Contemplative spirituality embraces a process of sacred reading called Lectio Divina. This “sacred reading” is a way of sitting with scripture or other sacred texts as an anchor for communion with the Divine. Its dimensions entail: Lectio, Meditatio, Oratio, Contemplatio… Reading, meditation, prayer, contemplation. We begin with the words, we move into pondering the text, we grasp words and phrases as seeds of prayer, we watch for longings and prayers that bubble to the surface. And then, we sink into to cool stream of silence that immerses us in the Divine. Silence. Beyond words, but not without them.
Of course, process-oriented Westerners might believe that each of these is a step that must be followed in sequence. I have never found this all that helpful. A text can start with longing in its first words, and slip into silence before we move back into the rich symbols of the text. I have integrated this practice into my life, sometimes more fruitful with poetry than the Bible, but nonetheless I appreciate how the different aspects invite me into relationship with the Divine.
Reading for a living, most of the time I would rather pray on foot, in my neighborhood park or the rainforest parks that I am lucky enough to have close by. I have begun to translate Lectio Divina as a form of prayer onto the land as Lectio Terra, reading the land. I often start my walks praying a version of the Rosary or Jesus Prayer. Then my soul moves through at least four modes: First I draw attention to how I perceive the land with my senses. I scan and open my senses to the place as I walk (Lectio). Second, I zoom in and zoom out. I ponder the larger whole and then crouch down and sit with the particular (Meditatio). Third, I watch and wait for the prayers of gratitude and praise that come to my lips. My longings, sorrows, joys. My hopes and petitions. I offer up my wounds to the soil, the mosses, the ravens, the trees, the forest, and to the Divine presence that suffuses this land like a mist (Oratio). Lastly, as my muscles warm and my mind begins to quiet, I often find myself passing into the awe and wonder of embodied silence (Contemplatio). And then I meander back through each of these as they arise. Try it yourself sometime and see if this approach to experiencing the world bears fruit.
I will be discussing this and more at the Center for Benedictine Life’s upcoming webinar series: Monastic Land Stewardship: Caring for the Earth in Troubled Times. Register here!
Opening the creaking door of the large pickup truck that had driven us down the hatchery road, I was overwhelmed by the smell of death and decay. I let out a groan and my host, a board member of the Oyster River Salmon Enhancement Society, laughed and said, “That’s why I don’t eat fish most of the year!”
I had come for a scheduled tour of the Society’s hatchery. Our first stop was a fish trap that was filled with pink and a few early coho salmon. The trap was a large rectangular metal container submerged in a small side channel of the Oyster River. As we approached, we could hear loud banging coming from inside as the salmon jumped. When we opened the lid, a large pink salmon sprung out of the water with gusto and landed with a splash. The Society has been working for decades to restore salmon to historic numbers in the Oyster River which has been severely impacted by logging, mining, and development.
I felt a rush of childlike wonder at the sight of these living breathing aqua-bodies, swirling, and lusting for the gravel beds where they would spawn. They were born here, lived their lives in the oceans and then came back to these places to mate and die. The Society collected them, harvested their eggs and milt and then released them back into the river to live out the rest of their short lives. This might sound romantic, but salmon who have spawned start to look like zombies, their flesh decomposing and falling from their torsional bodies. Bears make frequent appearances along the banks, fishing with ease for the spent salmon, though we didn’t see any the day I went. Ravens and crows pick at the fishy bodies. Animals will sometimes carry the salmon deeper into the forest, and their bones nourish the roots of trees. The dying salmon give their bodies to the river and the forest, and in a way to the world.
A few days later, I came across a reference to New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan’s book Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. Crossan is known for his vivid and controversial portrayal of the “historical” Jesus. This moniker is to distinguish him from the Jesus of faith, belief, and miracles that is so familiar to the Christian story. In the passage, Crossan speculated that any convicted traitor crucified by the Romans was likely either left on the cross to terrorize the public, eventually devoured by carrion eaters; or, tossed into a shallow mass grave, and then, likely scavenged by dogs. Crossan believes that in all likelihood, Jesus of Nazareth met this fate, and stories of the tomb, the bodily resurrection and ascension emerged from the disciples’ grief, realistic visions of Jesus alive, enduring faith in his message and teachings, and the living breathing developments of oral traditions.
At first, the idea and image of the body of Jesus being picked at by vultures or eaten by dogs felt scandalous, blasphemous. Certainly, it is not an unprecedented claim. Denial of the resurrection is often part of larger polemics against Christianity from Greco-Roman Pagans or later materialists. All the same, I felt a flash of defensive anger at the implied disrespect to the central story of my Christian (even if unconventional) faith.
The Paschal Mystery is a deep and cherished cosmic myth and reality for me. God is not some distant First Cause, but implicates Themself into the world. Each day is a death and resurrection. Each phase of my life is death and rebirth. The Christian liturgical wheel of the year cycles through the birth, life, death, and resurrection of the landscapes of the Northern hemisphere and the Christ. The universe proceeds on the principle of star death and resurrection. The story feels deeply woven into the world, and into the land. And that is why I believe it. It has been less about whether it was historically true, but more about whether it felt real.
Visually, I am used to seeing the Jesus of stained-glass windows and icons. Stern, serene, floating in the air. Even if some of our more gruesome crosses vividly portray his suffering and death, we all know how the story ends. Jesus was resurrected and ascended bodily into heaven.
As I allowed Crossan’s image to sink a little deeper into my heart, my anger transformed into peace. Jesus, the God-Man, eaten by buzzards and dogs began to touch the soft edges of my faith. It was not at all that with Crossan’s scholarly boldness, the story finally made sense, appealing to my reason, intellect, and now I could just get on with taking the resurrection metaphorically or symbolically.
The image of a God who descended into our deepest pain and suffering through death on the cross, being further humiliated and devoured only enhanced the image of a God whose weakness is Their power. A God who enters fully into the world “saves” it by becoming one with it. The body of Jesus going the way of all flesh, cycling into the body of animals and the soil is an earthier resurrection. But it also adds a step to the Paschal Mystery. The world is in a constant cycle of Birth, Life, Death, Decomposition, and Resurrection. My God Decomposed before the resurrecting into the bodies of the animals, plants and fungi.
This may seem absurd to the orthodox ear, but Jesus himself invokes this kind of horticultural mysticism in the Gospel of John. The author writes Jesus saying, “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24). The seed does not grow in space. It does not ascend in the air. It sinks into the dark moist humus of the earth. This is the fabric of cosmic, biological and spiritual evolution. Jesus entered into this mystery, but we turned it into a fairytale about how good always wins and the wicked are always punished. The cross became a ransom, a universal sacrifice rather than a grand archetype of the way suffering must be metabolized and transformed for new life to emerge.
Most theological claims about the resurrection are primarily spiritual anyway. It isn’t that the resurrection is imagined to be a post-mortem resuscitation. Theologians claim that Jesus really died, and that the resurrected body was a post-mortal eschatological reality. It represented the Humanity 2.0 of the coming Age. Paul understood this as a spiritual body, and later Gnostics would assume that it was only spiritual, the physicality being illusory.
To be honest, despite my love for the Paschal Mystery, I have always struggled with the doctrine of resurrection as a historical event. The way it comes across in the New Testament is fragmentary, somewhat contradictory, and dream-like. The Ascension too has always troubled me, especially because it seems to be a clear homage to the power and legacy of the Hebrew Prophet Elijah, and a taunt to claims that some Roman Emperors were taken into heaven.
The idea of the resurrected body as an ecological body endears me to Jesus’s carnality, but still retains the Divinity he points to in himself, humanity, and the earth community. In addition, I like to imagine the life of Jesus after the resurrection as an insension rather than an Ascension. God went deeper into our world by becoming it. After all, Jesus didn’t come down to earth, he emerged from the fleshy humanity of Mary. He was born just like the rest of us.[1]
Franciscan Friar Richard Rohr writes of the difference between Jesus and Christ: “The Christ Mystery anoints all physical matter with eternal purpose from the very beginning.”[2] Rohr sees creation, Jesus, and the Christian community as instances of the Universal Christ spoken of in Colossians chapter 1. In Christ the world was created; the Son is a visible image of the invisible God, etc. With this scriptural Cosmic Christ, Rohr wants Christianity to expand not contract our view of God in the world and at the beginning of his book The Universal Christ he asks us directly:
“What if Christ is a name for the transcendent within of every “thing” in the universe? What if Christ is a name for the immense spaciousness of all true Love? What if Christ refers to an infinite horizon that pulls us from within and pulls us forward too? What if Christ is another name for everything—in its fullness?”[3]
The mystical body of the world includes the earth community evolving toward greater complexity. The French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin saw Christ as the horizon of evolution, the Omega Point of all creation and Jesus as the living Heart of the Cosmos, which is love.
To be clear, I don’t want you to take my sketches here as anything like a truth claim. I am not trying to convince you that the resurrection is false. That Crossan’s is the real story. I don’t believe I have now discovered the true history of Christianity. My faith in the Paschal Mystery is not literal, it is literary. I am not seeking authentic orthodoxy but realistic mythodoxy.
There are times when I will resonate with the bodily resurrection after three days and the Ascension into Heaven after forty. But watching salmon give themselves to the world, and hearing Crossan’s scandalous claims about Jesus in the same week felt significant. I remember feeling like the salmon were a kind of Forest-Eucharist, and that to talk of Jesus’s body leaving the earth was a strange tale that abstracted his fleshliness from the earth that made him.
This fleshly eucharist was illustrated beautifully in Cormac McCarthy’s last dual-novel The Passenger and Stella Maris. A brother and sister are entangled in a forbidden love that is never consummated. Alicia Western is driven to suicide by vivid visions of mutated vaudevillian creatures and Bobby Western lives with the regret and guilt of her death. At the end of Stella Maris, which is a series of transcripts from interviews between Alicia and her therapist, Alicia longs to give herself back to the earth and end her deep existential loneliness. She says,
“I thought that I would go to Romania and that when I got there I would go to some small town and buy secondhand clothes in the market. Shoes. A blanket. I’d burn everything I owned. My passport. Maybe I’d just put my clothes in the trash. Change money in the street. Then I’d hike into the mountains. Stay off the road. Take no chances. Crossing the ancestral lands by foot. Maybe by night. There are bears and wolves up there. I looked it up. You could have a small fire at night. Maybe find a cave. A mountain stream. I’d have a canteen for water for when the time came that I was too weak to move about. After a while the water would taste extraordinary. It would taste like music. I’d wrap myself in the blanket at night against the cold and watch the bones take shape beneath my skin and I would pray that I might see the truth of the world before I died. Sometimes at night the animals would come to the edge of the fire and move about and their shadows would move among the trees and I would understand that when the last fire was ashes they would come and carry me away and I would be their eucharist. And that would be my life. And I would be happy.” (my emphasis)
Alicia wants to become a eucharist for the world. She intuits that for there to be life there must be death. Alicia’s self-emptying (the Greek is kenosis) impulse is much like that of the salmon, and much like that of Jesus. My encounter with the Salmon-Christ taught me that to get from life to death and back to life again, there must also be decomposition.
[1] I heard Richard Rohr say this in one of his daily emails somewhere.
[2] Rohr, Richard. The Universal Christ (p. 19). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[3] Rohr, Richard. The Universal Christ (p. 5). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
I am launching a pilot project in Ecological Chaplaincy at my university! Here are some thoughts about what I mean by Ecological Chaplaincy.
Pre-Amble
For a good long while now I have felt like I wanted to be a priest in a religion that does not yet exist. Like reading poetry in translation, there is always this nagging feeling that something deeper is being missed. Words that rise up from the murk when I have thoughts about vocation have mostly been words like teacher, forester, monk. These are all paths I have more or less explored, or participate in to some degree. I am now a university lecturer and I teach and write about religion, contemplative ecology, monasticism, and forestry among other things, so I am not too far off from that imagined arrival.
For a time before I started my PhD, I worked briefly as a forester. In Utah, where I worked, beetles were ravaging pine and spruce forests and leaving clusters of grey poles in their places. The US Forest Service does the best it can, but with budget cuts and lawsuits from environmental organizations it can’t afford to manage forests properly. Our relationship to the forest has never been more polarized. Activists decry the desecration of forests as sacred groves, foresters and loggers scoff at their naivete at our reality of society’s need for timber.
For the most part in North America, monastic communities are elderly. More and more monasteries are closing their doors for good. The average age of a monk on this continent is pushing well into the 70s. In my many visits to monasteries, I have seriously considered vowed life. The lack of young monks, the shift away from serious work on the land, the repetitive schedule and closing off of the option to marry, have kept me from becoming anything more than an eager student of contemplative spirituality.
After a crisis of faith led me away from the Mormon (LDS) tradition of my youth, I joined with a broadly Catholic contemplative practice. I moved to Vancouver to pursue doctoral studies. I officially joined the Anglican Church and then the Roman Catholic, and then found myself back in the Anglican Church discerning a calling to the priesthood. While I was discerning, I stumbled across the word chaplain on an instructional retreat on the pastoral care related to death and dying. Tending to those who are grieving resonated deep within the hallowed hollow of my longing. I read books about green funerals, I worked for a summer as a funeral attendant, I taught a course on death and dying in religion and enrolled in a short End-of-Life Doula training.
After discerning out of the Anglican Church, I have settled into a practice I call contemplative ecology—cultivating a sense of place, literacy and reverence for the world around me. I appreciate much that is small ‘c’ catholic—The Eucharist, Centering Prayer, liturgy, Gregorian chant, and the rich symbolism of Christian theopoetics. But all too often on political, social and theological issues, I feel myself to be too heterodox for comfortable belonging in any one creed or tradition within this religious family.
So, I have immersed myself in my practice and my teaching. My students admit to experiencing anxiety, worry, grief, and fear. Many are anxious about finding a fulfilling job. Some worry that wildfire smoke is becoming a regular health hazard of the summer season. Others feel a nagging anticipated grief and fear as the future shifts under our feet with every failed international climate summit. Many progressives and activists feel spiritually adrift, melancholy, burnt out. The so-called Anthropocene—the age of human supremacy—is bringing along with it a spiritual malaise that compounds the existential loneliness of modernity with the anticipated grief of the ecological crisis into the cool alloy of hopelessness. Those of us of European descent feel orphaned by our cultures, even ashamed of aspects of our civilization. We are searching for ways of reconnecting to each other and the earth community but feel lost.
Over the last several years, that word “chaplain” began to show up more and more often. Talking to a student about the existence of God over coffee, writing an email of consolation to a student whose loved one has unexpectedly died. Writing a letter of recommendation for a student applying to a graduate program in ecological restoration. The topics I teach are loaded with uncertainty and being a professor often includes a great deal of what might be called pastoral or spiritual care. An ecological chaplaincy is the thread that just might stitch my disparate vocations together. This then is something of a soft manifesto. No hard edges, no bold proclamations, no demands, no platforms. Just musings, sketches, notes on an emerging vocation.
