Author: Jason M. Brown

A Visit with the Doukhobors Part II

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In Part I, I wrote about my visit to a small religious community called the Doukhobors. Those who remain of this fascinating religious movement live mostly in the Kootenays region of British Columbia. I enjoyed visiting the Doukhobor service and getting to know a few of them. But I left feeling a mix of peace, sadness and a familiar longing. In this short piece, I want to put words to these emotions, even if just to work through them for myself.

I have always felt that there is something beautiful about group religious worship and identity. There is such a strong sense that those in the room know who they are, where they are, and why they are. I still appreciate this when I attend a religious service, visit temples, monasteries, or gurdwaras. I even appreciate this when I return to a Mormon meetinghouse with my family during the holidays. Though I have long since stopped identifying and practicing the religion of my upbringing, the familiar hymns, the inflection of prayer, the smell of a church, and everyone dressed in their Sunday best, tap into my longing for be-longing.

The sadness is harder to articulate. I think is has to do with a mixture of spiritual and existential loneliness. Though the Mormon / LDS tradition never espoused as radical an approach to Christianity as the Doukhobors, like many restorationist movements in the 19th century, they were certainly committed to living out Christianity in what they saw as an authentic and radical way. And I would even say that Mormonism’s roots were what led me to my exploration of radical politics.

At the Mormon university I attended, I really struggled with how overwhelmingly partisan Mormon culture can be, especially in the so-called Book of Mormon belt. By that I mean intentionally aligning itself with the US Republican Party. As if Jesus or Joseph Smith were teaching modern conservative talking points. I had always seen religion differently, and I soon found a community of more left-learning and radical Mormons, many soon to be ex-Mormons, and I felt very seen and understood in my leanings and struggles.

As I wrestled and read, I sympathized with more radical formulations of Christianity by authors like Leo Tolstoy, and non-religious writers Peter Kropotkin and Murray Bookchin. I even wrote an article about the first convert to Mormonism in Mexico, the Greek radical Plotino Constantino Rhodakanaty (1828-1890). Like him I saw something powerful at the heart of the early Mormon relationship to land, place and social organization. The Mormons attempted to create The United Order as a cooperative social-economic system. It was never fully realized. Like Rhodakanaty, I was eventually disillusioned with Mormonism’s assimilation of the American capitalist religion, though I tried for years to find my own sort of Mormon radicalism. I wrote several articles for a Catholic Worker inspired newspaper called The Mormon Worker. That was a long time ago.

I also felt sad because the Doukhobors are dwindling, and their tradition cannot live as they envisioned. As I chatted with my new Doukhobor friends, they related to me how the community gets along today, and how it has had to adapt with the times, and how from their peak in the early 20th century, only about 1,675 identify Doukhobor as their religion, according to the 2021 Canadian census. The Doukhobors work through a legal nonprofit structure, they do not own land communally, and many don’t bother observing vegetarianism anymore. I understand, but in addition to the existential loneliness of longing for belonging, seeing a tradition with such a beautiful way of live dwindling is a bit tragic.

And it’s not as though I would want to be Mormon again or become a Doukhobor, even if they were more radical. But there is a nameless love that is hidden inside the feeling I got sitting with the Doukhobors and listening to them sing together. After the visit, back on the road, I was marketed to by countless fruit stands, new distilleries, luxury retreats and resorts and excursions. The warm summer world seemed to be buckling under the weight of us ravenous experience-seeking tourists. This is a landscape of leisure, of make believe, of Air BnB rentals, cabins and resorts for the religion of consumerism. It feels like the opposite of that nameless longing. It feels like the contours of a spiritual wasteland of sorts. Always seeking, never finding, we wander around hungry for meaning and experiences. Why is this “religion” flourishing while the Doukhobors languish? I don’t know. But I want to keep finding places where I feel that feeling and keep trying to name that nameless love that is hiding within it.

A Visit with the Doukhobors

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Doukhobors in Grand Fork, BC

I am driving to Calgary to pick up my parents from the airport so we can tour Banff and Jasper National Parks. It is going to be Disneyland-dense with fellow tourists, each of us seeking to feel something like awe, to connect with the rawest aspects of nature. Still, I am very excited to go and see the beauty of the Canadian Rockies!

From Vancouver I decided to take the southern route along the US border which passes through the Kootenays on Highway 3. It was a stunning drive, even with the pangs of climate anxiety I occasionally nursed from seeing massive clear cuts, fire scarred mountainsides, aspen groves drying out too soon, and browned-over fir forests dying from some unknown pathogen (Spruce bud worm?).  

