us with its capacity. But it will not be smooth or orderly.

Like ill-tempered toddlers we will be dragged kicking and screaming (and dying) into alignment. Indeed, the kicking and screaming has already started. But it will get worse. The dying, too—already started … and to get worse. No doubt there will be tears aplenty spilled along the way. But that weeping, while it may be momentarily cathartic, will not save us.

The tears that might save us will be of a different sort. These will be tears not for what is happening to us (or to those nearest), but for what is happening to the world around us. Tears for others. For all others.

We long for a magical solution to our ecological peril. Let me tell you, this is as close to magic as it gets. Gut-wrenching magic, though. Here is the supreme truth of our lives: we are one. Every shimmering wave, every twinkling star, every quivering quark, and every creeping critter—ONE. Interwoven. Pulsing. Breathing. Kin.

And we—humans as a whole, though, of course, it is hardly the whole of us—have unleashed a system that is DESIGNED to rip apart the interwoven-pulsing-breathing fabric of creation. To position us as “above”—meaning against all others. To extract, exploit, extinguish life-beauty in the name of accumulative progress as though death-making is our noble purpose in life. Global human civilization is built on the notion that we can kill the planet without killing ourselves. The superficial truth—the low-hanging fruit so to speak—is that we can’t. Our way of life is wrecking (has wrecked!) the support system needed for the very life we cherish most: our own. Oops.

Munch recalled that he had been out for a walk at sunset when suddenly the setting sun’s light turned the clouds “a blood red.” He sensed an “infinite scream passing through nature.” Wikipedia

But the supreme truth—the priceless pearl—that may yet help us tend to the wreckage left in the wake of our death-making civilization is this: all that we have exploited-extracted-extinguished … all that we have reckoned “other,” so as to set our lives against it … all this is interwoven-pulsing-breathing-dying KIN. We are one. And if we dare open ourselves to that truth, the tears will come from a very different place. No longer born of self-interest, we will weep for kin-interest, all-interest, one-interest: for the entire gamut of life-beauty that is under assault from the inertia of our empires.

Such tears will threaten to undo us. How do you weep “in moderation” for the loss of so much? The loss of so much finally known as kin? It will be gut-wrenching. And it will be magic. Because the deepest power accessible to us in the universe, the ground of authentic human agency, the womb of holiness if you wish, is to live from the awareness that we—all—are ONE. Interwoven. Pulsing. Breathing. Kin.

That awareness—should we choose to avail ourselves of it—will dawn with tears. In another age, perhaps it could arise from blissful reflection or immersion in the natural world. In this age of ecological wreckage wrought by us, it will dawn with tears … or it will not dawn at all. And yet, behind-beneath-beyond those tears is the power of the universe beckoning-begging-empowering us to act with empathy-outrage-love-care.

There will be need for more than tears in the days to come. Awe and gratitude, laughter and joy, skills-sharing and community-building, and loads of hard work, too. But we fool ourselves—it’s actually much worse than foolery; it’s a deadly delusion—when we think we will do and do and do some more and save the tears for later. The tears are the saving. They are the echo of ONEness in our soul, the opening of empathy, the ground of our power, and the roots of our resolve. Right now EVERYTHING hinges on our willingness to weep. And I’ll keep saying that until you join me in declaring yourself—

For crying out loud.

* * *

David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, doing “public theology” around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, diversity, and peace. 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 Community Supported Theology at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.

This IS the Kobayashi Maru

May10

This IS the Kobayashi Maru
David R. Weiss – May 10, 2023

It’s true, there are days that the company I keep wears me down. I’ve made the abyss of ecological overshoot my conversation partner. The banter is not cheery.

Overshoot, in a nutshell, refers to the reckless plunder of the planet in the present, borrowing heavily against the wellbeing of the planet in the future. It is living in excess … until the biosphere—and the “sociosphere”—collapse in exhaustion. And it has become so normal as to be almost boring.

Did you notice, back on March 13, when the United States went into overshoot? I didn’t. But that was the day—just 72 days into the year—by which the average U.S. consumer had consumed their entire year’s worth of goods. From the Ides of March onward, we are borrowing from (well, stealing, since there is no plan and no way to pay it back) the wellbeing of tomorrow. We are plundering the planet. The mantra of our lifestyles having become, “To hell with those who come after us! Born too late; it’s just their fate: they’re screwed!”