Amble
“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”
–Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
What is a chaplain anyway? A chaplain tends. A chaplain serves. A chaplain listens. A chaplain sometimes officiates rituals. Most chaplains you might have interacted with are attached to both an institution and a religious tradition. Sometimes chaplains are ordained ministers, sometimes they are not. The most common chaplain titles are those qualified by one or the other: Muslim Chaplain, Buddhist Chaplain, Pagan Chaplain; the setting: prison, corporate office, military, hospice, hospital.
Institutions have specific circumstances that require spiritual care: the regret of a prison sentence, the rigors of the corporate work environment, the devastation of warfare. Religious denominations have specific spiritual goals and guides that chaplains use to companion the bereaved. Kadish prayers, passages from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad, or Buddhist loving kindness meditation. A chaplain doesn’t try to talk anyone into belief, we sit and listen and serve and tend.
However, many folks in North America these days, particularly on the West Coast, do not belong to a single or a particular religious tradition. There might be echoes of one or several from ancestors, but many have long since passed into the realms of spiritual-but-not-religious, secular un-belief, or irreligion. Many feel comfortable outside of religious practice, and yet feel like something is still missing. Many find moments immersed in the more-than-human world to be wholly holy experiences that need very little doctrine to go along with it. While the thrust of traditional Abrahamic religion is to connect with a higher power; contemporary spirituality in general, and practices like contemplative ecology in particular, seek to connect to a wider power.
An ecological chaplaincy then might be one that tends to the spiritual care of people of any or no faith who want to connect more deeply with the earth, or who worry about what is happening to the earth. As an Earth Chaplain I would serve those who feel ecologically disconnected, spiritually lost, or emotionally overwhelmed. An ecological chaplaincy would be place-based rather than institution-based. As an Earth Chaplain I would tend to the wellbeing of humans as part of the wider ecological community. An ecological chaplaincy would provide spiritual care that is comfortable with discomforts past, present and future. As an Earth Chaplain I would not provide Sunday-school-answers to the problem of suffering, evil and death, would not be afraid of the dark.
Place-based Chaplaincy
“Wisdom sits in places. It’s like water that never dries up. You need to drink water to stay alive, don’t you? Well, you also need to drink from places. You must remember everything about them. You must learn their names. You must remember what happened at them long ago. You must think about it and keep on thinking about it.”
–Dudley, in Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places (1996)
An ecological chaplaincy would be a place-based chaplaincy. An Earth Chaplain tends to the soul of places. Monks make a vow of stability which voluntarily ties them to a particular place and community. Perhaps for us un-vowed, making a bond of stability to our places would suffice. Our abbot underfoot, our obedience to the land. This might enable us to explore the contemplative depths of being alive in a lush and wounded world. Rather than being part of a congregational Diocese, we might see ourselves as part of a bioregional Biocese, a place presided over by the bishopric of weather and season.
To say that I chaplain the place does not make me a chaplain for all, some kind of authority. It only means that I put myself forward as one of many willing to witness, tend and defend. It does not infringe on existing place-based elderhoods that exist in religious and Indigenous communities. It is a vocation of listening to the land, and accompanying those who are unsettled and yet still here. As I practice it, it might especially be for European-descended settlers and immigrants who feel deep ambiguity about our place in North America; acknowledging that we need spiritual care too, even as we stumble in confusion on the far side of Abrahamic faith, and lend our support to the Indigenous resurgences happening across the globe and in our places.
While I may live on unceded Musqueam land here in Vancouver, BC, I dwell in Cascadia, an aspirational biocultural zone that spans from Alaska to California along the watershed boundaries called a bioregion. It is an idea that reimagines place along ecological lines. It is imagined not as a new nation, but as a federation of smaller settler, immigrant and Indigenous peoples nested within the wider/wilder ecological community.
As an Earth Chaplain then I would share a practice I call Placefulness: The contemplative practice of attending to what is and what is arising in our places, especially during troubled and dark times. This means cultivating a spiritual practice that seeks to learn the liturgies of place, the unfolding of the seasons and cycles. Developing literacies of the place and the creatures as a form of lectio terra, rather than lectio divina. Placefulness is learning stories and myths, making art. It is re-cognizing in our languages the hidden “grammars of animacy” that Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests see the world as filled with active, vibrant and enmeshed personhoods. Personhoods that have for too long been turned to lifeless objects by the noun-based materialist metaphysics of the mainstream of Western culture and science.
But Placefulness is not Nature spirituality. It is not forest therapy. Our ecological communities have rich and complex histories especially in areas where Indigenous peoples have been displaced or oppressed. Placefulness encourages wrestling with the tensions of being unsettled in these places, as well as learning to love them. Placefulness is also the practice of loving landscapes and ecologies that have been modified, degraded or destroyed. Trebbe Johnson calls this Radical Joy for Hard Times—a global network that offers acts of beauty to wounded places as a step toward healing them, and in the process ourselves. Therefore, a placeful contemplative ecology, and the ecological chaplaincy that expresses it, is not just focused on cultivating reverence and connection with pristine places, cherished protected areas or blessed smoke free horizons. It is also for the green cracks in sidewalks, backyard blackberries, street trees, parks, clear cuts, urban interfaces, rip rapped rivers, and naturalizing trees. Loving a place is the first step to defending it. But continuing to love places that have been wounded, is also an act of radical self-compassion, for by insisting on loving even the most wounded of places we affirm that our own wounds, living in the folds of our soft animal bodies, are also worthy of love.
Cosmic Uncertainty
“At the end of uncertainty comes the uncertainty of the end.”
–Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)
An ecological chaplaincy would learn to sit with the uncertainty and hard emotions of these times. An Earth Chaplain would preach, as John Caputo writes, a theology of perhaps. Developing an ecological chaplaincy is not collecting practices aimed at fixing or assuaging our anxiety. It is not therapy. For moderns, therapy is an essential tool for working through the impact of trauma and psychological harms we have suffered. Therapy is often a treatment for the array of symptoms that accompany emotional distress and mental illnesses. In clinical settings we attempt to square a desired state with past traumas and experiences that are causing us to languish in some way. Therapy is not the place to question the underlying conditions of a world that is inducing the symptoms in the first place.
As climate writer and researcher Britt Wray writes in her book Generation Dread however, “Despair and fear are not inherently bad. Hope and optimism are not inherently good…We must move from an either/or to a both/and model. There is meaning in every emotion.” Learning to live with greater uncertainty is a spiritual practice in itself, and every emotion has something to teach us. Our anxiety is not just pathological. It is a signal from the heart of the earth that something is desperately wrong.
Ecological chaplaincy as spiritual care might be imagined as trans-therapeutic. To me this means that it is not an alternative to therapy, it focuses on the deeper dimensions of our soul’s wellbeing and the deeper spiritual crisis that has attacked that wellbeing from every side. The spiritual care that chaplains offer is not curative or even preventative. It is companion-ative.
Chaplaincy speaks to and sits with cosmic uncertainty. We tend to our existential, philosophical, ethical, ritual, and aesthetic health. Meaning, purpose, and connection are our watch words. Chaplains are not technicians of the soul who fix wounded hearts. We are not even guides who pretend to know the way home. We are wounded companions who walk with other wounded hearts through landscapes spiritual and ecological.
An ecological chaplaincy would remind us that the grief we pour out is also the overflowing of a love that has filled us. As spiritual activist Stephen Jenkinson defines it, “Grief is a way of loving what has slipped from view. Love is a way of grieving that which has not yet done so.” An Earth Chaplain would be a practitioner of griefcraft—learning to live with loss even as we keep on loving.
As a chaplain I would not offer any certainty about the outcome of the ecological crises, or even insist that we stay optimistic. I would however, attempt to carry a radical hope, the kind that is made of the earth herself and lives in our bones as an intergenerational heirloom that has been passed down to us. A heritage that we must pass on to others. I acknowledge that my ancestors, scattered as they are across North America and England, are the reason I am alive. And the future I work toward is in a way part of becoming a good ancestor myself.
As Stephen Harrod Buhner writes in his book Earth Grief
“Hope is a quiet, enduring, persistent thing. It is not filled with the excited, uplifting, future-oriented energy of optimism. It possesses instead a slow-moving groundedness, an enduringness, a solidity, a nowness. It isn’t going anywhere, it just is. It’s a form of faith, a faith that comes from life itself…”
Faith in and from life. The spark of life that dwells in me and is me is not mine. It is inherited from my ancestors and borrowed from future generations. I must tend to that spark so that it can light the way.
Navigating Through the Darkness
“But when I lean over the chasm of myself—it seems my God is dark and like a web: a hundred roots silently drinking.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours ([1905] 2005)
An ecological chaplaincy would be comfortable in the dark. An Earth Chaplain would provide no easy arrivals or answers. When I say dark, I don’t mean the evil, nefarious; realms of ghostly entities that cause mischief. When I say dark, I am speaking into the deep, mystical dimness that is just below the surface of the earth’s contemplative traditions.
The mystics speak of a theology in the negative, an apophatic—literally other than the spoken—dimension to spirituality. The Lineages of Chinese Buddhism and Daoism are well known for their discourses on the ineffable. Lao Tzu’s Tao teh Ching (Dao de Jing) opens with this famous line: “Tao can be talked about, but not the Eternal Tao. Names can be named, but not the Eternal Name.” For Christian mystics like Dionysius the Areopagite, Nicolas of Cusa, and Meister Eckhart, the luminous dark of the Divine required an unlearning and an unknowing. For many Zen Buddhists this is the return to Beginner’s Mind that prepares one for enlightenment.
There is a rich loamy fecundity in darkness. In When the Heart Waits (1990) novelist and spiritual writer Sue Monk Kidd observes that most living things incubate or gestate in darkness. To live, seeds must die and be buried. In the silent obscurity of the heart, we ripen, even when it may feel like we are wasting away. Spanish mystic Juan de la Cruz (John of the Cross) speaks of this as a Dark Night of the Senses and of the Soul. It is a spiritual malaise, an aloneness that comes over even the most disciplined practitioner. These are not just hard times, but times that feel like being hopelessly lost in a thick fog, buried under a landslide of crushing earth. The union or enlightenment that breaks through is not a reward for virtue or hard work, but the result of a slow ripening that we can only patiently await.
The world has been dark before. Plagues, war and famine are endemic to civilizations past. But beyond political upheaval or pandemic, it seems clear that culturally the West is passing through a great Dark Night of the Soul—an absence of direction, inspiration, and purpose at the far end of post-modern cynicism. We orphaned Westerners struggle with a creeping sense of unworthiness. We suffer from privilege guilt, settler guilt, human guilt. Sometimes we wonder if the earth would be better off without us. This kind of wrestling is the kind that happens in a dark night of the soul. We even begin to doubt the worth of our existence.
And yet, the other side of darkness is not noonday sunshine. There is no guarantee that light will dawn again for us. Even though our species will almost certainly survive, much of our civilization will need to die for the earth community to live. How much, I don’t know. But coming to terms with our individual and collective mortality is part of the deep spiritual practice of navigating the dark. We cannot emerge from the chrysalis and be the same.
As Gerald May writes, “Sometimes the only way we can enter the deeper dimensions of the journey is by being unable to see where we’re going.” We cannot escape the dark except by sitting still for a while and letting our eyes adjust to it. Then, and only then, can we start to move our way through it. We cannot go back the way we came; we must cross to the other side. Like the ancient Inca, we need to start making dark constellations from the gaps between the clusters of stars of this dark night sky. So, we’ll need brave dark pilgrims to explore this shadowland. We’ll need dark storytellers to make sense of the gaps.
We don’t have much time. But each of us will always have just enough time to fall in love with life and with the world before it is our time to return to earth’s embrace. And then, to pass that love on to those who come after. The good earth’s liturgy of dying is always followed by a lush rebirth and resurrection. I believe in this resurrection.
Resources and Other Projects
This manifesto is how I am thinking about the topic, there are a lot of other ways to walk this journey.
This essay is based on an interactive workshop given at the Swan Lake Nature House in Saanich, BC on Oct. 13, 2023.
Grieving Our Aloneness
Philosopher David Abram mused that the West is a civilization that has been increasingly talking to itself for the several hundred years. In so many ways, the mainstream of Western cultures have disenchanted the world and tuned out the hymn of praise that is being sung from its heart. This isolation is sometimes referred to as the modern malaise, a loss of meaning and purpose in what is felt to be a vast, godless cosmos. It is no wonder that so many of us feel a sense of longing and grief that is sometimes hard to place.
Biologist Paul Shepherd in Talking on the Water said, “The grief and sense of loss, that we often interpret as a failure in our personality, is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.” This quote appears in Francis Weller’s book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, where the author begs us to apprentice ourselves with the hidden pain in our hearts and of the world. As we Westerners move to re-enchant our worlds, we are sheepishly coming back into conversation with the earth community, which according to our science from the last 200 years, is merely driven by the laws of matter, chemical reactions and biological urges. For this reason, as Weller writes,
“…the perennial conversation has been silenced for the vast majority of us. There are no daily encounters with woods or prairies, with herds of elk or bison, no ongoing connection with manzanita or scrub jays. The myths and stories about the exploits of raven, the courage of mouse, and the cleverness of fox have fallen cold.”
Much of our grief for the world comes not from an inner imbalance, but from an outer absence from the web of life that make up our day-to-day worlds.
Tuning in, learning to listen again, witnessing the pain and joy of the world, and collaborating in a vast conversation is essential for these troubled times. We must, as Robin Wall Kimmerer admonishes, re-learn the grammar of animacy that exists in so many Indigenous languages. She writes,
“It’s no wonder that our language was forbidden. The language we speak is an affront to the ears of the colonist in every way, because it is a language that challenges the fundamental tenets of Western thinking—that humans alone are possessed of rights and all the rest of the living world exists for human use. Those whom my ancestors called relatives were renamed natural resources. In contrast to verb-based Potawatomi, the English language is made up primarily of nouns, somehow appropriate for a culture so obsessed with things.”[1]
The materialism of the West developed with and through our noun-based languages. Our lives and our tongues have been stripped of vibrancy, animacy and aliveness.
Fostering Ecological Dialogue
Western cultures are waking up to the rich chatter of the natural world in ways that were lost to us for half a millennium of mis-enchantment by our anthropocentric theologies and sciences. We are connecting with the ancient wisdom preserved by Indigenous peoples, rural people, and many ethnic and esoteric knowledge systems that have existed underground and on the margins within Western cultures.
In recent years, forest ecologist Dr. Suzanne Simard has made headlines for claiming that trees communicate through a neural-like web of root grafts and mycorrhizal networks. Though her work has come under fire in recent months for overstating this claim, she articulates a widespread intuition shared by many of us and reinforced by popular works from foresters like Peter Wohlleben or biochemist Diana Beresford-Kroeger. This intuition is that trees are more than natural objects that can be valued either as so many board feet of timber or for their intrinsic aesthetic beauty. Simard writes, “Our modern societies have made the assumption that trees don’t have the same capacities as humans. They don’t have nurturing instincts. They don’t cure one another, don’t administer care. But now we know Mother Trees can truly nurture their offspring.”[2] Trees are alive and they’re talking!