While I was planning my trip, I realized that the route would take me right through the traditional heartland of the Doukhobors, an ethno-religious community originally from Russia. I learned about the Doukhobors shortly after moving to BC, when I was chatting with the barber cutting my hair (I had more then). I told her I was studying religion and ecology at UBC, and she told me she grew up in a Doukhobor village in the Kootenays.

As I came to learn, the Doukhobors emerged in the late 1600 and early 1700s. The word means “Spirit Wrestlers”, and as a sect of radical Christianity, they were known for their communalism and simplicity. Some of their beliefs are similar to branches of Radical Reformation groups such as the Amish and the Mennonites. The Doukhobors however also resemble the Quakers in that they believed that God dwells in every person, and that this meant clergy and even scriptures were not necessary. Instead, they speak of the “Book of Life”, wisdom embodied in sayings, hymns, psalms and prayers.

If this was not controversial enough, they got into more hot water in 1734 when they were declared iconoclasts for preaching against the use of icons, a cherished piety in the Russian Orthodox Church. Eventually they came to espouse a vegetarian diet for ethical rather than ascetical reasons and as pacifists, they refused to swear oaths or join the military.

They were persecuted by Russian Orthodox clergy and a string of Tzars. Many were forced to migrate to various places in the Transcaucasia region and their leaders were often exiled to Siberia. In 1895, a group of Doukhobors burned their weapons in protest, causing another wave of persecution. One community attempted to settle in British controlled Cyprus, but soon many died of disease in route.

In 1899, around 6,000 Doukhobors emigrated to Saskatchewan with the help of local Quakers and Russian pacifist author Leo Tolstoy. Others such as Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin and professor of economics James Mavor at the University of Toronto donated to the cause. By 1930 there were over 8,000.

They worked on communal farms and ran a grain mill and a brick factory among other things. They built communal dormitories, but unlike the Shakers of New England, they were not celibate. Their communal land and pacifism eventually got them in trouble with the Canadian government as well. In 1906, they refused to surrender their communal title to land and lost much of it to the Crown when a law was passed requiring landownership to be under a single person’s name. During the world wars, they were also resented by Canadians for not supporting the war effort. In the 1920s, a breakaway group calling themselves the Sons of Freedom staged naked protests and engaged in arson attacks against more law-abiding Doukhobor families causing tensions within the community.

Today, the majority of practicing Doukhobors live in Grand Forks and other areas of British Columbia. Many moved here in 1908 after the Canadian law against communal landholding. Tensions also grew within the community, and it seems likely that a Doukhobor bombed the train that community leader Peter V. Verigin (1859-1924) was on as he headed to British Columbia in 1924. So much for pacifism (though we still don’t know who planted the bomb). Some of the Doukhobor children were forcibly interned into boarding school much like Indigenous residential schools.

I pulled up to the Doukhobor meeting house, now officially called The Union of Spiritual Communities of Christ (USCC) and noticed several veiled women making their way to the door accompanied by men and some younger folks. A large stylized dove adorned the doorway, symbolizing the Holy Spirit, and their persistent commitment to peace.

I had planned to just snap a picture and be on my way, but when I realized that they were gathering for service, it was Sunday after all, and I happened to arrive at the top of the hour, it seemed providential that I attend the meeting. I guess I half expected them to speak only Russian, but when I wandered over and asked a young man if the public were allowed to attend, he spoke to me in unaccented English and said, “of course!” I was greeted warmly by all and began chatting with one of the men, who immediately inquired as to my own religious convictions. I told him it was a long, meandering story, but that I had been raised in the Mormon tradition. I mentioned that in my view, Mormons shared a few similarities—a health code (The Word of Wisdom), early experiments with communalism (The United Order), friendly people, and a love for the land they settled in Utah.

There were about a dozen and a half people attending the service, with men and women sitting on opposite sides facing each other. There was a small table at the front that held a loaf of bread, a pitcher of water and a small wooden bowl of salt. These symbols, which we never partook of during the service, were symbolic of “hospitality, sharing, and our basic principle—Toil and Peaceful Life.” (from the Doukhobor hymn book).