It is not a mantra to be morally proud of. But it is the mantra of consumer capitalism (and its close kin: misogyny, white supremacy, homophobia, anthropocentrism). It is the mantra SUNG by the socio-economic structures of our lives. It is the mantra in which we are entangled. And, even if we are “lucky” enough to die before the debt comes due, it is the mantra that will exact repayment—in the form of catastrophic system-wide ecological-economic-social collapse in the lives of those who come after us. Some of whom we have birthed and named and raised with love ourselves.

Except for the super-wealthy, that mantra is indiscriminate. As our life choices carry its chant, we may assume that those damned to hell by the illicit leisure of our lives are surely ones unknown to us. Those born in distant lands or those whose humanity is hued different than our own. But unless the balance of (stolen!) “wealth” in your bank account is measured by multi-millions or more, your hope to buffer those of your choosing from calamity will be next to nil.

Which brings us to the Kobayashi Maru.

The Kobayashi Maru is an imaginary civilian spaceship in a training exercise of the same name in the Star Trek universe. In the exercise, Starfleet cadets encounter the Kobayashi Maru, disabled in hostile space and facing certain disaster. Their training has formed them to seek to rescue the ship, even if it means endangering their own crew and vessel. But the exercise was set up—designed—to be impossible. Every attempt at rescue would result in the loss of both vessels and all lives.

The point was to force a cadet-in-training to encounter a no-win situation. Because at some point, as a starship captain, they might well face a no-win situation out in the field. In the simulation, the rational response—to ignore the moral claim of the imperiled lives and focus on protecting their own crew and vessel—is immoral. While the moral response—to risk (and inevitably lose) one’s crew and vessel in a failed rescue attempt—is irrational.

Were it left there, Star Trek would’ve had its own mythic motif of existential tragedy. But this is Star Trek, and Captain James T. Kirk is not the author of Ecclesiastes. Instead, according to Kirk’s own admission, he was the only Star Fleet cadet to ever “beat” the Kobayashi Maru test—because he cheated. After losing twice, he managed to reprogram the simulation to make winning a possibility.

Today, in a world too far into overshoot to simply ease back, we face the Kobayashi Maru dilemma. It would be immoral—on the scale of global ecocide—to make no attempt to alter the trajectory of overshoot, which imperils countless Earth ecosystems and individual species—including humanity. And yet, if catastrophic system-wide ecological-economic-social collapse is now inevitable, are we not faced with a truly no-win scenario, where even doing the right thing “too late” is no more than noble failure?

Yes and no.

Unlike the Star Trek simulation, our present dilemma wasn’t exactly “designed” to be no-win. Perhaps a hundred years ago (maybe as few as seventy-five years ago) there were still different choices available to us, with different outcomes possible. “Winning”—achieving sustainable balance on a small planet—was theoretically possible, with the right mix of wisdom, reverence, humility, restraint. But since the Great Acceleration (dating roughly to 1950), Western “civilization”—which can only honestly be described as the deliberate desire to plunder the planet by any means necessary, hence the quote marks—has pretty much nailed the gas pedal to the floor of the car, making even the desperate desire to slow down beyond difficult. So, by now, “design” is a moot point. We can argue about who did the nailing, and the list of villains would be legion, but most of us (in the “developed”—that is, the plundering—world) have been complicit. We are in a no-win scenario.

Still, while I am loathe to lionize Captain Kirk, there is a glimmer of subversive grit in his willingness to cheat the system in order to save the innocent.

Now, before you get too excited, let’s get realistic. Collapse is coming. It will be catastrophic. And there is no “win” that avoids this. At this stage of overshoot, there is no amount of green technology, no sudden onset of political will power, no miraculous new course set by corporations that can make this anything other than a no-win scenario. All hopes of “reprogramming” our dilemma in a way that preserves the reigning values that created it are OFF THE TABLE.

That is, the only way to re-program the Kobayashi Maru dilemma that we face, is to change the very scripts that guide the program while also recognizing that even if we succeed, at its best, “success” will look like a slightly cushioned collapse and will result in (perhaps, and if we are truly fortunate) some smattering of human communities able to regroup and persist on the far side of collapse. This is thin success by any measure.

Except by the measure of imagining any other way “forward.” Because every other imagining is death. By that standard, changing the scripts for even thin success … is a win. It is the only heroic aspiration on the table. And an aspiration only effectively exercised … collectively. (I cringe to say it, but we must decide to channel James T. Kirk together. I’m sorry.)

