Everything I Have Loved

more church + climate feelings

I have not, this year, written anything except a few expletive-laden journal entries about my home denomination’s annual synod, which was– here comes the first expletive– a total shit show. I did write a little bit last year, which I stand behind, though I now wish I could revise with better transitions. Many people have said eloquent and thoughtful things about this year’s meeting in other fora, so I simply invoke it here as context for the question I am asking, which is something like: how do I live in a world where everything I have loved is dying?

I recognize that this is might sound melodramatic.

And I’m not saying loved here as in valued, endorsed, chosen, carefully-assessed-and-deemed-worthy. I am saying loved, because most of the things we love are not things we selected according to external metrics. They are, instead, happened upon or inherited; they are loved because we are entangled with them, because they are containers for our memories and because they are symbols and because we would not know ourselves as we are without them. Sometimes we love them only insofar as we notice and grieve their absence. Sometimes we recognize them as a ballast only when the ballast is gone.

So, for me, because of the family into which I was born and the communities in which I came into myself, those are things like Calvin College, Christian higher education, liberal arts education in general, the CRCNA, the church more broadly. They are all struggling for air. And I wonder if this would feel so absolute if the stabilizing metaphors of the Bible, about the cycles of the seasons, sowing and reaping and new life, didn’t feel hollow right now. I am working on coping skills for my climate anxiety but I wish I could take even one single solitary hike without thinking about impending ecosystem collapse. The things of the natural world I most love— that smell of sun-warmed pine needles in a sandy Michigan forest, monarch butterflies pollinating the garden, the glaciers still visible on Mount Rainier as we fly into Seattle every summer— these joys, too, feel so very fragile.

Nadia Bolz-Weber wrote about the dying church this week, a word I found comforting in a long-suffering-sigh sort of way. She cited a book I don’t think I can bring myself to read about surviving the Anthropocene, and invoked the idea that the human species’ bleak future may warrant a palliative care model: “reduce the suffering we can, learn to endure what we cannot and focus only on what is most important.” Thursday’s procrastination scrolling resurfaced a 2019 essay from Sarah Bessey about handling friends’ de-conversions from Christianity with grace. A few years ago, I read a tweet from Episcopal priest Amy Peterson that, per the disintegration of the platform now known as X, I can’t link here: something about how she sometimes sees her work as an Episcopal priest as hospice chaplaincy— helping churches die with dignity—because so many of them have and will close their doors in the span of her career.

How do I live in a world where everything I have loved is dying?

I’m with Nadia, that many things that are dying are “signs of A Kingdom, not signs of The Kingdom,” and with Sarah, who writes that one might tell friends who leave faith that “I am not afraid for you,” because “I am so convinced of the Love that shaped and formed the universe that I believe we are held in that Love within our unbelief.” That all sounds very nice, and I do believe it.

I am also, to be perfectly frank, a little bitter about what I am losing.

Much of that bitterness is, I think, just growing up stuff. I assumed some things to be True about the World that were more a product of historical circumstance than a law of physics, and like all people in all time I was raised in one set of historical circumstances that have since changed, as they are wont to do. It’s no one’s fault, necessarily, that they couldn’t predict the future-that-is-now-the-present and prepare me for it. Or at least, it’s not the fault of the people who were close to me in my childhood, who presumably were not privy to suppressed Exxon climate science nor masterminds of the culture wars that gave us Donald Trump, QAnon, and Liberty University.

How do I live in a world where everything I have loved is dying?

I have lived long enough to know that there is no change without loss, so there is no change without grief— including the good stuff, the very necessary transitions, the battles that are hard-won. Some precious thing will fade, even if it is just the fantasy of a perfect victory. It helps to notice and honor the loss along the way; it keeps you from the small terror of realizing, all of a sudden, that you are without something you once depended on, and in fact you do not know when you last had it.

I also know that there is rarely one right way. Any structure facilitates some things and precludes others, both good and bad; the American church of the late twentieth century is no exception. Rhetoricians and digital studies scholars I know call these affordances: what does this platform afford, or make possible? What does it make less or im-possible to see or do? It helps sometimes to think of these features of any ideology or structure or space as neutral in themselves— it is we who put them to sinister ends; it is we who can chose not to, or choose to change the available options to incentivize something better.

It is we who must grieve those precious things they offered us.

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Things I am reading and thinking about:

• Dissertation-wise: the idea that “silence is violence,” particularly as it pertains to the internet culture of 2020. If you have links, screenshots, articles, feelings about the felt obligation to post about high-profile news stories during the Trump years, send them my way.

• My favorite irreverent podcast Maintenance Phase is doing a series on RFK Jr. and conspiracy thinking, particularly around vaccines. They name a cycle that feels really potent right now in a lot of spheres from public health to physical infrastructure to the catechizing institutions of the church: we build something in response to a need and then it works so well we forget how bad the problem was and stop investing in the solution, and then the problem crops up again (so, we make a measles vaccine, but it works pretty well so we stop taking vaccines because no one has measles anyway, and then behold, all the kids end up with measles again). The podcast says it better, I recommend it (warning for many swear words).

• I continue to be really grateful for the work of

  Katharine Hayhoe
  ,
  Debra Rienstra
  , and
  Bill McKibben
  , who keep me informed about the climate movement and what I can do to support it. (One of the biggest things: eat less dairy, for us vegetarians, and less meat if you’re still doing that). I feel heartsick at least once a day; I also keep a sticky note on my desk about my goals: getting compost collection for the condo association (check); getting solar panels for our shared electric bills (going up in August); rain garden (working on native plants for the shared beds). Solvable problems at human scale, political action for a global one. Their newsletters remind me that I am worried! They also remind me that I am not alone.