The service was simple, the singing beautiful. They did a sort of ritual greeting call and response as people entered. The women were veiled and the elder women dressed in what seemed like more traditional dress, though I saw one carrying her things in a Lululemon bag. They sang and prayed in Russian and bowed after each hymn. There was also a sort of passing of the peace ritual during the beginning which involved three handshakes and a kiss. But only a few folks in the first rows did it. Toward the end they asked me to come to the front and say a few words, and I introduced myself and thanked them for their hospitality, kindness and way of life. After the service I perused some of the historic wall photos, chatted a bit more and was given a stack of literature to take with me.

The experience left me feeling a mix of familiar longing and a bit of sadness. And I am not quite sure how to articulate it… perhaps a part two of this essay is in order, or perhaps not.

Your Forestry is Your Theology: How Forest Management Decisions Reflect Society’s Ultimate Concern

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On Monday the Trump administration rescinded a 2001 Clinton era roadless rule that affects 59 million acres of National Forest land. This move reveals not just an economic and political strategy, but a theology that has been at the heart of industrial forestry since its inception. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said this about the decision:

“Once again, President Trump is removing absurd obstacles to common sense management of our natural resources by rescinding the overly restrictive roadless rule, … It is abundantly clear that properly managing our forests preserves them from devastating fires and allows future generations of Americans to enjoy and reap the benefits of this great land,”[1]

This rule affects over 30% of the National Forest System, but 90% of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, in addition to major swaths of National Forest lands in Montana and Utah. The Trump administration’s philosophy of government revolves around deregulation in line with his Executive Order 14192, Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation. The order aims to reduce the barriers to extractive industries in order to stimulate the economy.

President Trump has made numerous comments to the effect that America is already a beautiful place and that the rules governing ecological health are excessive. While some want healthy ecosystems, Trump want’s a healthy economy, and sees regulations as a feature of the “swamp” in need of draining. This agricultural metaphor is apt, as it speaks to the central agrarian story at the heart of Western civilization: the natural world needs improvement through the application of technology.

In my essay “Give Me That Old Growth Religion: Finding Common Ground in the War in the Woods” I lay out three major perspectives on North American forestry: Industrial, Wilderness, and Relational. These perspectives are rooted in the worldviews shaping forestry decisions. The Industrial theology is primarily aimed at maximizing profit and social benefits in the form of economic growth, Wilderness focuses on preservation of rare and fragile ecosystems, and the Relational theology represents the approaches taken by people to live and work with a deep cultural connection to the forests they harvest from.

What seems clear from Monday’s announcement, is that each of these approaches to forest management reflects the wider worldview of its defenders. With protestant theologian Paul Tillich I think a theology is not just a belief system, butreflects one’s “Ultimate Concern”[2], something toward which one is completely oriented. In this sense an Industrial worldview that is oriented toward maximizing human flourishing is not just a policy but a theology.

The rescinding of the roadless rule reflects this theology. Opening more forests to roads is common sense because forests are a material resource for humans to manage, and a healthy economy is highest good. This approach didn’t begin with Trump or even George W. Bush. Rather, it goes back to figures like Gifford Pinchot, the famed American conservationist, who defended forests against boom-and-bust exploitation so that they would be used prudently for the benefit of the whole society. But the forest reserves he created were not ecological reserves, they were economic ones. Pinchot the conservationist had a falling out with wilderness preservationist John Muir over his view that protected areas should be “temples” where we worship rather than resources that we manage.

Despite his erratic and idiosyncratic style of governance, President Trump has merely followed along with the mainstream of the industrial forestry approach. Roads allow us to manage fires more effectively the argument goes, and to generate some wealth in the meantime. In keeping with the Industrial theology, President Trump would point to massive wildfires as evidence of poor management that has failed to maximize the forests’ economic potential. This is California’s original sin.

Unfortunately, President Trump has also consistently shown very little confidence in climate science, which should be considered when discussing forest management and the increasing severity of fires in recent years. In 2020 President Trump chided California officials in the midst of the Mcclellen Park fire claiming that sure the climate might change, but that maybe it would get cooler. When Governor Newsom insisted that climate change was a factor, Trump dismissed him saying, “Well I don’t think science knows, actually.”[3] Trump continues to ignore the repeated and consistent IPCC reports that state with the highest possible confidence that climate change is a real existential threat and a factor in increasingly catastrophic wildfires.

Despite this willful ignorance, what President Trump has fixated on is rooted in a partial truth. Much of the conservation efforts of the 1980s and 1990s promoted a hands-off management strategy that looked at the massive clear cuts of that era and proposed their opposite. This “wilderness ethic” preached that nature knows best. Thus, California’s fire adapted ecosystems were often managed to exclude fire, and as a result many state and federally managed forests became very dense with trees. Historic photos from the 19th century show massive increases in tree density for example. This density is historically mitigated by natural fires, intentional fires embedded in Indigenous food systems, and forestry.