Still to come: reflections on the damning scripts that got us here (the core assumptions—the “code”—that creates the systems that frame the range of possible outcomes). And then reflections on the subversive scripts that might let us “rescue,” even if only as a badly battered vessel, the Kobayashi Maru … and the innocent lives on board that imaginary spaceship called Tomorrow.

* * *

David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, doing “public theology” around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, diversity, and peace. 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 Community SupportedTheology at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.

Unboxing Myself

May6

Unboxing Myself
David R. Weiss – May 6, 2023

This essay is a conversation across time. I began my March 8 post, “Giving Up on Church for My Children,” with this line: “Perhaps every decision has multiple forces, tiny and large, stretched out behind it. This one surely does.”

Well, this post begins on September 14, 2022. I never completed it, but it feels important to come back now, fill it out, and publish it, because it explores one of the seismic shifts happening inside me that proved to be a precursor to my decision to “Give up on church for my children.”

I’ll start with the original September material (so you can get a sense of how these thoughts first took shape almost eight months ago), and I’ll note where I begin with fresh writing.

September 14, 2022—

Strange. For the past several weeks since Mom died (August 24), a multitude of people have been kind enough to check in with me to see how I’m doing. I’m fine. I’m not pretending to be okay; I’m simply not overwrought by grief. I think I lost so many pieces of Mom over the past years as dementia stole whole swaths of her from the rest of us, that my grief began and stretched out for years. Maybe at some point a finer more focused grief will find me.

Puck – photo by Ben Zamora-Weiss

For now, Mom’s death has unleashed an avalanche of existential restlessness. And I am wrecked. Or, maybe, it’ll just be the boxes I’ve been living in that get wrecked. I hope so.

I’ve been in therapy for a while now. Processing trauma and depression (both have roots running back to my teen years, with fresh additions of both in adulthood) and exploring how the dynamics of my mostly happy childhood have unhappily conspired to undermine some of my best hopes for adulthood. Oops—never saw that coming. Of course, it’s a long, complicated tale. In a sentence: the course of my life has been shaped and misshaped by a dysfunctional dance between my academic-intellectual excellence and my unconscious yet powerful pattern of linking … knotting … chaining (dammit!) my self-esteem to the external approval that came easily and abundantly. Not unlike Pavlov’s dog’s, my public performance became paired so consistently with positive reinforcement, that I fused the two together.

Thinking back to last week …

I am at L.’s for a counseling session on September 7. Recently back from Mom’s funeral. Trying to catch up on life and feeling the demands press in from all sides. I am stretched.

But, for now, I am settling in. Eyes closed, L.’s voice leads me through a short full-body check-in, encouraging me to listen for the whispers of my Self in the bodily sensations that are also finding their place in the room. In the quiet. In the stillness. The rocking chair (no proverbial couch in L.’s office) is firm, and, by now, familiar. We—the chair and I—move in a slow rhythm, initially negotiated between intent and inertia, then settling into something like a gentle wave. It is a good feeling, but as I rock, an inner restlessness rises within me. Asking me to trust a still deeper goodness. I resist. I relax. I’m in.

I never know what I’m listening for in these first moments. I sense stiff muscles, weary bones, occasional tingles and tickles. Does L. really think my assorted appendages bear messages? Do I? No matter. It works. Having “settled in,” I open my eyes, and she asks, “What comes up for you today?” Something always comes up. As often as not, what comes up is a bit messy. Not wholly welcome. Appearing as if at the invitation of a Self that is as yet distant kin.

Today the words speak themselves before I think them—an incantation set loose in the room. “I want to unbox myself.” L. smiles. “Tell me more.”

And this captures what I said …

I’ve become keenly—uncomfortably—aware of all the boxes I place around myself. The ways I’ve limited who I am and who I desire to be in order to maintain the approval of others. The ways I conspire with outside expectations to box myself in. And, in order for my truer Self to expand and flourish, I need to unbox myself. Which is scary.

Not least, because I’ve done it so well, that very few people suspect how hard I am working at being someone else than myself … for their sake. Well, for my “mistaken sake,” to keep the external approval rolling in.