Trees seem to communicate as much with each other as with their fungal partners. Mycorrhizal fungi enter the very cells of trees and trade sugars for water, nutrients and information. A healthy and resilient forest is one that has a web of connections and dialogue partners. Despite being competitive when it comes to canopy real estate, trees have been documented sharing resources with other trees, especially kin, but also between species such as Douglas fir and Paper Birch. Trees can also communicate above ground. Some trees that are being attacked by defoliating insects, for example, release a pheromone that can be “smelled” by adjacent trees, queuing them to up their chemical defenses.
This awakening on the part of Western cultures and sciences to the amazing complexity of forests has got me thinking. How might we humans (of immigrant and settler backgrounds), learn to better listen to the conversations of the more than human world? And more specifically, what kinds of dialogue partners could help us discern a more reciprocal, relational and regenerative place in the rapidly changing ecologies of the so-called Anthropocene, an age of expanded human impacts on the earth community?
While it is certainly the case that we should continue to demand ecological justice, biodiversity protections, and an extreme reduction in carbon emissions, we are now at the point where reductions will almost certainly have to be paired with removal. This might mean that our children will come of age in a brave new world of geoengineering experiments and a global network of carbon vacuum plants.
Of course, planting trees is certainly an important activity and part of the solution, but with slow growth rates and their susceptibility to becoming carbon sources due to their pesky flammability, any carbon forestry should probably be nested within wider ecological and common good goals, rather than being integrated into market-based offset initiatives. In other words, we should plant trees because planting trees has a range of ecological and cultural benefits apart from the hyped quantified economic or climate benefits.
To these two general points—couching our ecological actions in dialogue and increasing tree-covered landscapes for a range of values—I want to start a conversation with a tree that has witnessed the entirety of human evolution across the globe. I am speaking of, and to, the mighty oak tree.
A Love for Oaks
Quercus agrifolia (Source: Wikipedia)
I grew up with an orange tree in the back yard, and our neighborhood streets were lined with Eucalyptus windrows. The oranges migrated from southeast Asia via Spain, and the Eucalypts directly from Australia. Orange County, a sleepy network of agrarian villages, eventually enlisted a narrow band of fruits in a botanical get rich quick scheme where they now grow mostly high-end houses and luxury malls.
Despite this charismatic flora, I will never forget the dusty smell and dappled light of the patches of preserved oak woodlands that were the destination of naturalist programs and school field trips. California boasts nearly 20 oak species, and the California Live Oak (Quercus agrifolia) was a common oak in protected areas and patches of undeveloped foothills inhabited by lurching dinosaur-shaped oil rigs. The Live Oak’s glaucous holly-shaped leaves and slender charcoal-colored acorns spoke to me of an ancient way of life. A way of living in this place that my people had never really been interested in learning. And so, the oak whispered softly in the background of my childhood, and most of my arboreal memories are of foraging lush oranges, feral figs, and blood red pomegranates from the shaggy suburbs of Yorba Linda.
When I lived in Utah, I met the Gambel Oak (Quercus gambelii) who lived in the foothills below the alpine fir forests. It is a scrubby oak that dwells in clusters and thickets and rarely grows taller than 10 meters. They are expertly fire adapted, and quickly regrow from their vital roots. They are a stable food source for bears, turkeys and deer. And Indigenous peoples of the Wasatch range and great basin harvested them regularly for food which was even used as an aphrodisiac by the Isleta Pueblo.
When I moved to Connecticut for forestry school, I worked for a summer at the Yale Forest in Northeaster Connecticut. The hardwood forests of Connecticut are home to at least 13 Quercus species. As foresters, we were attempting to manage the forests so that they would retain oak in perpetuity. Because oak trees need more light than maple trees, selection harvesting of choice oak trees can shift the forests species composition toward more shade tolerant species such as maples. To ensure that oaks would be in the next generation, harvest plans not only needed to ensure that there were enough oak trees in the canopy left to provide acorns, but also that there was enough room in the harvested forest floor for the oaks to germinate and thrive. I loved my time in the forest, and even though we marked for cutting some hefty oaks, we left behind many more, and opened space for the next generation to grow.
In 2014, I spent a month living with the monks of Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey in Carlton, Oregon. I was there preparing for my doctoral dissertation which would study the sense of place and ecological spirituality of Catholic monastics. The 1,300-acre property had been clear cut in the 1950s and the monks spent many decades reforesting their steep hill with Douglas fir plantations. In the 1990s however, the abbey underwent an ecological paradigm shift. They wanted to manage the forest more sustainably, and more in line with the local ecology. They hired a talented local forester who wrote a new management plan for the abbey and began diversifying the abbey’s forests. One project he proposed was a full-scale restoration of the Oregon White Oak (called Gary oaks in British Columbia) savannas that used to be in abundance in western Oregon. After some persuasion the monks agreed, and the abbey now boasts several hundred acres of grasslands dotted with majestic oak trees. I have visited the abbey many times over the years, and I always enjoy reunited with both my monk and oaken friends.
Oak as Provider
Oaks are in the Beech family, Fagaceae. Globally, there are over 500 oak species, with Mexico and China being countries with the most species. Oaks evolved over 56 million years ago with the emergence of flowering plants. Oaks predate humans by millions of years, and by the time humans emerged, oaks had wrapped a green embrace around the temperate northern hemisphere.
Oaks are a loquacious species. They have associated with dozens of fungal partners including truffles. One source identified over 800 insects that are associated with the oaks, 48 of which were obligates. These obligates include the visible gall wasps which hijack to oak leaves to create a swollen outgrowth from which young wasps emerge sometimes gall oak apples. Mammals and birds also love their acorns which are a staple food for many diverse forest ecosystems.
In 1985, David A. Bainbridge coined the term Balanocultures. Balano is the Greek word for acorn, and Bainbridge argued that what in Asia and the Mediterranean were assumed to be mortar and pestles for grinding grain, in fact predated the widespread domestication of grains. Bainbridge suggested rather, that across the temperate zone, oak and oak ecosystems were the primary food system of our budding old-world civilizations.
Forest lands have always been multiuse spaces where game, cultivation and harvesting happened simultaneously. From the earliest archaeological accounts, fire was used as a management tool. Many forests containing oak, hazel, and chestnut were burned to maintain open pastures that were also good for grazing game species. As grain and domesticated animals replaced these forest-gathering systems, orchards, hedgerow and silvopastures were adopted. In some cases, hazel was coppiced under oak standards. And throughout Europe, but especially in Spain, pigs were enlisted in converting acorns into pork.[3]
All along the California Coast Indigenous peoples forged abiding relationships to oaks. Half a dozen oak species were managed with fire to provide a staple starch to their diverse diets. In her book Tending the Wild M. Kat Anderson writes about the sophistication of Indigenous food systems management, which, in addition to fire included intentional cultivation and planting, pruning, weeding and training branches into particular shapes such as digging sticks, tools and arrows. The West Coast of North America’s balanocultures were some of the last peoples to rely so heavily on acorns as a staple food, though acorns are still widely consumed in parts of Asia, especially Korea.
In Octavia Butler’s novel The Parable of the Sower, the main character Lauren Oya Olamina, lives in a post-prosperity United States that is struggling to stay out of all out survivalist chaos. Her small community gardens and has returned to making bread from acorn flour. They represent a kind of post-apocalyptic balanoculture. Later, forced to leave her relatively secure neighborhood she forms a new religious movement called Earthseed and the community Laura forms with a rag tag group of survivors is named Acorn.
The Oak is an abundant gift giver. Gifts are a kind of language, oaks speak in seasonal flows of acorns, bark, truffles and leaves. The bark and leaves have traditionally been used as astringent and have anti-inflammatory properties that can stop bleeding or sooth external sores. It is also anti-diarrheal and antioxidant. The bark is also used for tanning and for wine making.
The wood is structurally very sound and sought after for fuel and fine woodworking such as ship building. Neolithic European dugout canoes were sometimes made of oak trees. The Lurgan canoe, was used over 4,000 years ago in Galway, Ireland. It was re-discovered in the early 20th century and measured more than fourteen meters long. In Medieval Europe, trees were trained to become specific parts of the ships’ hulls and body.
Strong mature oak beams were also sought out to build the roofs of Westminster Abbey and Notre Dame. As an aside, when Notre Dame burned down in 2019, the restoration of the building insisted on using mature oak, which were sought from all over France. The Villefermoy forest has provided over 50 trees for the project. This was of course a controversial move, as more than 40,000 people signed petitions calling the cutting of oaks “ecocide.”
This foundational abundant gift giving on the part of oaks and their associated species, also contributed to the spiritual ecology that populated the imaginal realms of these primal peoples. For example, oak is a totem of almost all the sky gods within early Indo-European religious expressions. This probably means that oak was a sacred tree that later became anthropomorphized as the familiar male sky gods of Zeus/Jupiter, Dagda, Perun, Thor and Indra. These lightning bolt wielding thunderers were present in the form of oak, which itself has an affinity with lightning strikes due to its high water content. Even early fragments referring to Yahweh connect him to groves of trees some of which were identified as oaks. Later, extreme monotheists would cut down these sacred groves, so the official theology of Judaism’s relationship to trees certainly evolved. But after people, trees are the most often referred to entity in the Hebrew/Christian Bible.
In the Finnish epic The Kalevala, during the creation of the world, a massive oak tree shaded out the other trees, and more importantly the barley fields, from the sun.
“Spread the oak-tree’s many branches,
Rounds itself a broad corona,
Raises it above the storm-clouds;
Far it stretches out its branches,
Stops the white-clouds in their courses,
With its branches hides the sunlight,
With its many leaves, the moonbeams,
And the starlight dies in heaven.” (Rune II)
The tale’s hero Vainamoinen called on the goddess of Nature to help him. From the primal waters emerged a small man clothed in bronze. Despite his size, and tiny ax, he felled the mighty oak with three blows and Vainamoinen and his helper are again able to sow the fields and forests with seed. On one level the story reveals the tension that surely arose between the early balanocultures and the ascendant granocultures. The massive tree was not a tree of life, but a hindrance to the open growing conditions needed for barley.
In the Greek religious imagination, a dryad is a tree nymph or tree spirit. But the word Drys (δρῦς) is just the word for “oak” in Greek. Dodona was originally a center of worship and divination of a mother goddess, Dione, related to other feminine figures such as Rhea, Gaia, Hera and Aphrodite. Divination was often undertaken by listening to the rustle of leaves or to the sound of windchimes hung from the branches of sacred oak trees. Augury, or bird divination, was also done from within these sacred groves. By the 1200s BCE, Dodona had been appropriated by the cult of Zeus. But even then, a sacred oak was identified with him and was later walled off by King Pyrrhus (~290 BCE) to protect it.
You have probably heard of the connection between oaks and Druids. In Ireland, the word Druid, the name for their scholar-priests, refers to groves of oak trees where they performed their councils, rituals and perhaps even human sacrifices. Druid is sometimes translated as “knower of oaks”, and the harvest of mistletoe from these oaks was a sacred rite. We don’t know much about them, and there is plenty of Neo-Pagan romanticism about their proto-ecological ethics, it is likely that human sacrifice was part of their oaken religious rituals. Nothing is certain about this however, because much of our information comes to us through Roman imperial eyes. What is certain, is that oaks played an important role in the foodways and spiritways of these pre-Christian earthy pagans.
Druids harvesting mistletoe from oak groves (Image source: Wikipedia)
In the Salish Sea Bioregion, Coast Salish territories, or Cascadia, where I live, we dwell alongside only a single oak species. The Saanich (SENĆOŦEN) word for this oak is ĆEṈ¸IȽĆ (pronounced chung-ae-th-ch). In botanical Latin, it is the Quercus Garryana—the Garry Oak (The same species I encountered in Oregon). The name Garry came from explorer David Douglas who named the oak for his friend Nicholas Garry of the Hudson’s Bay Company (1782–1852). The rest of this essay is about my dialogue with Quercus Garryana and trying to tune into what they may have to teach us about living together in this messy post-colonial world. For English speakers, I propose that we begin to call them the Cascadia Oak. Sorry Garry!
According to Western archeological pollen studies, the Cascadia Oak migrated here around 10,000 years ago and flourished at its greatest extent from 8000-6000 years before present. After that its range began to shrink as the climate grew wetter. Many histories of the Cascadia Oak in this region suggest that a Mediterranean climate “prevails” over most of the oak’s range. While the rain shadow of Vancouver Island certainly provides conditions more suitable for the Cascadia Oak, they seem to flourish best when humans co-manage their range with fire. If I understand my reading of the history correctly, the oak savannas and grasslands where the oaks are most iconic may have disappeared completely if it had not been for continuous Indigenous management. This entanglement with human culture is what fascinates and inspires me most about oak trees in general and the Cascadia Oak in particular. Oak savannas are not a rare ecosystem just because European colonialism has displaced or replaced them, they are rare because they need fire to maintain themselves. Left untended, Douglas fir trees overtop them, and unless a natural fire comes through, they likely will die out after a couple of decades.
The Cascadia Oak, like most oaks, are also social trees. Over 100 species of birds have been identified in Cascadia Oak woodlands. Hundreds of insects and invertebrates make their homes with Cascadia Oaks. Indigenous peoples up and down the west coast used their bark, leaves, wood and acorns as sustenance, medicine, and tools. Their ecologies were also hunting grounds and camas prairies (Camassia quamash), a flowering plant with a starchy tuber that was one of several root crops cultivated by Coast Salish peoples. The Capital of British Columbia, Victoria is originally named Camosun, or “place to gather camas.” Like California, Island and lower mainland British Columbia maintained strong balanocultural food systems.
Dialogue through Ecological Restoryation
In Anna Tsing’s book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, she shows us how another ecological dialogue has been going on for many thousands of years. She studies the ways that matsutake mushrooms have not just been prized gourmet foods, but how their allure has ebbed and flowed with human land management, especially second growth pine lands in Japan. She writes,
“…one could say that pines, matsutake, and humans all cultivate each other unintentionally. They make each other’s world-making projects possible…As sites for more-than-human dramas, landscapes are radical tools for decentering human hubris. Landscapes are not backdrops for historical action: they are themselves active. Watching landscapes in formation shows humans joining other living beings in shaping worlds.”[4]
In a similar way, the Cascadia Oak was an integral part of a diverse land-based food system that included clam gardens, berry patches, salmon and herring runs, hazel orchards and camas gardens. These food systems were intensively managed by Coast Salish and Vancouver Island First Peoples. Cascadia Oak savannas were kept open from encroaching fir forests using fire, even as the climate got wetter. Burning was a technique for enhancing a set of anthropocentric management goals: keep grasses vigorous, keep bugs out of the duff and acorns. European invaders did not recognize these landscapes as anthromes, or if they did, did not respect Indigenous tenure enough to care. Much of what was assumed to be wilderness or unclaimed, was in fact ancient active landscapes where humans and a myriad other species made each other’s “world-making projects” possible.