The public facing justification for the new rollback of the roadless rule is that 28 million acres of these roadless areas are at high risk of wildfire, and allowing roads will allow management prescriptions that decrease the risk of catastrophic, stand replacing fires. The hope is that this will protect people and allow for modest harvests that will benefit the economy.

However, roadless areas are frequently far from human settlements. And in recent decades, fires in remote areas, have been allowed to burn to enable these ecologies to develop a more historically consistent fire return interval. A more frequent fire return interval results in lower intensity fires. Thus, the dense forests that burn with such high intensity have been fueled by both management decisions and climate change.

President Trump, and perhaps wilderness advocates too, refuse to accept that both things can be true and than management needs to focus on local conditions informed by local knowledge. Yet both camps are devoutly committed to their theologies of forestry: More cutting on the one hand, and less intervention on the other.

What’s more, Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, where 92% of its forests will be affected by the rollback of the roadless rule, is a sopping wet temperate rainforest. The fire risk in Southern Alaska is never zero, but it’s not a high risk. Rather, it seems clear that rescinding the roadless rule is the latest attempt by timber companies and their Industrial theology to get at the old growth forests in Alaska it has been drooling over for decades. To make an economic impact, management interventions, likely large clear cuts, will negatively impact dozens of species, including bears, salmon and whales, which are also intimately connected to the economy of Southern Alaska.

Unfortunately, the loudest voices about the implications for the Tongass National Forest will be the Industrial theology who frame the development as a major boon for jobs and industry, and the Wilderness theology who lament this as a desecration of sacred old growth wilderness. Nuanced rural and Indigenous voices will likely be marginalized by these two dominant theologies.

Yet, if we would just look to Indigenous and rural communities, we would see that a healthy economy and healthy ecosystems do not have to be mutually exclusive. They only require a Relational theology that is more committed to the places we are managing than to ecological purity or corporate profits. Forests are not just sacred sanctuaries for weary urbanites, and they are not just crops for absentee corporate landlords. They are places with names, and there are people who love them. Perhaps instead of the tired back and forth posturing over jobs versus the environment, its time to return to a theology that sees people whose lives are tied to the places they manage as the best way to ensure that the earth community, including us humans, prosper.

[1] The administration’s Press Release: https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2025/06/23/secretary-rollins-rescinds-roadless-rule-eliminating-impediment-responsible-forest-management

[2] See Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith

[3] https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-briefing-wildfires-mcclellan-park-ca/

Must Meditation Lead to Action?

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Last year, I attended a meditation conference in Vancouver with a prominent international organization. The event featured an important teacher of Christian contemplative spirituality who spends much of his time travelling and teaching. I wrote much of this reflection the day after the conference and then decided not to post it. But I want to publish it now that some time has past because I think the distinctions I make are still relevant to our unfolding meta-crisis.

After my talk I was on a panel. An elderly woman stood and in her shaky voice said that she wants to know what we can do about climate change. And that for her, at her age, the best thing she could think to do is pray and meditate. I empathized with her desire to know what we can do, and I tried to assuage her guilt a little for not being able to do more. This was a meditation conference after all. So, I said, its not as though meditation is a tool in our climate action toolbox and that we should walk away from a conference on meditation with a list of five things you can do to solve the climate crisis.

The figurehead of the conference, who was also on the panel followed up in his characteristically blunt, didactic tone. Despite what I thought was a realistic and contemplative response, he took me to task for suggesting that there was nothing we could do (I did not say that). He suggested that while we shouldn’t instrumentalize meditation, it should always lead to action; and that there are plenty of things we can do to take meaningful action to solve the climate crisis.

At the end of the conference, the local organizer (who works in corporate finance) asked us to get into small groups and literally make a list of things we could do to combat climate change. This felt like a direct jab at my panel contribution, and at that point I could not stay in the room or join a small group. So, I stood up and left.

I admit this was not the most mature thing to do. But I also think that the gesture expressed without words how I feel about the risk they were taking in packaging the purpose of contemplative practices as useful action. So let me defend my one man walk out.

There is a controversy that goes all the way back to the Greeks between contemplation and action. Should the good life be devoted to higher things of the mind or the worldly things of politics and society? The Benedictine monks I have worked with say, do both! Their motto is Ora et Labora, Work and Prayer. But notice that the motto is not Work is Prayer. Work and prayer both have their place in the monastic life, as do contemplative and active pursuits outside of the monastery. But in relation to climate change, there is an important space to keep between these two domains.