It hit me while driving home after Mom’s death. Mom barely knew me over the past year. She remembered my name; somedays, my wife; never my kids, my work, or my writing—not really any of my life. She didn’t really know me at all anymore. And yet—for her sake, and mine, and Dad’s, and my sisters’ sakes—I wish I’d gotten home to see her (and my immediate family) far more often in what turned out to be the last year of her life. I didn’t.

Box 1. Instead, I limited my trips home … lest I inconvenience—no, less I disappoint and risk losing the approval of—those I work for at church. It’s only a part-time job, but with hours scattered across the week, it’s impossible to get to Michigan City (eight hours away) without missing a couple of days I’m scheduled to work. I write that now with a measure of disbelief.
I placed the approval of others above presence to my mom and family.

I understand, many of us are limited by the demands of our work schedule. But this particular work generates only marginal income and is NOT central to who I am. I should have quit my job (or insisted on redefining my schedule) rather than place myself in a box that left Mom and family mostly on the outside.

It’s not a disaster. Mom forgot every visit within hours of my leaving. I don’t “blame” anyone but myself. And even myself, I only blame if I don’t learn from this moving forward. Still, it’s a searing insight to realize how beholden I’ve been … even as an articulate, successful adult … to outside approval. “Entangled” fits.

But that’s actually the least significant box, because that bit of work doesn’t matter all that much in the big scheme. There are other boxes, and they’re interwoven. (Box 2: climate. Box 3: church. Box 4: theology/faith.)

[That’s the end of September 14, 2022 material.]

Six days later, still stinging from these insights, I resigned from my parttime job at the church. But I gave twelve weeks notice, until mid-December, so as not to disrupt any fall programming that my parttime position supported. It was, as I look back, my weak attempt to curry one last round of approval on my way out the door.

Fast forward to May 5 and I’m going to fill out—then rip up—those last three boxes so I can be done with this and move on.

Box 2. Climate. I’ve steeped myself in climate reading since 2016. When I returned to this theme (which I’d first explored almost two decades earlier in grad school), I naïvely assumed I would add my voice to the growing chorus of those working on climate issues—and that, even if only in the nick of time, we would indeed “save the planet.” Sadly, I no longer regard that as possible. But, not wanting to risk the approval of those many friends who still want the last line of every alarming paragraph I write to come back to a note of hope, I’ve worked hard to keep the public display of my personal views on the climate crisis just this side of alarmist so as to remain in a box labeled (even if only in fine print) “respectable.”

Bottom line: the planet will (eventually) be fine. But we will not, nor will many of our companion creatures whom we continue to sacrifice to idols of consumption and convenience. So, this is the work that will occupy the rest of my life: how do we live with purpose, when we can no longer realistically live with hope? Believe me, that’s a heavy lift. Our world is collapsing, and while there are things we can do to lessen the impact (the single biggest of which is to radically simplify our lives), there need to be people working patiently and with focus on what collapse means for our humanity and how we might safeguard some of the character and culture that we’d like available for those who will endure the worst of what is yet to come. That’s my work. And I cannot do it faithfully so long as I’m beholden to the approval of others.

Porter, Puck – photo by Ben Z-W

So, tear that box up.

Box 3. Church. Insert “Giving Up on Church for My Children” here. Clearly, one big part of tearing up this box is the urgency of ecological-social collapse and my driving desire to speak in words that might reach my children. But there’s a bit more to it than this. Because as much as the “church” box keeps me away from my children, it affords me security and approval from my past. But a security and approval that not only hinders my work now but hinders as well the authenticity that must be the foundation of what I’m doing. The Christian church is no longer the right place for me to be.

So, tear that box up, too.

Box 4. Theology and faith. This is the box I’ve held most dear. It’s where my intellectual and artistic gifts—heart and mind—intersect to shape my most prized identities as theologian and writer. The identities themselves are profoundly true. But so long as I express them inside a box bounded by the expectations and approval of others, the whole of me and my gifts cannot show up. And now they have to. Too much is at stake to play it safe any longer.

Hell, too much was always at stake. It just took a climate crisis and my kids to make me choose risk over security.

Obviously, I’ve hardly been a “preserve-the-status-quo” theologian. I’ve rather ransacked the attic of Christian theology to find kindred spirits over the years. I’ve found myself drawn to theology from the margins, often hearing in these voices the call for justice that most resonates with my own sense of the sacred. I’ve often told others over the years that I managed to remain Christian thanks to the company I found in the attic and at the edges. (See “Tipping Points” and “Doubtful” for more on this journey.) And that was true.