Fast forward to contemporary restoration ecology. In recent decades, the Pacific West of North America has seen several organizations pop up like mushrooms to protect and restore the Cascadia Oak’s unique and biodiverse ecology. It seems to me that the central dialogue or story of Restoration Ecology is one of repair, purification, and penance. Ecological experts restore species composition and ecosystem function to make right, restore balance, bring order back to the natural world, which Western humans, from the outside have disrupted. We are the serpent in the Garden. So, Cascadia Oak ecosystems are seen to be under threat from “invasive” species and development. The Garry Oak Ecosystem Recovery Team comes across like First Aid to a wounded ecological person. The medicine is to eradicate invasives, wall off ecological precincts and begin to implement professionally supervised prescribed burns to maintain oak prevalence over Douglas Fir.
This approach has its place, and endangered species must be given room to flourish. However, on their website, GOERT has a page dedicated to resources for gardeners and landowners. This is the approach that enchants me most. This is what I would call a Collaborative or Reconciliation Ecology. A more collaborative ecology might accompany us from a so-called “crisis narrative” in which wild nature is besieged by a voracious culture; to a “dynamic narrative” in which all cultures are understood in ever shifting relationships to biodiversity.
Wherein diverse biocultures and values collaborate in restoring plural relationships to places, species, foods and materials. Native and non-native species are welcomed (not necessarily invasives), and Indigenous and non-indigenous perspectives and technologies are experimented with. This Restoryation is about approaching ecosystems where humans are back in right relationship to places, not restricting them to the status of invader, visitor or tourist. If all we see when we look at changing ecosystems is loss, we are not seeing the possibilities that change might afford for fostering novel relationships that are regenerative.
The Indigenous peoples who stewarded Cascadia Oaks were not park rangers, they were managers, gardeners. So, what if we began to think of oaks, and many other species, not as victims to be saved and protected, but as interlocutors and companions in responding to the unfolding climate crisis. The plants that I know are going to fight like hell to keep on living. I want to fight alongside them, not as a savior but as collaborator and kin. I want to grieve losses as they happen, but I also want gardening, which is a kind of ecological dialogue, to become one of many tactics for resisting consumerism and climate doom.
Restoryation, is not so much about a re-consecrating and purifying an ecosystem of its human influence as an act of environmental penance, it is about restoring our relationship to the earth community, a relationship which has been betrayed in many ways throughout time by our rampant and destructive economic culture. Ecologist Stephanie Mills even suggests that restoration, Restoryation, is a form of ecological ritual:
“[The act of restoration] gives [people] a basis for commitment to the ecosystem. It is very real. People often say, we have to change the way everybody thinks. Well, my God, that’s hard work! How do you do that? A very powerful way to do that is by engaging people in experiences. It’s ritual we’re talking about. Restoration is an excellent occasion for the evolution of a new ritual tradition”.[5]
We don’t have to endure the coming losses and changes in isolation. We have each other and we have the living, breathing world on our side. Oaks, like so many of the species on this planet, are here to dialogue with us about how to live in a chaotic and changing world, and for me at least, that makes fighting for a just and livable world just a little bit less lonely.
In the same week that Pope Francis went to hospital, Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s former Prime Minister, Ted Kaczynski, the unibomber, and famed American writer Cormac McCarthy died.
What a strange collage of legacies. I don’t know much about Berlusconi, but when I was on an 8th grade field trip to Washington DC I got the news that my uncle, who was a timber industry lobbyist in northern California, had been killed by a bomb addressed to his boss. Ted Kaczynski, an anarchist/primitivist living in a remote cabin was terrorizing the forces of ecological evil. He was arrested in 1996 and spent the rest of his live in prison.
I remember hearing about Cormac McCarthy in university. He had just published The Road (2006). He was beginning to be known as one of the greatest living American writers.
I didn’t get around to reading McCarthy until a few years ago, when I finally picked up The Road I couldn’t put it down. His stainless steel prose and the exploration of human purpose stripped to its most elemental struck a deep chord. The book is heartbreaking and horrific. But it somehow still touched something like the holy in me. Perhaps that is a predictable response from a privileged first worlder to post-apocalyptic simplicity, but still.
Last year, while teaching a course on death, disease and disaster in the humanities, McCarthy’s novel seemed an obvious choice for exploring the possible ruin of earth the coming age of the so-called Anthropocene may bring. At the end of the novel he writes:
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” (Pg. 287).
The Road makes clear that we have a lot to lose, and that enduring that loss may cost more than some of us can muster.
I have read most of McCarthy’s major works. I can’t say I love it all, but something that keeps coming up in my experience of McCarthy is an abiding encounter with the holy, or to put it another way, grace. By grace in this instance I mean an unspoken wholeness that seems to be shot through it all, or as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it “the dearest freshness deep down things.”
Now don’t get me wrong, McCarthy’s stories, characters and plots don’t directly speak to this. McCarthy’s world is a world of fallen, wounded, and downright evil human beings. McCarthy liked to show humanity at its worst. But each story is set in a richly alive world bursting with fecundity. In his first novel, the Orchard Keeper (1965), a hermit figure lives deep in the Tennessee woods. He is a kind of Appalachian Adam, before the fall that surely comes.
“Curled in a low peach limb the old man watched the midmorning sun blinding on the squat metal tank that topped the mountain. He had found some peaches, although the orchard went to ruin twenty years before when the fruit had come so thick and no one to pick it that at night the overborne branches cracking sounded in the valley like distant storms raging. The old man remembered it that way, for he was a lover of storms.” (pg. 51).
Lush prose for a lush landscape.
In Blood Meridian (1985), where the huge, pale, erudite and depraved “Judge” seems to be a personification of a simultaneously civilizing and terrorizing Manifest Destiny, the pools of blood and monstrosity are somehow poulticed by the beauty of McCarthy’s language and vast western landscapes.
“He woke in the nave of a ruinous church, blinking up at the vaulted ceiling and the tall swagged walls with their faded frescoes. The floor of the church was deep in dried guano and the droppings of cattle and sheep. Pigeons flapped through the piers of dusty light and three buzzards hobbled about on the picked bone carcass of some animal dead in the chancel.” (pg. 27-28).
“Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.” (pg. 57).
“It grew cold in the night and it blew stormy with wind and rain and soon all the wild menagerie of that country grew mute. A horse put its long wet face in at the door and Glanton looked up and spoke to it and it lifted its head and curled its lip and withdrew into the rain and the night.” (pg. 124).
McCarthy’s landscape is not moral, enchanted or invested in his characters’ lives. But somehow the spaciousness of the land allows for the possibility that another path might have been chosen. And that for all the terror, small moments of peace are never to be squandered.
I am not a literary critic, so maybe some has already said all this, but in my experience, there is something holy about a beauty that includes darkness. McCarthy doesn’t try to persuade the reader to see the beauty in bad things, he simply zooms out far enough so that even humanity’s most sinister acts are humbled by a grandeur not of our own making.
The Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor has been credited with writing to a similar effect—invoking a sense of grace through stories of violence. Her two novels and many short stories contain characters blinded by their own selfishness, greed and hatred. There is supposed to be a kind of path not chosen in O’Connor that points toward grace.
I have read many of O’Connor’s stories and her novels with this in mind. But personally, I just don’t experience it. I find O’Connor’s characters’ evil deeds so sticky and unflinchingly proximate that I never get to see another path or a bigger world. I leave the reading feeling closed in on and the wider world cut off. There doesn’t seem to be any cosmos, just dark, eccentric human foibles on colorful display like wax models in a museum. The trouble being that no matter how lifelike the museum pieces, their backdrops are only a hasty two dimensional painting under dim lighting.
O’Connor’s first novel Wise Blood (1952) in particular felt this way. Hazel Motes, an ex-army man, starts to preach the Church of Christ without Christ. The philosophical premise is promising but the delivery is a string of nasty interactions that left me feeling sad and existentially disappointed. Displaced even.
Again, McCarthy’s characters are not better people, they don’t come around. But somehow when I read McCarthy, a dull melancholy throb transfigures into grace, not disappointment.
So the Catholic writer (O’Connor) feels more like a nihilist than whatever McCarthy might be called in his raw portrayals of human evil and the yawning void of an apathetic cosmos. Personally, over and over as I have read and reread McCarthy, I was surprised by grace. Thank you, rest in peace.
From May 15-31 I will be in Israel/Palestine on pilgrimage. Going to post some jottings. But I’m writing them on my phone so forgive the brevity and choppiness.
The first ten days will be on a tour led by a Franciscan friar named Father Ben. He is originally from Ghana. Getting here was a long journey but very smooth. On my over night plane from JFK to Tel Aviv, there were many different kinds of Jewish folk. The man next to me wore a black woven Kippah on a bald head and it kept falling off when his head dipped in sleep.
I would wake up and look around with groggy eyes and see men dressed in full Jewish prayer regalia bobbing in place with prayer books in hand or sitting quietly adjusting their phylacteries on forehead and left arm.
The airline steward asked if I wanted my mid flight meal kosher, or “just regular.” I looked at my Jewish seat companion and said, “um, non-kosher please.” I said that so as not to imply that eating Kosher was all that odd.
At the hotel, there were mezuzahs on every door. A surcharge for spa services on Shabbat. And there was an elevator that was designated for use on Shabbat, saving observant Jews from having to press the elevator buttons. There was a small synagogue in the hotel basement.
In the front of the hotel, just below their welcome sign, there was a small pipal tree growing, the holy tree of enlightenment for Buddhists. I think they are quite common here.
When I rented a car on the first day before the tour started so I could see Haifa, I saw a man pulled over to the side of the busy freeway praying on his mat in the dust. In the most mundane of places he was making that dust holy with his prayer.
As I drove on the busy Israeli freeway, I passed a Caesarea freeway exit and the Roman aqueduct that fed water to the city from Mount Carmel built by Herod to honor the Roman Emperor in 22 BCE. It felt surreal to see Biblical place names on street signage. But of course, how else would it be? These places did not freeze in time.
In Nazareth, we visited holy basilicas and shrines and then ate shawarma in an equally ancient grotto turned pilgrim cantina. I joked that perhaps it was the place Jesus himself had his first shawarma!
Eating fish at our hotel on the Lake of Galilee, where Jesus and his disciples fished. Walking the shoreline and seeing privatized beaches with kayak and sea doo rentals.
All the religious sites have been breathtaking, if crowded. But at the margins off all these places and spaces there has been a kind of dialect of the holy also spoken by the mundane. If holy places are so often sacred because of what we believe exists there objectively, holiness can also be a powerful practice of making-sacred-with our places.
I recently joined the board the Brandt Oyster River Hermitage Society. We are getting ready to launch our website, and I was tasked with writing a short bio on Father Charles Brandt, a Hermit-Priest who lived in a small cabin and supported himself as a bookbinder on Vancouver Island. I met Charles in 2016, when I was completing my dissertation at UBC.
Photo by the author, 2016
Charles Brandt was the fifth child of the six and was born on February 19, 1923, in Kansas City, Missouri. He is of Danish-English heritage, the child of Alvin Rudolph Brandt-Yde and Anna Chester Bridges. His father was an auto mechanic at a Buick dealership and later served as a pilot in the Airforce during World War II. After the war, he worked as a Park Superintendent at Swope Park. Charles had two brothers and two sisters.
At the age of three, the family moved to a small farm where he had some of his first encounters of wonder in the natural world. The family raised chickens and had a milking cow. A small spring emptied into a creek on the property and there Charles would fish for perch and crawdads. In primary school, an observant teacher encouraged Charles to paint, and he enjoyed painting apple blossoms with watercolors. His Aunt, Helen F. Bridges, was on the board of the Kansas City Art Gallery and encouraged all the Brandt children to pursue artistic talents. Charles continued studying art at the Kansas City Arts Institute on Saturdays for several years.
As a Boy Scout, he earned the rank of Eagle and was drawn toward craft and book binding. Eldon Newcomb, a scientist who was also the head of the nature staff at Osceola Boy Scout Camp, became a major mentor and influence on Charles. For several summers, he served as a counselor at the Osceola Boy Scout Camp, where he taught bird watching and natural history. As a Scout he was elected to the Mic-O-Say tribe, which is an honor society that exists within the Boy Scouts of America. (In recent years the organization has been criticized by Indigenous people over concern that it engages in cultural appropriation. But in Charles day, it was a different time.) Charles was very early on fascinated by birds. Charles writes,
“During the spring of my 2nd year of high school, having become quite interested in bird study, I had an experience on weekend out along the Blu River. It was beside a small stream with the spring foliage when I began to see a stream of warblers moving along the stream and in the bushes, feeding and calling. The amazing thing was there were about nine different species in all their mating plumages, migrating through their nesting grounds. It was an overwhelming experience of beauty and wonder and wild. I wanted to preserve it forever” (Brandt 2006, 2).
This fascination with birds, birding and wildlife was a key dimension of Charles’ contemplative approach to ecology, and ecological approach to contemplation.
Father Brandt attended high school in Raytown, Missouri. Active in debate, band, swimming, oratory, sports, drama. He also worked as a life saver and lifesaving instructor. When Charles was thirteen, he read Henry David Thoreau’s famous book Walden Pond, and immediately felt the desire to “go to the woods”, a desire that eventually would call him to the hermit vocation. On Thoreau Charles said,
“I got interested then in Henry David Thoreau. He went to the woods to find out what life was all about, and that was really quite exciting, and a real challenge for me; and I wanted to do something like that. That was probably my first inroad into the hermit life” (Grayston and Chang 2016, 42).
Land, place, ecology and silence were for Charles a single whole from a very young age.
But at university, he decided to study conservation at the University of Missouri where he majored in wildlife conservation. Reflecting on this later, Charles realized that he had roomed with Starker Leopold who was studying wild turkeys in the Ozarks. Starker was the son of the famed conservationist Aldo Leopold (1987-1948).
In 1943 Charles entered Active Service with the US Army Air Corps. It was around this time, while Charles was studying in Colorado for the army, that Charles began attending a Baptist Church. And until 1946, when Charles was discharged, he travelled and studied for his service positions with the US Army, including bombardier training in Victoriaville, California. Charles was appointed a Flight Officer but never saw active combat before the war ended. When he entered military service, he didn’t really reflect on whether or not it was the right thing to do, since it seemed to be a patriotic duty. But by the end of his service, he felt that he had become something of a pacifist and winced at the thought of being an actual bombardier.