Because here is where we are: avoiding 1.5- and even 2-degree warming targets are likely unattainable at current rates of emissions and international commitments. So, when we talk about “taking action” on climate, we are not talking about little things that will contribute to a gradual cultural shift. We are not talking about our individual actions adding up to dodging the worst implications of two degrees warming. We are talking about urgent, massive internationally coordinated efforts to radically reduce carbon emissions, and, at this point, because we have no other option, to pull carbon out of the atmosphere because if we don’t, we are looking at three or four degrees warming by the end of the century. That is where we are.

So, I agree, we should never stop asking the question “What must I do?” We are living out the risks of not being able to answer this question. My lifetime may never fully answer this question. I want to keep asking it. But when it comes to climate change, I just do not know of an answer that can be packaged into a pithy hope-slogan or a list of actions. There are dozens of things we can do with our days. And I have too long lists of them. But there is no thing that we can do individually, municipally, provincially or even nationally that will swallow this meta-crisis whole.

And that is where meditation resides. It lives in the dark folds of my still hopeful heart. Contemplative Practice is not a tool to get us ready for the right action. It is not just one of our strategies for effective climate action. It is not just a practice of self-care to process our burn out from our at-least-we-are doing-something actions. It is not just a means to an end. Contemplative practices are the ground of our action. They are the soil out of which right action grows and the air our actions breath. I engage in contemplative practices whether our actions succeed or fail, whether I know what to do or not. I meditate as I wait for the answers to come, or not.

How to Grieve the Death of a Species

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Slender Billed Curlew (Numenius tenuirostris)

In November of 2024 scientists declared that they were now confident another species had gone extinct. The Slender Billed Curlew (Numenius tenuirostris) is in the sand piper family and was last photographed in Morocco in 1995. Dr. Alex Bond, Senior Curator at the Natural History Museum in the UK reviewed all the available recent sightings and data and made this grim conclusion.

Europeans have caused extinctions in the past. The Dodo, the Great Auk or the Canary Island Oystercatcher. But these birds were endemic to islands. The Slender Billed Curlew was a shore bird that inhabited mainland habitat from Europe to North Africa. It was known to have bred in Siberia, but migration wintering grounds were observed in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

It is a notable extinction because it is the first continental bird species to be declared extinct in recent history. The decline was long, but scientists are confident that the species is now globally extinct. What do we make of an extinction? How do we mourn a body of bodies that no longer flies, an avian language that is now silent?

We know that animals grieve for their dead kin in their own ways. Tahlequah, the Salish Sea resident orca mother carried her dead baby for 17 days. Primates, dogs, even crows show distinct behaviors around their dead. Elephants have been observed fondling the bones of their dead matriarchs tenderly, standing in quiet circles over the remembered dead.

On September 1, 1914, Martha the last Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) died in the Cincinnati Zoo. Once numbering in the billions, passenger pigeons formed sun-darkening flocks over much of eastern North America. They were hunted into oblivion by people with guns. Martha may not have understood that she was the last of her species, but I am sure there was a dove-shaped loneliness to her final days.

Death is part of life, not an exception. Extinction is part of evolution and not a failure of it. All that is true in this world is also all that is change, flux and transformation. From death comes new life. From extinction comes openings in the ongoing ecologies of our home. Just as death must be grieved, even in the hope of new life, so too must extinction be grieved. But the difference is that extinction in these times is one of many outward symptoms of a global illness that is threatening us with planetary death. And this death would not hold the promise of new life for a very long time. It is this death, not death in general, that we must resist; the death of a vibrant and living earth who should not yet die. And just as in ancient alchemy and Chinese variolation the cure was to be found in the illness itself, resistance is our only medicine, our lives lived well the best anti-bodies.  

Nov. 30th has begun to be honored as a Remembrance Day for Lost Species. To face our grief and to acknowledge this planetary illness is to commit ourselves to healing, to building strength to fight. The documented events suggest that in the past there have been gatherings that encourage art making, speaker series, poetry readings. They encourage lighting candles, holding vigils and procession. I did not know the Slender Billed Curlew; can I still grieve authentically for her absence from the world? How might you sit with the strangeness of extinction in these heartbreaking times? Perhaps we could sit together. I am open to ideas.