Nevertheless, I have also silenced more than my share of intuitions along the way. My sense of God is so thin as to be vanishing. My view of Jesus is so wholly human as to deny him any divinity that I don’t also share. My sense of ethics is so thick as to eclipse any interest in an afterlife. And yet, with my sense of self tightly tethered to outside approval, I’ve spent most of my adult life carefully contributing to a conversation in a tradition where I still feel boxed in.

Last July I was unnerved by an article in Christian Century, “When my dad killed God.” In it, Don Hamilton wrote about the backlash his father, William Hamilton, experienced in the mid-60’s after he became associated with “death of God” theology. Despite its name, this theology was less about “killing God” than making honest theological sense of the human capacity for evil—a capacity often wrapped in religious language (still today!). “Death of God” theologians pressed toward an ethic that prized the precarious pursuit of compassion apart from any divine guarantee of success. Don Hamilton wrote that his dad “never stopped being a Christian, with Jesus as a companion on his journey.” But he became the target of hate mail and death threats, eventually losing his teaching position and a host of friends. Although written with genuine warmth, it was not a cheery remembrance. Rather, a costly one.

Ironically, what unnerved me was that, already while reading it, I regretted that I’d never dared to be honest enough to spark that much controversy. My own theological inklings over the years—captured in my sporadic journaling—are testament to questions no less piercing than William Hamilton’s. To suppositions no less daring than his … no less faithful(!) to the legacy of Jesus. But I’d never dared to go public with mine. So how were my kids ever to fondly recall my courage?

Then, this past spring, I began exploring the Unitarian Universalist tradition as a faith community that might offer me more “breathing space.” I read a bit of early UU history … and discovered a whole other attic of kindred spirits. From the 16th to 19th century, these first precursors to the UU faith were impassioned voices at the edge of the Christian tradition. They questioned doctrines that felt too small for God as sensed by their reason, experience, and pursuit of justice. The story of their bold commitment to unbounded authenticity (which eventually led them further and further afield from Christianity) has been … bracing for me to read. Because, up to now, my commitment has been to an authenticity bounded by the Christian tradition, even if mostly at the edge.

Porter (box), Persimmon – photo by Ben Z-W

It’s time to tear that box up, too.

I cannot and do not discount those who find the Christian tradition a fruitful space in which to do their work. But I also cannot and do not discount any longer the sense within me, that my own theological wings might’ve unfurled in even deeper and more gracious ways had I allowed myself to venture beyond the tradition of my upbringing sooner. I have poured energy—endless and creative, prophetic and persuasive—into dialoguing with a tradition increasingly not my own.

And now that my own children, as well as the wider world, need my wings unfurled as fully as possible, it is time for me to pour my energy—endless and creative, prophetic and persuasive—into dialoguing with authenticity. In community with others, yes. But beginning with an authenticity that is foremost my own.

I don’t yet know entirely what form that will take, but I’ve already told my kids to be ready to write that remembrance. And once I clear away all these torn up boxes I intend to get to work.

* * *

David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, doing “public theology” around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, diversity, and peace. 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 Community SupportedTheology at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.

Meet Me in the River

May2

Meet Me in the River
May 2, 2023 – David R. Weiss

I am awash in grief you might say. It is the sacred ether in which I “live and move and have my being” these days.

If the words sound familiar, they’re from Acts 17:28, where Paul employs them to describe our subsistence within the life of God. In fact, he’s quoting Epimenides, a Greek philosopher-mystic-poet from six or seven centuries before him, who coined the phrase in a poem to Zeus. In both cases, the meaning is that our human existence is rooted in a Reality larger than ourselves—and that we can only navigate our own lives meaningfully in the humble recognition of that larger Reality.

For me, that larger Reality is perhaps best called Compassion. I see this as the driving force in Jesus’ life. Not some abstract ideal, but the animating energy moving through his being yet also in some mysterious way much larger than him. Compassion—literally, “to suffer with”—is the dynamic disposition of the cosmos to promote the birth of whole worlds and the flourishing of ecosystems and communities. In theological verbiage: God.

But today, in this place, in this time, Compassion most often tastes salty. Like tears of Grief.

Our world is dying. The wounds inflicted on the biosphere by our industrial civilization continue unabated. Indeed, what we like to call “civilization” is more accurately described as the relentless malignancy of the life patterns chosen by the dominant societies on this planet.