In 1947, Charles headed to Cornell University to study ornithology. Charles studied birdsong recording under Dr. Peter Kellogg and studied nesting birds at the Edwin S. George Reserve in Michigan. He was also elected to Phi Kappa Phi, a student scientific society for his high academic achievement. Charles would go on to graduate first in his class with a Bachelor of Science in biology. Charles’ first scientific article was published in the Wilson Bulletin, based in Anne Arbor, Michigan. The essay was entitled “The Parasitism of the Acadian Flycatcher.”
Taking serious stock of his spiritual life, Charles began attending Saint John’s Episcopal Church in Ithaca, New York. Soon, Charles met the Reverent Francis Voelcker, the priest in residence there, who saw in Charles a great contemplative potential. He began mentoring Charles and encouraged him to explore a vocation to the Anglican priesthood. Charles spent that summer living with an Anglican religious order, the Brothers of Saint Barnabas, who were devoted to the care of men and boys with developmental disabilities and incurable illnesses.
Though as a Hermit-Priest Charles never married, and he doesn’t mention many romantic partners, it seems that during this time he was quite fond of a woman he refers to as C.C. They attended services together at Saint John’s and Charles simply writes, “we spent considerable time together” (Brandt 2006, 4).
After graduating from Cornell in 1948, Charles decided to pursue Holy Orders. He returned to Colorado where he lived during his military training and was accepted as candidate for Anglican priesthood by Bishop Bowen of the Colorado Diocese. He entered Nashotah House Seminary in Wisconsin, living there for three years where Charles enjoyed the routine of the community which included Mass and the daily office.
However, during seminary Charles continued to wrestle with finding a meaningful spirituality and began to read more widely from books by writers such as Jeremy Taylor and Father Benson of the Cowley Fathers of England, another Anglican religious order. He seemed to be seeking a deeper spirituality of silence and contemplation. Then, Charles stumbled upon Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s autobiography The Seven Story Mountain and found a deep resonance with Merton’s rich contemplative spirituality. Of Merton’s writing he said simply, “it blew me away.” So much so that he and several seminarians had arranged to spend easter at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, where Thomas Merton lived, to experience Trappist life firsthand and meet Merton in person, but the trip was cancelled at the last minute, and they didn’t end up going. On reading Thomas Merton for the first time, Charles reflects,
“So when I read The Seven Story Mountain, that was what I was looking for; that really answered my question. I wanted to know if it was possible to really experience God in this lifetime, can you talk to him, as a person? That was really a revelation, The Seven Story Mountain, and it changed my whole thinking. From then on, I was thinking in terms of monastic the life” (Grayston and Chang 2016, 48).
That year, however, Charles ended up visiting another Trappist monastery. He made arrangements to meet with Father Bede O’Leary the Abbot and theologian of Our Lady of Guadeloupe Trappist Abbey which at the time was located in New Mexico (in 1954 the community relocated to Carlton, Oregon). Charles wanted to talk with O’Leary about contemplative, or mental prayer and Father Bede became a great voice of council for Charles.
In 1950 Charles spent the summer at the Community of Augustine and Anglican Contemplative House in Orange City, Florida and on December 7th Charles was ordained a Deacon at Saint Andrew’s Church in Denver, Colorado by Bishop Bowen.
In 1951, accompanied by Reverend Voelcker, Charles went to England to explore the varieties of the Church of England’s contemplative life. They visited Chevetogne, Belgium where he met with Dom Lambert Beauduin (OSB) who was interested in the Anglican re-unification with Rome. This meeting brought Charles to question the validity of Anglican Holy Orders, because he learned that they had been declared invalid by the Vatican.
From here, Charles began to try his hand at the monastic life in earnest and in 1951 he became a Postulant at Community of the Resurrection, an Anglican monastery in Mirfield, Yorkshire. Despite his doubts, in 1952 he was ordained an Anglican Priest by Bishop of Wakefield, UK.
In 1953 Charles left the Community of the Resurrection and spent some time in continental Europe making various stops in France and Rome. He spent ten days in Assisi, a few weeks in Rome, and met with a Benedictine monks named Father Dennis Stratham OSB. Father Stratham was from Saint Gregory’s monastery in Shawnee, Oklahoma. This meeting would prove providential, as Charles was received into the Roman Catholic Church there in 1956.
In the meantime, Charles continued his quest for a place to express his contemplative vocation within the existing religious communities of the Anglican/Episcopal traditions. When he returned from Europe in the latter half of 1953, he travelled to a property in Gaylordville, New York where Father Paul Weed had a property that he wanted to transform into a contemplative community. Father Charles built a small hermitage on the property out of old railroad ties and started working as a Chaplain at Kent School in Connecticut where he also helped with the garden.
Soon however, Charles discerned that this was not his place and he decided to move to Three Rivers Michigan, a small Anglican Benedictine community in 1954 and entered as a postulant. While he was there, he learned to chant the divine office in Latin, and continued his voracious reading of the mystics and contemplatives. Charles was deeply moved by the writings of Camaldoli monk Father Bede Griffiths whose autobiography The Golden String deeply impacted Charles. Griffiths was a monk in England for many years, but eventually found himself in India dialoguing with Hindu Sanyasis and fusing East and West. Father Charles also began reading John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Newman had spearheaded the Anglo-Catholic revival in the Church of England in the late 19th century, but eventually converted to Catholicism and was made a Cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879. This period sealed Father Charles movement to the Roman Catholic Church, so he left for Louisiana to meet with the only catholic priest he knew, Father Bede O’Leary who was on leave and serving a parish there. O’Leary sent Charles to St Benedict’s Monastery, and he met with the Prior there. Despite meeting daily for a month, Charles was not quite ready to make the move from Anglican to Roman Catholic. So, Charles decided to travel to Mexico City on pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our lady of Guadeloupe, accompanied by Father Bede.
Upon returning, he decided to head to Saint Gregory’s Abbey in Shawnee, Oklahoma where he continued his discernment, studied Latin, and met with a resident theology professor regularly. It was during this time that Father Charles fell in love with book binding, a skill that would become his own contemplative bread and butter throughout his years as a hermit in British Columbia.
On January 26, 1956, Charles Brandt was received into the Roman Catholic Church and in April he was confirmed in the Cathedral at Oklahoma City. Charles continued his stay at Saint Gregory’s, taking theology classes and deepening his bookbinding skills. That Easter Charles decided to travel to Gethsemani Trappist Abbey where he met with Thomas Merton who was the novice master at the time. Merton was warm and received Charles with kindness.
On his first meeting with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, Brandt recounts, “So at Easter I went to Gethsemani. I knew Merton was the novice master. I didn’t realize I was going to meet him. I was in the guest house for about a week. So [knocking] I hear this knock on the door, and in enters Thomas Merton. You know, he sat down there, just the most ordinary person in the world. Immediately, I liked him, really liked him as a person, and we talked. My intent was to enter the novitiate there, but he said, “Don’t come here. We could make a good monk of you, but not a good contemplative”” (Grayston and Chang 2016, 52).
After several chats with Merton and later his Bishop, Charles decided to forgo a trip to Rome to pursue a quicker pathway to priesthood and decided to first solidify his vocation as a monk. Charles decided to enter New Melleray Abbey, Dubuque, Iowa, another Trappist Abbey. This decision seemed fruitful and in 1958 Charles made Simple Profession (temporary vows) and was put in charge of a small book bindery. Charles continued his studies in philosophy and theology.
In 1964, during the upheavals and experimentation of Vatican II, Charles became uncertain about making final profession (vows). All over the world, monastic orders were studying their roots, which went back to the hermits and recluses of Syria, Judea and Egypt. Charles remembered that Thomas Merton told him about the Camaldolese Order which had a monastery in Ohio. So, Charles and his Abbot drove to visit them. However, the Camaldolese stood for the duration of the divine office. Having a back problem, Charles knew within ten minutes that he wouldn’t make it.
Back to the drawing board, Charles wrote a letter to Thomas Merton. Merton’s reply was published in a collection of letters, and Merton encouraged Charles to continue his search for a more contemplative place to live out his vocation. Charles soon found two eremitic experiments: A Benedictine hermit named Peter Minard in North Carolina and Dom Winandy, greatly admired by Merton, who was leading a small group of hermits on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
After visiting Peter Minard, Charles was impressed. Minard lived a simple life on old plantation. But soon it became clear that Father Minard was mostly looking for someone to run the farm. So, the Abbot of New Melleray wrote to Dom Winandy, who gave Charles permission to come for a visit.
In March of 1965 Charles arrived at Winandy’s group, The Hermits of Saint John the Baptist, located on the Tsolum River in Merville, BC one hundred acres of forested land. Charles moved into a small trailer and then began to build a hermitage there with some local help which was completed in September. To earn a living Charles decided he would try his hand at being a professional book binder, and the Trappists of Carlton, Oregon, Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey (who Charles had previously visited in New Mexico), donated some book binding equipment. With this Charles began to search for clients in the local area.
Despite Dom Winandy’s misgivings about hermits becoming priests, Winandy gave Charles permission to meet with Bishop Remi De Roo, who eventually accepted him as candidate for priesthood. In August he received minor orders and was incardinated in the Diocese of Victoria which essentially ended his temporary vows at New Melleray. On November 21, 1966, Charles was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest by Bishop De Roo at the Canadian Martyrs Church. According to Charles, he was the first full time hermit ordained in Catholic Church in several hundred years.
While living on the Tsolum River, Charles began working as a fisheries technician, and assisted in some parish work on Cumberland on Sundays. Eventually the hermitage site became a bit too crowded, and Winandy and several hermits including Charles dispersed to other properties. In the Spring of 1970, Charles moved his hermitage structure to its current location on the Oyster River.
In the mid-1970s Charles travelled extensively to improve his bookbinding skills. He spent several months in San Francisco learning book restoration and then travelled to the New England Document Centre in Andover, Massachusetts to learn more about flatwork conservation of maps, parchments and prints. Charles was even appointed Chief of the Bindery, which kept him very busy teaching workshops and conducting surveys. In 1975-76, Charles travelled extensively in Europe where he both worked and studied additional conservation techniques.
Returning to Canada, from 1976-1981 Charles was employed by various Canadian book conversation programs. First, he worked for the Canadian Conservation Institute in Moncton, NB as Professional Book and Paper Conservator. Charles said a daily noon Mass in an English-speaking Church in Moncton. When this office closed, he moved to a centre based in Ottawa where he restored bound volumes, maps and art works on paper. Charles was also hired by the Manitoba government to design and oversee the building of a state-of-the-art restoration laboratory in Winnipeg from 1981-1984. The purpose was to survey and restore the Hudson’s Bay archives. Charles also travelled throughout Canada doing conservation work in Yukon, Manitoba, and Alberta during this time. On his love for bookbinding and conservation Charles wrote:
“Probably the best contemplative part of bookbinding is sewing the book. It’s a very relaxing, I think a very meditative, contemplative aspect of binding. Literature is disappearing at a great rate from our libraries all over the world, and it’s our written record of humanity. So if you’re preserving that, as I am, you’re preserving humanity, the culture, and I think that’s really quite worthwhile. It’s like preserving the earth. It’s not just a job, it’s something that’s conducive to the prolongation of civilization” (Grayston and Chang 2016, 55).
Charles was a craftsman and appreciated work well done. The embodied nature of the work, the quiet and the sense of purpose facilitated a contemplative atmosphere that was conducive of prayer.
In 1984, Charles finally returned to his beloved hermitage where he began making additions to the structure and installing a conservation lab and library. Charles began teaching conservation and restoration techniques at University of Victoria, UBC, Simon Fraser, University of Alberta, Washington State University and in many communities across Vancouver Island.
Even before he left for his travels related to book binding and document conservation, Charles was a passionate lover of place. He would write letters to local officials protesting proposed developments on the Oyster and Tsolum Rivers. When he returned to full time residency at the hermitage in 1984, he began lobbying campaign which mushroomed into a large number of environmental projects throughout the Campbell River and Comox Valley. Throughout the years, Charles was involved in many environmental groups and causes: The Steelhead Society of BC, Haig Brown Kingfisher Creek Society, the Campbell River Environmental Council, the Tsolum River Enhancement Committee, the Oyster River enhancement Society, the Oyster River Watershed Management Committee and the Tsolum River Restoration Committee. In the 1990s the local media began to take notice, and he even received several environmental awards for his work on river restoration and conservation.
It was at this same time that he began holding meditation retreats with the local community, despite some Catholic leaders warning against “Eastern” forms of prayer and meditation. His work of ecology and contemplation were quite a natural fit: Action and Contemplation were connected. In 1990, the meditation group became a regular event, which continued to the end of Charles’ life.
In 2001, Charles was the keynote Speaker at the Western Conference on Christian Meditation in Edmonton, Alberta which solidified his leadership in the global contemplative movement. On prayer, Charles reflected, “I think that anybody who prays benefits the whole body of Christ. Prayer touches everybody. The person next to me is affected by whatever I do. If I pray, that helps them, and it also helps the natural world” (Grayston and Chang 2016, 39).
Charles life was a series of questions lived out in many different places and among many different communities. But his love for craft, ecology, and prayer shine through all of this. Charles is an exemplar of contemplative ecology lived well. Toward the end of his life, Charles reflected on the contemplative life and on the hermitage property that the Hermitage Society lovingly maintains. He said,
“In a way, I’m looking towards eternity now. I’ll be 93 on February 19th, [2016], so I’m not going anywhere. I love this spot. I’m permanent. I feel steady, in a sense, with life, and with my calling. And this is my place. I walk out and I know the trees, and I know the birds and the animals. They’re my friends. As I said, the human community and the rest of the natural world has to go into the future as a single sacred community. I feel that I’m part of this community where the natural world and people come and go; and if we don’t, as Thomas Berry says, we’ll perish” (Grayston and Chang 2016, 57).
Father Charles Brandt died at the age of 97 on October 25, 2020, after a short stay at a local hospital in the Comox Valley. Upon his death, close friend and co-founder of the Brandt Oyster River Hermitage Society Bruce Witzel reflected, “His stature as a spiritual teacher as well as his whole legendary reputation as someone who integrated spirituality with ecology will live on after him in the lives and efforts of the many people he directly inspired” (Closter 2020).
Charles’ Publications
Charles Brandt. Meditations from the Wilderness: A Collection of Profound Writing on Nature as the Source of Inspiration (Harper Collins, 1997). 150 quotations about ecology, place and contemplation.
Self and Environment: On Retreat with Charles Brandt. (Bloomsbury Academic, 2000). An outline of Charles thinking on contemplative and ecology.
Bibliographical Sources
Charles Brandt, “Autobiographical Timeline” Email from Charles Brandt to Judy Hager (Dec. 14, 2006).
Rev. Don Grayston (1939-2017) and David Chang “A Single Sacred Community:
Keynote address presented to Facing Ecological Grief at Simon Fraser University, April 29, 2023
I don’t know how you all build community, but planning conferences like this is one of my favorite ways! Planning this conference has been a joy. I am very grateful to Naomi Krogman, Paul Kingsbury, Laurie Anderson, Laurie Wood, Candace Ratelle-Le Roy and Chelsie de Souza for believing in this gathering. I am also grateful to all of you, who trust us enough with your day to come and sit and talk.