Resources

www.lostspeciesday.org

Buchanan, G.M., Chapple, B., Berryman, A.J., Crockford, N., Jansen, J.J.F.J. and Bond, A.L. (2024), Global extinction of Slender-billed Curlew (Numenius tenuirostris). Ibis. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/10.1111/ibi.13368

Honoring Our Grief as a Community

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“In the dark times

Will there be singing?

There will be singing

of the dark times.”

— Bertolt Brecht, Svendborg Poems, II

Bertolt Brecht (1889-1956) was a German playwright and poet. He fled Nazi Germany and later became a Hollywood screenwriter. In one collection of poems, he wrote the motto above. It was written in Svendborg, Denmark, where he first fled from the rise of Nazi Germany. His words remind us that though we did not choose to live in these times, we can choose how we respond to them.

Every age has its darkness, but in a time of climate chaos, heartbreaking warfare and political uncertainty, many of us are feeling the weight of anxiety and anticipated grief. Walking the halls of our university between classes or meetings, we wonder what good might come of our disciplines, our research, our reading, our lives. In the coming months some of us will make plans, New Year’s resolutions, earn degrees and find jobs. And yet, each step carries a hesitation, a whisper that the times are too hard for our lives to matter. We wonder at a future that feels less and less certain.

For others, people we love have slipped from view. Parents, siblings, friends or non-human companions have died; cherished relationships have ended; jobs or careers or imagined pathways have turned out differently than we planned. We worry about wildfire, violent storms, species extinctions, deforestation, drought. Sometimes it feels almost too much to bear.

It is no wonder we are afraid of facing our grief. But Brecht reminds us, in dark times there should be singing about dark times. “This is how the heart makes a duet of wonder and grief,” writes the poet Mark Nepo in his poem Adrift. “I am so sad and everything is beautiful.”

This is because grief touches something deep inside of each of us that dares to be named hope and love and “yes, I will keep going.” This is because to honour our grief is not to give in but to live on. To honour our grief is to let the seeds we have buried rise rooted in the loamy soil of these dark times and to grow. And like a forest, we cannot grow in isolation.

So, what if Simon Fraser University was a place where we didn’t feel like we had to hide our grief? What if as a community we honoured our losses, our pain and our uncertainties?

Tuesday, November 19th is National Grief and Bereavement Day and the Ecological Chaplaincy Program is hosting a gathering to honour our personal, political and ecological grief.

Register here.

We will also be hosting a table in the northeast corner of the AQ with resources. Stop by our table from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on November 20th through the 22nd. Write a letter to your loss. Honour your beloved with a photograph and candle. And take a blue ribbon with you to show that we don’t have to hide our grief, and that grief is a way of loving ourselves, our community and the future even during times of uncertainty.

Resources for grief and bereavement

  • SFU Ecological Chaplaincy Discord
  • BC Grief and Bereavement Helpline: Visit their website or call 604-738-9950; toll free 877-779-2223
  • MySSP 24/7 crisis support: 833-768-2188
  • Staff and faculty support: lesjames_reimer@sfu.ca
  • Counselling Rapid Access appointment: 778-782-4615 
  • Indigenous Counselling Services: iscwell@sfu.ca

A Month at the Brandt Hermitage

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I had never been alone in the Brandt hermitage before. I first visited Fr. Charles in 2017, when I was completing my PhD on monastic sense of place at the University of British Columbia. We sat on his back porch and talked about Thomas Berry, the state of environmental activism and climate change. And at the end of July, four years after Charles death, I was sitting alone on that same back porch listening to the Oyster River hush toward the sea.

Fr. Charles’ successor at the hermitage, was a contemplative nurtured by the Benedictine tradition and the spirituality of the Desert Mothers and Fathers (She has asked to keep her name private). However, she has recently moved to Nanaimo, to start the next chapter in her life journey. For the month of August, I took up temporary residence at the hermitage to work on getting the house ready for the Hermitage Society’s contemplative in residency program. We invite people of all backgrounds to experience the benefits of silence, solitude and immersion in the natural world while living in this historic and prayer-infused space.

Contemplative Ecology can be defined in many ways. We call Fr. Charles a contemplative ecologist because he brought his vocations of priest, hermit, bookbinder and land-keeper together into a single life well lived. A monk once told me that a hermit (a monk who lives mostly in solitude) is not someone who is running away from the world but running toward God. In my time here I can affirm that silence and stillness are compost for feeding the gardens of healing, growth and spiritual connection.