For at least fifty years the scale of that malignancy—our imbalance with the rest of the natural world—has been public knowledge. “Debatable” only by those whose interests aligned with wealth rather than wellbeing. And yet from the wealthy individuals and corporations who twist politics to promote profit … to the socio-economic structures that constrain the choices available to most of us … to the cultural-religious worldviews that form our appetites and imaginations … we continue to accelerate toward collapse as if there is no tomorrow. Which, come to think of it, there won’t be—on account of that ongoing acceleration.

But still, it seems an act of gratuitous violence to slam ourselves—really, our children and grandchildren—into a brick wall as hard as possible. Isn’t there something to be said for kindness on the cusp of collapse?

Hence, Grief.

Ironically, it’s often experiences of beauty and community that trigger grief for me these days. (See, for instance, my earlier pieces on “Even Beauty Cannot Save Us” from February 2022 or “Two Things True” from July 2022.) Sunday afternoon Margaret and I attended the Apollo Chorus concert out in Plymouth. Listening to a men’s chorus sing with gusto and joy surrounded by a community of folks happy to hear their music. Beauty and community rolled together. And grief. It is a sort of wistful recognition that there are moments in which humanity shines, in which creation gleams. Moments to be treasured … soon to be endangered … if not extinct.

Hence, awash in Grief. And yet, it is a good grief.

Our world is dying. And in such a time as this being as fully connected to the world as we can is our only pathway toward integrity and humanity. Disconnected—whether pretentiously (and falsely) set above or despairingly (and just as falsely) set alone—we are figments of a faulty imagination. We are human, only to the extent we are wed to the humus (and everything else!) in the world around us. And there is no honest relationship with the world that is not awash in grief.

To clarify, there is no authentic relationship with anyone or anything that does not require an openness to grief. To meet any aspect of the world, from fellow creature to entire ecosystem, as a Thou rather than an It, is to be open to curiosity and awe, joy and grief, in relationship. But today, the level of grief that is prerequisite to being connected to the world is so immense as to be daunting. And almost our entire way of life is oriented toward avoiding grief. (The most obvious exceptions being those industries [e.g., funeral homes, burial services] that manage to monetize its inevitability. The most laudable exceptions being hospice and other “pro-death” movements that aim to honor the place of death and grief in life—laudable, but as yet marginal movements in society at large.)

No wonder, then, that our default disposition toward grief is avoidance. By entertainment … travel … shopping … when all else fails, by frantic distraction.

But here’s what comes next in a dying world: collapse and chaos. Followed by brutality and inhumanity. And the only way we can avert these outcomes in ourselves and our communities is by opening ourselves to grief. As never before. On a scale near unimaginable. Grief, especially as communal practice, is the only portal through numbness and into authentic relationship with a world so badly wounded as ours. Grief at what we have done to our fellow human beings … our companion creatures … the Earth itself … the planetary systems that are the very womb of life … and, not least, to ourselves.

There is no way across the gaping chasm of these wounds except to grieve them in full measure. And in that grieving to invite empathy into our hearts (our lives!)—to allow the echo of our buried kinship with all that is to rekindle itself.

Worlds are born on geologic scales that our minds can hardly conceive. It took almost three billion years of one-celled organisms flourishing in Earth’s oceans for the first multi-celled organisms to appear. Worlds die on scales less grand, but often just as inconceivable because their dying begins unnoticed—and because we are keen to dismiss the rumors of their impending death.

But “keenness” cannot confer capacity. And whatever capacity we once had—perhaps just decades ago—to avert this dying, has been forfeited in exchange for continued ROI (return on investment) and for extended “ease and convenience.” And now the dying is a done deal. The details left to be negotiated concern the scope, the devastating breadth and depth of death, and the speed, whether a few decades or a few generations. But the continuity of our “civilization”? That’s off the table.

The goodness in Grief is that it is the only bargaining chip we have of any value. Its value is to birth empathy, to rekindle kinship, to cultivate kindness and compassion, to convene community, and, if possible, to carry humanity from one side of the chasm to the other. Floating, as it were, on our tears.

We will need a river of them. And—we will need to let go of this shore in order to cross. So, this is my invitation: meet me in the river. Let’s cross together.

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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, doing “public theology” around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, diversity, and peace. 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 Community SupportedTheology at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.