But I am not just grateful to you. I need you. We are going to need each other to weather the coming age. I am not sure if what we are witnessing is a death rattle or a birth pang. Perhaps, both. What I am going to do is outline some perspectives on ecological anxiety and grief. Not as a psychologist but more as a cultural and spiritual activist.
I want to gesture towards an engagement with grief that holds all the wonderful and terrifying tensions that are building in our time. I don’t come to grief as a problem to be solved. A symptom to be alleviated. A neurosis to be alchemized into action by positive thinking.
Rather, I want to suggest that grief is more like an art form. Grief is a skill. I would even say that grief is a companion or a friend.In the arriving age, we need movements and justice and policy and technology. We also need practitioners of what I call Griefcraft: Midwives and storytellers and artists and chaplains. So let’s talk about our time of trouble with no easy answers.
Because I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the world as we know it is ending. There has been a steady litany of troubling news from policy experts and scientists. There has been a litany of pleading for change from the world’s religious leaders, environmentalists and Indigenous communities. Listen to a few of these actual headlines from my newsfeed in recent weeks:
“Temperatures in 2023 could be record breaking with rapidly developing El Niño.”
“We are not the first civilization to collapse, but we will probably be the last.”
“Living sustainably isn’t just a trend, it’s a necessity.”
“As 1.5 degrees looms, scientists see growing risk of runaway warming, urgent need to slash emissions.”
“Climate diplomacy is failing — but we need it to survive.”
“Catastrophic warming will claim lives without action.”
“Ocean currents could collapse this century.”
“Oceans littered with 171 trillion pieces of plastic.”
“Record deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon a challenge for incoming president.”
“Extinction crisis puts one million species on the brink.”
“Scientists deliver ‘final warning’ on climate crisis: act now or it’s too late.”
Of course, there is lots of good news peppered in there too! Deforestation rates have slowed, nations are committing to more protected areas, or even that the garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean is enabling novel marine ecologies! But these days the scales seem to be tipped toward the catastrophic. We know there are still several pathways forward. But as the weeks and months pass, fewer and fewer of these pathways exclude a great reckoning with massive ecological, cultural and spiritual losses. This litany of troubling headlines can trigger in me a deep well of anxiety and anticipated grief. But what’s worse is that most of the time the sheer quantity of bad news results in numbness to feeling anything at all. (It also helps that the next frame is usually a tree or a cat or someone falling or a brand-new baby!)
Generation Dread
So, while there is no longer any uncertainty about the reality of anthropogenic climate change, it is not certain what kind of world our children will inherit. While passing 1.5, 2 or even 3 degrees warming will not be the end of the world full stop; this does not resolve a sense of dread about how bad things are and will continue to get. How much loss will the coming generations have to metabolize? How many species, whose evolutionary lineages span millions of years, will be put to an end? As psychologist and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “at the end of uncertainty comes the uncertainty of the end.”
For me, this uncertainty at the end of the Holocene climate invokes a buzzing anxiety. Ecological Anxiety is typically defined as a state of worry about the future that invokes feelings of sadness, despair, anger, helplessness or hopelessness. Mental health and therapy circles have been talking about climate and ecological anxiety as an impact or symptom of the unfolding crises. This clinical approach tends to revolve around adapting one-on-one therapy models to equip individuals with more tools for coping with their climate-induced emotions. But anxiety is a completely normal response to an unfolding crisis.
Anxiety is as much a signal being communicated from the heart of the world as it is a complex of subjective emotional responses. So rather than just coping with symptoms, deep attention to all of our feelings is an important part of engaging with anxiety related to the ecological crises. In her book Generation Dread, Britt Wray writes, “Despair and fear are not inherently bad. Hope and optimism are not inherently good…. We must move from an either/or to a both/and model. There is meaning in every emotion.”
There is a powerful practice here which is borrowed from Buddhist mindfulness. Anxiety is not best dealt with by insisting that I think positively or try to just focus on feeling gratitude. As Alain de Botton writes through his School of Life organization: “Peace of mind doesn’t come from hoping for the best; it comes from close attention to the very worst…”
A common misconception in discussions of climate anxiety and grief is that this is primarily a concern of the privileged, global north. However, psychologist Susan D. Clayton and co-authors which included Britt Wray have shown, young people in the global south self-reported negative emotions related to climate anxiety at a higher rate than those in the global north. Their essay published in the peer reviewed journal Sustainability analyzed the data from a survey of 10,000 young people between the ages of 16-25 from ten different countries. For young people all over the world, climate anxiety is impacting their ability to function on a daily basis. In Western countries however, self-reported impacts averaged around 45% whereas in the countries from the global south it was closer to 75%.
These findings reveal the obvious: Those closest to the front lines of these unfolding crises are most impacted by them. This is also the case for the far north. As the research of Ashlee Cunsolo, Dean of Arctic and Subarctic Studies at the Memorial University of Newfoundland shows, Northern and Inuit peoples are on the front lines of ecological anxiety and grief in an ecology that is seeing rates of warming four times higher than the global average. One of Cunsolo’s research partners, an Inuit Elder remarked: “Inuit are people of the sea ice. If there’s no more sea ice, how can we be people of the sea ice?”
Two Temptations
In a civilization that has perfected the art of either or, the media often presents us with two responses to the unfolding crises. The first is Climate Doomism which believes it is too late for any meaningful action. The second is a Hyper-Optimism that includes the belief that the more we do the better chance we have of fixing all the world’s troubles.
American writer Roy Scranton, in his book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene writes, “The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront our situation and realize that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the difficult task of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.”
Scranton frames himself as a climate realist, rather than an alarmist or reactionary. In my view he is more motivated by his anti-capitalist politics than a healthy realism about the future of the earth’s climate. Swedish academic and activist Andreas Malm, himself a Marxist scholar, calls Scranton’s book a reification of despair. This means that too often the Doomist view risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy that frees its adherents from any responsibility “in the meantime.”
But there is something else going on here too. Having frequented environmentalist circles and taught in universities in different parts of North America, I worry that a contributing factor to the Doomist mentality is the belief that our species deserves to go extinct. It is imagined that perhaps the earth community would be better off without us.
This intuition is actually a kind of self-hatred that appears among some settlers and progressives. Some days, I empathize. But I worry that we will not bother building the foundation for a world that we don’t believe our children are worthy to inherit.
Rather, with scholar Lyla June Johnston, who has Navajo, Cheyenne and European ancestry, I believe that “Human beings are meant to be a gift to the land.” Human extinction would be as tragic as passenger pigeon extinction or monk seal extinction or tiger extinction or orca whale extinction. Human beings emerged from a mesh of ecological brilliance; and there is a place for us in the web of life so long as we can stop techno-industrial civilization from unraveling it completely.
Hyper-Optimism
On the other side of this false choice is what I am calling Hyper-Optimism; which feeds a well-intentioned fix-it mentality. All of us struggle with finding meaningful ways to take action. But this urge is so powerful that we sometimes demand ten ways to take action, before listening to what’s really going on. Fed on a sugary diet of can-do’s, many activists throw their lives into the work and end up burning out in a few years. In his excellent book Earth Grief, Stephen Harrod Buhner reflects, “Activism is an institution that compulsively seeks to heal the world’s pain rather than feel it.”
Of course, he (and I) are not against action, or activism. We worry that a compulsive activism, fueled by urgency but also by guilt, can end up bypassing the necessary work of processing our feelings of fear, anxiety and grief. Some of this hyper-optimism is also deeply rooted in the modernist humanism which created these crises in the first place. The so-called techno-optimists, sometimes referred to as Eco-Modernists or Pragmatists, promise us that we are one technological breakthrough away from solving the climate crisis. Geoengineering, carbon credits, carbon capture and de-extinction will allow us to finally usher in the ecological utopia we have been dreaming of. I am very often tempted by their promises myself. Boosters of this approach are not so shy about suggesting that soon we will be managing every aspect of the planet’s biosphere.
There is, I think, a middle way between Doomism and its self-hatred and Hyper-optimism and its over-activism. Ecological Grief is part of this middle way: Griefcraft engages with complexities and uncertainties. As Donna Haraway writes, it’s part of the work of Staying with the Trouble. As an analogy, perhaps rather than franticly thrashing around in the dark to find the light switch, we might sit still for a moment and let our eyes adjust.
Topographies of Grief
In his book about the death phobia that pervades European descended North Americans, Stephen Jenkinson offers a novel description of grief: “Grief is a way of loving what has slipped from view. Love is a way of grieving that which has not yet done so.” This definition of grief shows how deeply connected it is to love, to feeling connected. We cannot grieve for that which we do not love.
Our experience of grief can vary from person to person and culture to culture. The famed psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed a typology for the stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Depression, Bargaining, and finally Acceptance. This has been a helpful tool for individuals coping with a terminal diagnosis or the death of a loved one. But as the illustration below shows, there may be a common definition of grief, but there is no common experience of it.
We began today with a land acknowledgement. And every land acknowledgement brushes up against a deep well of historical trauma and grief. To speak of ecological grief as an emerging phenomenon is absurd without first acknowledging that it is a present reality for so many. As Indigenous scholar Kyle Whyte writes, “In the Anthropocene, then, some indigenous peoples already inhabit what our ancestors would have likely characterized as a dystopian future.” As a philosopher, Whyte has theorized an Indigenous ethic of sustainability and spiritually appropriate science. He also amplifies the many examples of Indigenous communities that are restoring ecological and cultural connections to place and species despite the heavy losses wrought by colonial violence and erasure.
To some extent, all of our bodies carry the grief of our ancestors. But the topography of ancestral grief is anything but flat. The collision of colonial, racist, gender-based and species-ist violence with ecologies and Indigenous bodies, black bodies, brown bodies and women’s bodies shape the contours of the topographies of grief like tectonic plates. Some are subducted under the enormous weight of oppression, while others are lifted to greater heights of privilege and social mobility.
Humans are not alone in feeling grief over lost loved ones. There are cultures of grief woven through the earth community. Fellow primates express grief and may even have a form of ritual. For example, chimpanzees have been observed ritually cleaning the fur of a dead loved one. Elephants are well known to reverence the dead and even to handle their bones. And closer to home, J35 was a Salish Sea resident mother Orca who carried her dead newborn with her for over 17 days.
Psychologist and writer Andrew Solomon writes, “To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who despair at what we lose.” Most of us have felt that icy absence of a partner, a loved one or a pet from our homes. We have walked around familiar places after a divorce or tough break up and felt both cherished and painful memories.
There is an ecology to our grief that is at once a response to loss within the web of our relationships, and the slow composting of loss into new life that finds a way to keep going. Grief after the death of a loved one is learning to inhabit a new interpersonal landscape, a rearranged social ecology. Paraphrasing writer and mythologist Sophie Strand, “Each loss opens a wound and a song in the Animate Everything.”
Zooming out a little, loss is also an integral part of the earth’s ecosystems. But on the ecological level, the long-term effects of loss are more difficult to judge. By this I mean that ecosystems are not nouns they are verbs, they are not things but events. Ecologies are adept at reorienting around loss and forming new processes and pathways. Afterall, with hindsight, I am incredibly grateful for the many losses that melted the glaciers that once covered this very spot and made way for lush rainforests to grow.
Death and loss are not separate from change and life and birth. The good earth subsumes interconnection and rupture, balance and imbalance. If you go into a forest and only see what is alive, you are only seeing half the picture. So, to my fellow environmentalists, if all we see when we look at changing ecosystems is loss, then we are not seeing the possibilities that change might afford for fostering novel relationships that are regenerative.
But do not get me wrong! I am not saying that actually, loss is just change, let’s accept it. There is a massive work of discernment here! It is true that a fear of change makes me allergic to loss. So, engaging with ecological grief helps me become better acquainted with loss and death. But ecological grief, as contemplative as it is, is not quietism! It is not a resignation to whatever may come. If grief is a way of loving, then I am not afraid to admit: We still have a lot to lose! This is going to mean that Griefcraft is not just the skill of accommodating loss and tragedy. It is not passive or reactive.
As the twin sister of love, grief teaches us to accept loss when it comes, yes it does. But a love-bound grief is also willing to resist the losses that should not yet be let go of! In Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road we read a grueling and gritty thought experiment with a stripped-down sense of human purpose. In the novel, a man and his son stumble through a post-catastrophe landscape scrounging for food and avoiding roving bands of cannibals. The man’s only purpose is to see his son survive. His son is deeply committed to an objective sense of the Good. He carries with him the flame of hope that some day a better world might exist. At the end of the novel, McCarthy warns us against inheriting a world that is starved of life and beauty. He writes,
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
We have a lot to lose, and I do not want to make meaning with the scraps of a once beautiful world! I want to live in a world that teams with life and love and beauty. And yes, even in that world that we all know is possible, grief will not disappear. On some deep level, I know that to love is to risk great suffering.
Building on this idea that love grows out of the rich compost of grief, University of Washington scholar Jennifer Atkinson writes that, “Grief is strength in these times. Burying our emotions might shield us for a while, but grief keeps us in contact with truth, and beneath everything, it opens our eyes to the profound love we feel for the fabric of life that’s under threat. Grief is a direct expression of connection—a pain we could never feel if it weren’t for the depth of our love. And more than cheerfulness or stoicism or more information, it is love that will move us to fight. No scientific report or technological innovation will ever match that kind of power.”
So being willing to risk the deep wounds of grief might give us a fighting chance. And that, my friends, brings us to Hope.
Litanies of Hope
Writer Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark is a powerful meditation on the complexities of history and the power of collective action over the long term. Solnit argues that Hope is active, but it does not die when things don’t turn out the way we expect. Hope is a stance of openness to the possibilities that uncertainty may bring. It is a posture of prayer. Hope is what got me out of bed this morning. Hope is what led Britt Wray, the author of Generation Dread, to the decision to have a baby despite her deep fears for the future. Hope is what is blooming all over Vancouver right now. Hope is what brough the goldfinches and chickadees and sparrows to my bird feeder this morning.
For these reasons, I appreciate Stephen Harrod Buhner’s reflections. He writes, “Hope is a quiet, enduring, persistent thing. It is not filled with the excited, uplifting, future-oriented energy of optimism. It possesses instead a slow-moving groundedness, an enduringness, a solidity, a nowness. It isn’t going anywhere, it just is. It’s a form of faith, a faith that comes from life itself.”