I have started and ended each day with silent meditation. In the mornings, after my meditation, I would make coffee and watch the day unfold before I buckled down to the day’s tasks of writing, my duties for the university, and coordinating the many repairs and upgrades to the hermitage that inevitably come with an aging building.

So, to be honest, I was not alone the whole time free of work. We have a very talented craftsperson who has taken on the hermitage as a personal project (we pay her of course) and members of the board stop by to help with the work. On my walks in the forest, I often meet people from the neighborhood and their dogs. I have met many slugs and birds, but no bears or cougars.

There is only a narrow driveway on which to walk on the property, as most of the property is on a steep bluff facing the Oyster River. But even on this small trail I never feel bored. My favorite thing about walking in the forest is how the light changes. In the morning the sunlight slants in from the east and by afternoon these slender sheets of light have shifted to the west. Each moment is its own eternity and when I am really paying attention, each footstep like a pilgrimage.

Sometimes late at night, when the weather was clear, I would wake up and stumble out to the deck to crane my neck at the night sky. I was lucky enough to catch some of the Perseid meteor shower and an early morning Mars/Jupiter conjunction. Cassiopia was my most constant constellation in the east, with trees obscuring most of the southern sky. Above me and to the west I could just make out through the trees, Vega and Arcturus, two of the brightest stars in the night sky. Being able to see the dark sky with her bejewelled cloak of stars felt very sacred to me. It both makes me feel very small and insignificant in size, and preciously and uniquely valued by this warm greenhouse world that spins so precariously on the vast oceans of the cosmos.

On Tuesdays I ride my bike to volunteer with the Oyster River Salmon Enhancement Society at Bear Creek Nature Park, which is only a few kilometres west of the hermitage on the Oyster River. The organization was founded in the late 1980s, and Fr. Charles was a part of it from the beginning. There is a picture of Fr. Charles in the small cabin that serves as a meeting area for board members and volunteers and his name is on a small plaque on a memorial bench near the river. Mostly what we do is maintain predator exclusion fences, feed fish, and brush algae off the river water intake screens. On my first day, I walked the meandering trails of the hatchery with a retired commercial fisherman and pruned shrubs and cleared debris.

As I was leaving the hatchery I saw hundreds of pink salmon who were beginning to venture into the Oyster River from the ocean as they prepare to spawn. Their sleek bodies syncopating through swirls and eddies delighted me. So, I decided that I would go fishing. Fr. Charles was a long-time fly fisherman, and many of the volunteers had met Fr. Charles. One old timer had tied flies for him. Later in life, Fr. Charles admitted that he really went fishing to feel more a part of the river, and that it seemed rather cruel to hook a fish and let it go. But I didn’t want to let one go. I wanted to eat one.

So, I found a fly-fishing guide in Campbell River and early in the morning we put on waders, and I soon felt the power of the river rushing past me. We spent time on the banks casting into deep pools for clouds of pink salmon who weren’t biting. We rafted down the river in his small boat and by the end of the day found ourselves at the kissing mouths of the Campbell River and the Salish Sea. I had hooked several pinks and a cutthroat trout with a small blue nymph, but none of them had wanted to go home with me.

Feeling bad, the guide invited me to come back to his house the next day, which is right on the south bank of the Campbell River, to see if I might catch one to keep. I returned the next morning and after a few fumbles and false starts, I felt that familiar tug on the line. She gave chase but after only a minute I could feel the line soften and I reeled her toward shore. I netted her and put her in a cooler filled with water, not sure if I could bring myself to end her life. I didn’t want to use a rock, that seemed barbaric, so I used a slender fishing knife and soon her water breathing gills fell still in the rose-clouding water.

As I cleaned the fish, I was amazed by the dense clusters of orange eggs marbled through the innards. I brought the fish to friends, and they mercifully taught me how to prepare and cook the fish on a cedar plank. We ate the smoky fillets with relish and cooked the roe in butter. I also made a stock out of the bones. I really wanted to use as much of the fish as I could to honor its life and to recognize that all life depends on death to continue. This cycle is embedded in ecosystems and the spiritual ecology of what Christians call the Paschal Mystery: Life, Death, Resurrection. Eating that fish was, in the language of the catholic tradition, eucharistic and sacramental because it pointed to the divine mystery that is shot through our days and meals and bodies and prayers.

I am grateful for my time at the Brandt Hermitage, and I am very hopeful to return for additional time there. But I am also excited to welcome in a single file community of folks from many faiths and paths and parts of the world to experience the power of silence and solitude. If you or someone you know might be interested in becoming a contemplative in residence, please have a look at our call for residents or send me an email with any questions at jason.minton.brown@gmail.com.

