I once slept in a hammock in the Australian rainforest, suspended alone between two strong trees, surrounded by the sounds of the wild night, immersed in wonder. The same trip took me to the Great Barrier Reef where I put my face into the water and immediately pulled it out again, gasping; so bright, beautiful and incredible was the world which dropped away beneath me, a sheer face of multicoloured coral inhabited by an amazing biodiversity of vivid life. These experiences live within me still. In wild places I am closest to the divine, the overwhelming beauty of Creation, and my faith in the great Mystery that connects all life is strongest. It is a marvel.
I was a vegetarian back then; I understood the relationship between our consumerism and the exploitation of the planet. I was bold in my activist heart and clear in my belief in the gift of life and interconnectedness of all things.
Then I met the church.
Sadly, the theology I was taught interrupted that which had seemed so natural. It crucified something in my soul. Somehow, I was pulled away from that which I knew in my heart; the pulse of divine oneness quieted. I lost connection with myself and my inner knowing. I lost touch with my feminine wisdom, with my sense of belonging to the earth. It grieves me still.
Some years ago, as the climate crisis loomed ever larger, I began to awaken and wonder at the church’s silence, inaction, lack of lament and grief. My deep knowing reared up and, refusing to be quieted or compromised, led me away, down new paths, into the wilderness, to reconnection with myself, my integrity and convictions. It has been lonely, but as I have journeyed and read and listened to my heart and to all that is happening in the world, my belief in beloved oneness, interconnection and Divine Feminine has been restored and healed.
The importance of grief in this process has been central. My memory of the vibrant colours of the Great Barrier Reef now sit alongside images of its bleaching by rising sea temperatures, and the fear my children will never see that wonder. Only by walking full into our grief and sadness at all we are losing can we emerge, empowered and hopeful, to act and to lead. It is Easter Saturday for me; sitting in the uncertainty of loss and pain, not sure a resurrection will come, but finding company amongst those who see and feel it, too, whose hopes are dashed yet not quite extinguished. Stubborn hope.
Dare we look for an Easter sunrise? Perhaps, together, we can dream it into being as we sit in the ruins of our own folly and reconnect with the beloved oneness of all life on Earth. Beautiful Earth, a delicate, blue marvel of wonder, our life-giving Mother, precious gift to us all.
3 comments
Thank you Alice. You’ve really captured both the grief and wonder in your words and stories. I have also had some of my most deeply connecting experiences in wild and remote places. What I am practicing today is the connections in the city. I sit at the top of my cherry tree in the garden and phase out the sounds of the motorway and factories to hear wren, dove and blackbird clean their feathers and greet the dawn. The birds still sing to the dawn don’t they, even while their homes are destroyed. Do you feel you are less lonely on your pilgrimage towards a Christianity that grieves and takes actions for climate and justice? I hope you feel less alone in our company…
Yes, as we walk into our grief it teaches us, when we listen.
You’ve had some amazing experiences in nature and allowed them to fill you up, allowed you to wonder, and then, lead you to hope. Here at this crossroads, there’s a choice each of us needs to make–to be bitter or better.
Choosing better is, well, better…but absolutely harder and calls for us to, “emerge, empowered and hopeful, to act and to lead” just as you said so beautifully… pray it be so.
Thank you Alice.
I’d love to be able to leave a thoughtful, insightful, perhaps even theological comment on this post, but the best I can manage is to say ‘Wow!’, followed by ‘Ow!’
Yes, the Church is tremendously concerned with itself and is often populated by the privileged classes who have a limited concept of creation from their ivory towers. BUT not everyone inside its walls has fallen into this trap. There are an increasing number of ecological initiatives within various denominations of Christianity and the tide is slowly turning – but perhaps too slowly. I admit that I, for all my good intentions, have spent years in this trap; years of being concerned with my own life and my own relationship with God and the church and thinking very little about what I am doing to the very thing that sustains all life. Mea maxima culpa.
I have also learnt that, when someone or something is struggling and in need of help, that help very often comes from those who have very little (case in point: when I found myself homeless, my belongings were moved in knackered old cars by people who understood where I was; those who were physically infirm were often the ones who were most willing to come and help me dismantle furniture and the occasional tenner that was slipped into my hand usually came from those who could ill afford it. My comfortably-off relatives looked the other way and did nothing).
Just as Jesus was poor and had little material worth in this life, and just as He chose those on the margins to do His work, I suspect that the help that our planet needs may come from the poor, the infirm, the outsiders and the marginalised. For decades, we have been told about climate change yet one autistic teenager has brought it to the forefront of the global mind, not billionaires or people in power. The ‘mainstream’ majority of this world are too busy with their own concerns to be bothered with the plight of the planet – they simply turn away; yet those who exist outside their world are best able to undermine those ivory towers because they are more aware of the impact of that world. You have touched on resurrection – and resurrection requires death to precede it. I pray that that death will be of the ivory towers and the perceived ability to remain unaffected by the planet’s demise simply by paying for some kind of exemption to it.
The current war in Ukraine seems to be attracting support from global superpowers in the form of arms – perhaps this is because those powers are dependent on Russian fossil fuels. I say that, instead of supplying arms, we bring about real political, cultural and environmental change not by supplying weapons but by building wind turbines, hydroelectric power stations and solar panels to devalue the fossil fuels and end our dependency upon them.