Hope is our animal soul’s very breath! There are dozens of projects, workshops, circles, art exhibitions and gardens that are engaging with the skills that accompany what I am calling grief-craft. Projects that are exploring the personal and collective depths of ecological grief. Francis Weller’s book The Wild Edge of Sorrow outlines many ways of engaging with grief through ritual. And groups in Iceland and Switzerland have already held public funerals for glaciers that are melting out of existence. A woman named Gabrielle Gelderman who lives in Edmonton, Alberta has begun using the title of Climate Grief Chaplain. In Victoria, a small collective of artists has started a magazine called Solastalgia which aims to be a resource for art, movement building and grief-craft. (I’ll explain this word in a moment.) There are earth hospices, good grief networks, grief circles and climate cafés being explored all over the world, online and off.
Just to highlight a few more of my favorite projects: Participatory artists Heidi Quante and Alicia Escott founded the “Bureau of Linguistic Reality”. This project solicits new words that express worries and the textures of our unfolding reality. They took inspiration from philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s neologism Solastalgia which means Comfort-Pain, was imagined to get at a pervasive uneasiness about the losses our home places are incurring. This word has spoken to thousands of people from Appalachians fighting against mountain top removal, to the Inuit peoples witnessing the rapid warming unfolding before their eyes. This is a powerful reminder that cultivating a love for our home places is not just for good days. Placefulness, as I call it, is also about loving our places after they have been clear cut, or on the days that wildfire smoke is turning the sun orange and we cannot breathe.
Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects began as a pioneering method for processing movement and ecological grief. Her cyclical, almost liturgical practices, encourage us to return again and again to gratitude. Then, turning our attention to honoring our pain allows us to see the world with new eyes. And even after one hundred burn outs, doing so enables us to go forth, back into the fray. To say with Samuel Becket, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” In a way, I structured this talk around this liturgy of hope: Gratitude, pain, new ways of seeing and the ways we might go forth from this conference.
Trebbe Johnson, a former wilderness guide, has started an organization called Radical Joy for Hard Times. Through annual Earth Exchanges, she invites us to love wounded and neglected places with simple acts of beauty. In a similar act of beauty, on June 16, 2017, during a Save the Arctic Campaign Ludovico Einaudi’s played “Elegy for the Arctic” before a calving glacier. This was of course primarily a public awareness campaign, but it reminded me of the famous epigram from German playwright Bertolt Brecht who wrote from exile, “In the dark times will there be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times.”
Ecological Grief is deeply personal, but we also need ways to express collective grief. I am open to ideas. Even bad ones! Perhaps we could create rituals that honor the losses we are too numb to feel. Perhaps we could sing our grief together and walk our grief together and dance our grief together. Or, perhaps we could experiment with nurturing trees and plants that are adapted to warmer climates. The many projects popping up all over the world help me to see that grief is not the opposite of hope, it is its pollinator.
Just as death is a mirror that we hold up to life to see how precious it is; grief is a mirror that is held up to love to feel how risky it can be. Public intellectual Cornel West once said that “justice is what love looks like in public;” well, my friends, if that is so, then perhaps what love feels like in public, at least sometimes, is grief. And perhaps that is what storyteller Brother Blue meant when he said, “My heart is broken. I never want it to mend.”
Over the next few weeks, I will post a series of sketches of some ideas I have kicking around in my head. With luck, they might become longer essays or full-length books! Apologies in advance for any grammatical errors or sloppy syntax!
Prelude
Toward the end of writing the manuscript for my book about the monastic sense of place, a simple turn of phrase occurred me: Placefulness. This seemed to sum up in a simple word how monks in the Benedictine/Cistercian monastic tradition related to the landscapes of their respective monastic communities. The were present not just to abstract theological notions, or the love of God, but to the intricacies of their surrounding environments, which were often extensive rural properties.
I googled the phrase. A workshop called Into the Mountain mentioned it, seeking an embodied encounter with the land. A travel writer named Vanessa Walker named her website after the word, and it appears to be a new site dedicated to travel writing. There were a few other hits, but nothing that explored the word as an academic concept or spiritual practice.
The word felt useful. So, in December 2022, when I was invited by the Multifaith Network for Climate Justice in Bellingham to give a talk on contemplative ecology, I thought I would think through the idea out loud. The talk was well attended, and I gave a follow up in Vancouver at Simon Fraser University’s Institute for the Humanities. This Sketch is an outline of that talk.
We seem to me living in the -fulness of times. You are probably familiar with the term Mindfulness: Meditation practice rooted in Buddhism; moment by moment awareness of sensations, thoughts and feelings without judgement. But there is also an emerging alternative called Bodyfulness, articulating the somatic therapist Christine Caldwell’s paradigm for a more embodied contemplative practice. Geologist Marcia Bjornerud has recently written a book called Timefulness which argues that as temporal creatures we are embedded in earth’s deep time cycles. Placefulness then would be something along the lines of the contemplative practice of attending to what is and what arises in our places, especially during troubled times. So, like any spirituality worth its salt, that means integrating the good, the bad and the ugly in the places we live, especially as climate change takes a deeper hold on the world.
To Be in Place
The Greek philosopher Archytas (4th century BCE) is reputed to have said that “To be is to be in place.”[1] This positioned place as a central ontological notion in Greek thinking that was all but obliterated with the advent of geometric space during the Enlightenment and the seeming social construction of everything with the semiotic turn of the 20th century. Starting in the 1960s sense of place began to reclaim space (so to speak) in the theoretical circles of geography and the social sciences. For example, an early re-examination of place is found in Yi Fu Tuan, a geographer, who used the term Topophilia to explore the “feeling-link” between people and places (1974). This can be compared with EO Wilson’s Biophilia: The idea that we are biologically rooted to feelings of affinity with life. Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness (1976) examines the importance of em-place-ment, and the malaise of place-less-ness that set in during the late modern period. One of my favorite explorations of place and perception is by anthropologist Tim Ingold, who developed a “Dwelling Perspective” on environmental perception that drew from the phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, who were overtly opposed to the Cartesian project that had favored space over place. Echoing this ontological turn, anthropologists began to see that as Christian Norberg-Schulz writes, “To dwell means to belong to a given place.”[2]
A few examples:
Aboriginal Song Lines
Bruce Chatwin’s book The Songlines (1987) explores settler and aboriginal understandings of place in Australia. In the publicly available sources, Aboriginal sense of place can be described as relating to the Dreaming. During the Dream Time (Every-when), the Ancestors of all life sang the world into being along tracks, called Songlines. during the Dreamtime. A Dreaming is one’s first Ancestor whether it be Kangaroo, Lizard, Bandicoot, Honey Ant, or Badger. Most Dreamings are animals, a few are plants or trees. An initiated person receives a portion of a Songline that traverses the first track of their Dreaming. The tempo and melody of the Songline express the topography of the place. So, forms of the land are a remnant of the first ancestors first movements, and each place is stacked with stories from that sacred canon.
Moral Place-scapes Among Western Apache
Indigenous placenames in the American West are often made up by afforded features of the landscape: Trees, mountains, valleys. Or they speak of activities that take place there like harvesting, council, or hunting. For example, in Western Apache place names, Tséé Chiizh Dah Sidilé means Coarse-Textured Rocks Lie Above in a Compact Cluster. This is a descriptive name for the features of that place.
In short, places teach Western Apache how to live. The collective history of the Apache has accumulated in these places, and they speak their lessons to the people. For example, at one such place a man attempted to commit incest with his stepdaughter. In Keith Basso’s account of these places in his amazing book Wisdom Sits in Places, his informant Ruth gets visibly uncomfortable as they pass this place in their car, and says, “I know that place, it stalks me every day.” In Ruth’s case the place reminded her of an assault she suffered by someone close to her. Not a romantic notion, but the wrongness of the act is written in the landscape which gave her strength. To put a person in their place so the speak, one need only recite a particular place name and its lessons will shoot like an arrow into the mind of one’s interlocutor.
Well Known Coast Salish Transformer Sites
In my part of the world, Cascadia, where Coast Salish peoples have lived and flourished for thousands of years, Transformer Spirits such as Xáays among the Squamish are responsible for certain prominent features of the landscape. A few publicly available examples: The Lions Peaks / Twin Sisters (Ch’ich’iyúy Elxwíkn) on the North Shore Mountain range were transformed for negotiating a peace treaty. The Stawamus Chief (Siám’ Smánit) in Squamish was a Long House where people and animals met for ceremony. Skalsh Rock in Stanley Park was an ancient chief turned into stone for insisting on purifying himself before his child’s birth. Additionally, obsidian deposits were understood as places where Thunderbird shot lighting out of his eyes. These sites were not only moral lesson, but monuments to their deep ties to place.
To be Rooted
Place is a richly textured part of Indigenous spirituality and lifeways. However, despite a reputation for Platonic otherworldliness, the Christian contemplative tradition has deep roots in a biblical sense of place. Simone Weil once wrote that “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”[3] Rootedness was a central idea for Weil, whose life was cut short by her own radical asceticism.
Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann (2002) wrote that “In the [Bible] there is no timeless space, but there also is no spaceless time. There is rather storied place, that is, a place that has meaning because of the history lodged there.”[4] The Peoples of the Levant were covenanted to the Divine through places: Jacob/Israel wrestled with an angelic person, and the placename Penuel means Face of/facing Adonai. Many passages in the Hebrew Bible either begin or end with a reference to the name of a place, or the origin of that place’s name. Stone altars, groves, and mountain peaks were places of contact with the Divine or the history of the Patriarchal period. This is not a reverent nature spirituality, but a sacred geography where a peoples’ claim to the land was rooted in encounters with the Divine. Layered over this history, is the motif of the tension between the Paradise-Garden and Desert-Wilderness, starting with the very first chapters in Genesis where Adam and Eve are exiled from the garden. The entire arc of the story of Israel is God alluring them back to the garden through covenant, obedience and justice.
The story of Jesus of Nazareth is told through particular places. The arc of his vocation as Messiah recapitulated the places of Hebrew tradition: Bethlehem, Egypt, Jerusalem, Mount Tabor, and finally the Tree of Life (cross) and the Garden (tomb). Jesus consistently leaves the towns and cities to pray in the desert. Early Christians recognized certain places as sacred based on their association with Hebrew prophets, Christian martyrs, monks and ascetics and the life of Jesus. The early hermits and monks fled to the desert as means of radical asceticism, but also because the desert is an ideal place to practice a spirituality of silence.
The Christian relation to place becomes more ambivalent as it weds Greek metaphysics. As Saint Augustine wrote, “Our heart is restless until it rests in You.” Christian writers often portray humanity as a wandering pilgrim on earth, much as Plato saw the Forms as the really real. Belden Lane (2001) and John Inge (2003) show that despite a rich sense of place throughout Hebrew and Christian sacred writings, there is a tension with the mystic placelessness of Christian eschatology: Lane writes, “…one finds a continuing tension between place and placelessness, between the local and the universal. God is here—in this place at Bethlehem, Lourdes, Iona, even Boston and Salt Lake City.”[5]
The Monastic Sense of Place
My book Dwelling in the Wilderness: A Liturgy of Place for the Anthropocene (2023) will explore how contemporary monastic communities are invited into a rich sense of place. Rather than being born from the place as Indigenous peoples are, monks take a vow of stability that encourages them to become ‘lovers of the place;’ to root their whole spiritual life of seeking God in a place and a community of imperfect monks. That life is punctuated by daily and seasonal liturgies that can attune the monks to the cycles and seasons of their places. Manual work balances a life of prayer by engaging the body and can enrich spiritual development by linking tasks to places and teaching vital lessons about the spiritual life. A monk’s time spent in formation, work and leisure means that over many years memories and lessons accumulate in place, giving shape to a personal spiritual ecology that connects place, spirituality and theology. And while some monks may return to certain places over and over, it was often the ‘Charged Moments’, as one monk put it, that ended up being most significant. By Charged Moments the monk was referring to times when a feeling of communion, or a spiritual insight comes out of nowhere. Those unexpected places are then integrated into a monks’ spiritual ecology, or moral landscape: places of rich memory, lesson or insight that then continue to teach monks how to be monks. As one monk said, “You become part of the land. Our vow of stability grounds us, and an image that was really helpful for me was the idea of these trees [points] taking root; you know we’ve got thirty feet of topsoil, and the roots go deep… So that was the image of stability that I had. The longer I stay here, the more I can see myself growing in ways I never thought possible. It’s of course not always easy, staying in one place, but the [longer] you stay the [the higher you can] reach.”
Placefulness as Contemplative Ecology
European descended peoples in North America live with a devalued sense of place. It has been re-placed by mobility, commodity and sentimentality. We see uprootedness, placelessness, dis-placement. The troubling loss of place can been seen through the post-modern attempt to respond to a deep yearning for rootedness in the culture. As philosopher Vince Vycinas wrote, “[W]e are homeless even if we have a place to live”[6]Often, new architecture seeks to emplace us by building homey Town Centres that mimic public or even domestic spaces, flashing a sense of place to our meaning-hungry hearts. Consumerism is as much driven by manufactured needs as it is a sense of belonging or self that has been expertly packaged and sold back to us. The Anthropocene, the so-called geological epoch of human domination, is as much a crisis of meaning as it is a crisis of ecology and extinction.
As parties gather in international conferences to discuss emissions reductions targets, many activists have also been looking for ways to heal a wounded sense of meaning, purpose and sacredness in a world on the brink. In the scholarly world, tracking this movement is often called Religion and Ecology or Religion and Nature. But activists tend to use terms like Spiritual Ecology or as Pope Francis does in his encyclical letter Laudato Si, Integral Ecology. These broad movements represent the spiritual wing of environmentalism that sees ecological issues as moral issues, the earth as sacred. As Sufi teacher Llewelyn Vaughn Lee expresses, “The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong. The world is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing.”[7] Separateness and displacement from earth are roots of our ecological crisis.
This sense of oneness is echoed in the non-religious but deeply spiritual ethnographic memoir of anthropologist Richard Nelson, which takes places on the island of Haida Gwaii in British Columbia. He writes,
“There is nothing in me that is not of earth, no split instant of separateness, no particle that disunites me from the surroundings. I am no less than the earth itself. The rivers run through my veins, the winds blow in and out with my breath, the soil makes my flesh, the sun’s heat smolders inside me. A sickness or injury that befalls the earth befalls me. A fouled molecule that runs through the earth runs through me. Where the earth is cleansed and nourished, its purity infuses me. The life of the earth is my life. My eyes are the earth gazing at itself.”[8]
Without reference to God, religion or even spirituality, Nelson describes a realization that is perhaps obvious to Indigenous peoples, and those who are rooted in place, whose ancestors nourish the land they harvest their food from. For Nelson, it was an ecological Apokalypsis, a great revealing of a truth hidden before his very eyes.
My own writing at Holyscapes has been oriented toward a contemplative spiritual ecology that reflects on the relationship between inscape and landscape. Really what I am interested in is to learn the liturgy of my place. My walks attend to the cycles of the stars, sun and moon; I am even learning the rudiments of the astrological archetypes and Greek stories that accompany the constellations. I want to attune to the cycles and patterns of season and weather, the features of topography and surficial geology. The Latin, common and/or Indigenous names of plants, animals and fungi. The lifeways of food, medicinal plants and fungi. The soundscape and seasonality of local and migratory birds. And a growing awareness of the memories, lessons, experiences, symbols and rituals that embed themselves in the places I visit.