A Blessing for Living in a Chaotic Climate

/ Jason M. Brown / Leave a comment

In Laura Schmidt, Aimee Lewis Reau and Chelsie Rivera’s book How to Live in a Chaotic Climate. There are ten steps to work through climate anxiety, grief and connect with meaningful purpose and action. I used this book as the textbook for a seminar on ecological grief and radical hope in the Spring term of 2024. The steps are:

  1. Accept the Severity of the Predicament
  2. Be with Uncertainty
  3. Honor My Mortality and the Mortality of All
  4. Do Inner Work
  5. Develop Awareness of Biases and Perception
  6. Practice Gratitude, Seek Beauty, and Create Connections
  7. Take Breaks and Rest
  8. Grieve the Harm I Have Caused
  9. Show Up
  10. Reinvest in Meaningful Efforts

The book is a wonderful framework for working with difficult feelings. And the course went well. At the end of the course as I thought about how I would rap it up, the Irish spiritual teacher John O’Donohue came to mind. John loved to write blessings, which in a word are not overtly religious though they often are. They come from the Latin Bene, to will the good for someone. We need more blessings in our lives. What a powerful way to express our goodwill for family, friends and loved ones. So here are ten Blessings related to the ten steps of the book:

  1. May your acceptance of the severity of the predicament deepen your care for the preciousness of life.
  2. May your encounter with uncertainty solidify your certainty that life is worth fighting for.
  3. When you honor your mortality, remember the softness of it too.
  4. When you do inner work, remember that it is not just work, but exploration.
  5. As you compost the messiness of biases, prejudices and perceptions may it also germinate seeds of self-compassion.
  6. May you be grateful for something every hour, seek beauty every day, and create connections that last a lifetime.
  7. May your radicalization include taking breaks and deep rest.
  8. When you grieve the harm you have caused, let that grief point you toward that which is still resisting destruction by the dominant system.
  9. When you show up, show up with everything you’ve got: love, fear, excitement, despair, joy, anger, optimism, rage, and active hope.
  10. And, lastly, whenever you harvest a bounty of blessings from your life, reinvest it into meaningful efforts so that at the end of your life you can say that you fought hard for all we can save.

Hope is an Heirloom

/ Jason M. Brown / Leave a comment

Hope can have different meanings. One sense of the word is when it is used as a wish: I hope there will be seats at the movie. I hope there is asparagus at the grocery store. This kind of hope can be rooted in expectations that defy reality, or long for our expectations to be true. We hope that the climate crisis isn’t happening, that it isn’t too bad. But hope as written about by many authors these days is radical, active, and critical. It is a living thing that we nourish with our action.

I’d like to add to this biodiversity. For me, hope is a bone deep faith in the goodness of things; in the beauty of the world, and the worthiness of being alive in troubled times.
If we think about it, we are the embodiments of thousands of hopes gone by.
Hope is inherited from our ancestors and borrowed from future generations.
Hope is an intergenerational heirloom. It does not depend on a feeling. It depends on a keeping. Hope is a seed to be saved and planted when the time is right and harvested when the time is right and saved all over again.
What is something you are too scared to hope for because it seems impossible?

Ten Principles for Ecological Action

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I used this list in my last module when teaching Environmental Ethics between 2018-2022. They are not doctrines but principles that I think are worth thinking about in relation to environmental action.

  1. No single narrative or movement will save us; but we must each find a deep sense of meaning and purpose in this world and act from there.
  2. There is no time for despair, but there is plenty of room for it.
  3. Supremacy is not the same as primacy. We are not separate from the earth, but we do have unique capabilities and responsibilities to the rest of our earth community.
  4. There will always be markets in society; but we should avoid ending up with a market-society. 
  5. Technology is not the enemy nor ours savior, therefore it must be expressed and harnessed by an ever ethically vigilant people.
  6. In light of new ideas and propositions, we should embody the Precautionary Principle without being reactionary.    
  7. Wonder is a virtue that we should cultivate, just as dogmatism is a vice that we should avoid.
  8. Everything we do matters. But nothing we do matters a great deal more than what others propose we do.
  9. We need all hands on deck: Top down and bottom up; deontology and utility; religion and science; politics and personalism; technology and simplicity.
  10. The dragon of capitalism is at fault for the global ecological crisis; but we will have a better chance of making change if we can tame the dragon, rather than try to kill it (for now).