In addition to learning the liturgy of place, I think it is essential that we engage and support ecological restoration projects. While ecological restoration has its critics, one of its potential benefits is not just to local biodiversity or ecosystem function, but to our sense of place. As ecologist Stephanie Mills (1996) writes,
“[The act of restoration] gives [people] a basis for commitment to the ecosystem. It is very real. People often say, we have to change the way everybody thinks. Well, my God, that’s hard work! How do you do that? A very powerful way to do that is by engaging people in experiences. It’s ritual we’re talking about. Restoration is an excellent occasion for the evolution of a new ritual tradition.”[9]
Ecological restorations’ biggest potential might be in its ability to restore people to a deeper relationship with our places.
Caution I: Beware Spiritual Extractivism
One of the core moral lessons of the conservation movement, was that industrial civilization’s hunger for converting the earth into cash or calories has devastated ecosystems and caused a culture-induced mass extinction. Many of those who are interested in shifting the conversation toward a more sacred sense of the world have started many wonderful projects such as retreat centres, Wild Churches, or Forest Bathing circles. As I shift my mind set of seeing the world as a background to one of home, I want to say that caution is in order. In some ecological spirituality circles, workshops or liturgies I have attended, there is often a circle sharing exercise in which we are encouraged to go out into the forest and find a natural object that speaks to us, or to have a conversation with a tree, etc. We are charged, dismissed and given 45 minutes to soak up the forest’s spiritual lessons and the pressure is on! As I talk about Placefulness, my first caution would be to beware of a taking our extractivist cultural instinct and simply shifting it toward what I am calling a spiritual extractivism. Theologian Belden Lane’s words are a much better caution:
“The challenge is to honor the thing itself, as well as the thing as metaphor. When [Ralph Waldo] Emerson declared in 1836 that ‘every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact,’ he sent people racing to the woods, anticipating the voice of God in the call of every thrush. But too often they paid scant attention to the songbird in their anxiousness to hear some transcendent message. They returned home full of nothing but themselves, their pockets stuffed with metaphors. As the imagination reaches relentlessly for a timeless, interior soulscape, it is easy to sail over the specificity of particular landscapes” –Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes (1998, 17)
Caution II: Beware Dissociative Jargon
This one’s for me. In academia, we are coming up with some important terms to describe what is happening to our world, words like Solastalgia, coined by Glenn Albrecht has gotten a lot of traction because it speaks to a feeling that is becoming more common, and just as potent as nostalgia was thought to be during the 1700s, where it was diagnosed as serious illness due to longing for one’s homeland. Solastalgia is the feeling of loss and longing for one’s home place as it changes before our eyes. This kind of language, though abstract and new, is powerful for describing our feelings. What I mean by dissociative jargon is more in line with words like environment, ecosystems and even ecology. Ecosystem is a word for places coined by a culture without a home. I learned this caution from a hero of mine, agrarian writer Wendell Berry. I have a lot to learn from this caution. As Berry writes:
“No settled family or community has ever called its home place an “environment.” None has ever called its feeling for its home place “biocentric” or “anthropocentric.” None has ever thought of its connection to its home place as “ecological,” deep or shallow. The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of “ecology” and “ecosystems.” But the terms themselves are culturally sterile. They come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities which was invented to disconnect, displace, and disembody the mind. The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands, lanes roads, creatures, and people.” –Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community (1993, 35)
Troubles: Therapizing Place and NIMBY-ism
In addition to these cautions, I am also interested in the troubles on the horizon, troubles for which I don’t have direct prescriptions to solve. These are troubles that I want to think out loud about in future writing and if possible, public gatherings.
First, there is a strong tendency to assume that developing a place is space is a kind of wellness technique. For example, forest-based therapists often see places through a therapeutic lens (this is often good). We develop a practice of deep attention to place as a means of de-stressing, unwinding, or spiritually tuning in to the happenings of a forest. However, I must insist that just as mindfulness is not just to be practiced when we are happy, a practice of Placefulness is not just practiced when our places are lush, or when we are comfortable and happy, or simply in need of cheering up. Forests are places of predation, decay, rot, parasitism, suffering and pain. If we go to the forest and only see vibrant life, interconnection and cooperation we are missing half of the experience.
Sense of place can also become something of a classist project of protecting a strict view of land that elevates places that are primarily in wild states, lined with walking trails and recreational areas. Working landscapes are often excluded, which tends to bias our notions of places worthy of our attention toward those that fit the narrow aesthetics of urban and wealthy recreators, retirees, or second homeowners. NIMBY-ism (Not In My Backyard) can even kill renewable energy projects that threaten a cherished viewshed. Some communities value places primarily for wellness, aesthetics, spirituality and leisure and these are important values. But Placefulness needs to wrap its arms around the reality that many people have to make their livings from the land, as foresters, miners, loggers, truckers, farmers, ranchers and many other professions and many of them are trying their best to do a good job, usually small scale, independent operators. This is tricky, because we need to radically transform our economy, but the answer isn’t simply building a wall around some places while others go to shit.
With Trebbe Johnson’s Radical Joy for Hard Times, we need to be prepared to love damaged places. We need to witness and resist cultures of destruction but also as Donna Haraway encourages us, to “stay with the trouble”. This means resisting either/or narratives that trade in either apocalyptic or techno-optimistic storylines. It means attuning to our neighborhoods as well as our local wild forest parks. It means supporting and celebrating a stream restoration project and grieving an oil spill in the bay. Our places are wounded, so are we. Attention, holy grief and acts of beauty in wounded places are integral to Placefulness.
Troubles: Weaponizing Place
Another important trouble is that deep reverence to places are caught up in human conflicts all over the world. Control over (sacred) places is often enlisted by ethno-nationalist agendas. For example, Hindu nationalists (VHP) demolished the Babri Masjid in 1992 because they claimed it was built by Muslim invaders on a sacred Hindu site. Sacred Groves in India, which are often pointed to as examples of ancient conservation projects, are often caste-restrictive, gender restrictive and include taboos that look nothing like the egalitarian access Westerners expect from protected areas. Sense of place is often accompanied by knowing one’s place in a social hierarchy. In addition, Israel/Palestine continues to be a conflict between those who are deeply invested in their identities and home places. Zionism is a place-based movement. Placefulness needs to grapple with this toxic dimension of sense of place.
Troubles: Reconciling Place
Last, sense of place is not communing with Nature with a capital N. In the pacific West where I live, he beloved forests where I walk, the parks and neighborhoods are all the traditional territory of the Musqueam people. To go into the forest and see only nature is to negate that these are cultural landscapes whose ancient stewards have been stripped of their claims by force. There is a political ecology to Placefulness.
There are some very encouraging large-scale trends: The BC Treaty Commission, Indigenous protected and conserved areas; the advancement of Rights and Title settlements; co-management, profit sharing agreements. The Land Back, Land Guardians, Indigenous land trusts, revitalization movements, Voluntary Land Tax projects like the Reciprocity Funds program. These are all gesturing in the right direction, but reconciliation and decolonization are not the same thing, and Placefulness needs to grapple with what that means for settler and immigrant peoples who love where they live. A post-colonial “Cascadia” should be able to include settler and immigrant peoples, but Indigenous peoples need to be treated with the historical justice that making right deserves. How far does that go? I don’t know. Perhaps I should start look into immigrating back to England after 7 or so generations of ancestry in North America? Or, perhaps my practice of Placefulness needs to be able to sit with discomfort, ambivalence, and the historical wrongs that I had no part in carry out, but whose privileged fruits I unquestionably benefit from. As Nigerian Post-Christian Yoruba writer Bayo Akomolafe says:
“I like to say that, sometimes the best answer to a pressing question is bewilderment. It’s not the answer itself, it’s not the correct answer, it’s the gift of bewilderment, it’s a gift of straying away from the algorithms of easy arrival. And my Elders always taught me that…the answers are not always going to be available…thank you for holding the space for queer questions, and uneasy arrivals for tending to the tense fields where new kinds of beings and becomings can thrive and grow…”[10]
Placefulness is about making space for the unknown, cultivating holy grief for a rapidly changing world, and loving our places even when it might be uncomfortable.
[1] Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place, 1993, 14.
[2] Christian Norbert Shultz, The Concept of Dwelling, 1993, 109.
Over the next few weeks, I will post a series of sketches of some ideas I have kicking around in my head. With luck, they might become longer essays or full length books! Apologies in advance for grammar and spelling errors…
Living in Vancouver I have always felt a bit lonely in my Christianity. I love the catholic tradition, but I have serious hesitations about a full-throated enthusiasm for being part of the Roman Catholic Church. Recently, I learned that two men I admire converted (or in one case reverted) to Christianity. This has made me feel a bit less lonely and pointed to something I see happening among some spiritual but not religious ecological types. Paul Kingsnorth and then Martin Shaw, both British, and both frequent speakers on podcast and YouTube circuits, converted to Christianity in 2021. Paul converted directly into Eastern Orthodoxy, and Martin, after being baptized by an Anglican priest, has entered catechesis with a local Orthodox church in Exeter.
Shaw grew up in the Baptist tradition, with a preacher as a father, but in his teens became a musician and eventually left the church (very familiar to my own story). He was raised not just with theology but the telling of fairytales and myths. Now in his late 40s, at the end of a 101-night vigil in the forest, Shaw saw a multicolored star-like aura of light moving toward him which pierced the ground like an arrow. He heard a voice that said “Inhabit the time in Genesis of your original home.” He says he felt the presence of “the mossy face of Christ.” Thereafter, entering the lockdowns of COVID-19, he had series of dreams in which a clear message was conveyed. Podcasters Mark Vernon and then Justin Brierley have observed that many in the West are seeking for deeper meaning beyond the fuzzy post-Christian spiritual but not religious landscape of the liberal and progressive West. They have cautiously suggested that Christianity is entering a new phase.
Paul is a talented novelist, who for many years, was a front lines environmental activist. He always had a spiritual side and spent time in Buddhism and Wicca as an unapologetic Deep Ecologist and critique of industrial civilization. His book Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist was a public break with his career in the mainstream environmental movement and a manifesto of slowing down, staying put and giving up on the “carbon game.” His response to environmentalism, and his lavish praise for writers like Wendell Berry always sounded to me quasi-monastic. His decision to move to a small farm in Ireland sealed that impression. Kingsnorth continues to rail against “the machine” but he is now doing so within a consciously English, even Celtic, Christianity that shares very little of the New Age trappings of the Neo-Celtic visions of folks like Matthew Fox or John Phillip Newell.
In both of their Substack threads Kingsnorth and Shaw have been thinking out loud about their newfound Christian practice. One thread of Shaw’s is entitled “A Liturgy of the Wild” and in it Shaw curates several wonder stories and archetypal hero journeys that are accompanying him as he learns the rhythms of the Christian liturgical calendar. I have always admired both men, and I feel a deeper kinship with their stories. I don’t always agree with Kingsnorth’s politics, but I certainly have taken heart in my own lonely journey with the catholic contemplative tradition.
My pilgrimage into catholic Christianity began when I stumbled onto the writings of Thomas Merton, the Trappist writer-monk who spent much of life writing about contemplative spirituality from his monastery in Kentucky. When I attended my first Easter Vigil (Saturday evening service before Easter Sunday), I felt the power of the liturgy through the candle-lit depth of anticipated resurrection. It was a powerful, aesthetic, and affective experience. As the warmth of the liturgy sank in over the days and weeks thereafter, I realized that for me the power of the Christian tradition lay not just in creeds and atonement for sin, but in an ability to invite us into a participation with the cruciform nature of the cosmos. By this I mean that through a liturgy that aligns with the seasons of the Norther Hemisphere’s waxing and waning and the earth’s own resurrection, we bring our own bodies to the pascal mystery: birth, death, and resurrection. Coming to believe in the resurrection of Christ was made possible for me by experiencing first a real attention to the resurrection of the earth. Thereafter, the resurrection of Jesus was not an exercise in intellectual ascent to the proposed truthfulness of an enchanted version of History, but to the reality of resurrection that spoke out of every flower and tree and my own circadian pilgrimage through the year. Jesus distilled and recapitulated that rhythm with his life.
I recount this here because what I am observing and learning from Kingsnorth and Shaw is that to a large extent they too were drawn to the archetypal, storied mysterious depth of the tradition. Their hearts were caught in the fisher’s net, and they have lived to tell the tale. Like the mystics, who classically emphasize direct experience, they are speaking from their own bewildered walk with a wild Christ. Not the buddy Christ of contemporary mainstream Christians, but a dark figure who broods in the wildlands and rails against convention.
Shaw for example specifically states that he was drawn back to Christianity because of the strangeness and wildness of Christ and the story. He calls Christianity “the last great mystery”. And now he is a on a mission to reclaim the contemplative, wild, ecologically rich texture of the faith. Whereas many converts to Orthodoxy I have read about tend to emphasize coming to some ascent to its authenticity in relation to some imagined original or continuous Christianity, what I hear Kingsnorth and Shaw doing, is, walking in the tracks of the mystics, drawing close to the warm glow of the power of Christianity’s stories and liturgies.
They are in short espousing what I want to call a Christian Mythodoxy. Mythos: from a root that comes from mouth, myths are not untruths to be busted, but the stories and deep human truths in which we see ourselves participating; not just moral lesson or entertainment. Doxy: meaning praise is our orientation toward the Divine, how do we soak up the rays of the Divine? It constitutes our spiritual practices, our liturgy and worship.
In the wider orbit of ecological spirituality, there are a lot of wonderful conversations that are trying to reconnect with the earth’s rhythms, place, archetypes, myths and even astrology. Adaya’s ecological spirituality courses, the School of Mythopoetics, the now defunct Seminary of the Wild, and many more. Yet while many of these courses can feel quite hostile to Christianity (speaking from personal experience), several renegade threads have been seeking to rewild the Christian lifeway.
For example, Franciscan Ilia Delio has showed that Catholic, from the Greek Kata-holon, according to the whole, must catch up with the facts of evolution and the implications of the discoveries of quantum physics regarding matter-energy as a continuous reality. Others like philosopher John D. Caputo have talked about post-modern Christianity as an exercise not in theology as science, but as a kind of Theo-poetics. As I often tell my students, religion done well is poetry about a mystery, meaning that theology for the most part is not meant to be an exercise certainty, proofs and evidence, but one of awe, wonder, praise and sometimes lament. Others such as writers Bayo Akomolafe and Sophie Strand are doing fascinating things with the possibilities of a wilder, earthier, porous Christianity. These two seem to be more on the outside margins of the tradition, but they speak eloquently about the wild origins of Jesus’s teachings, parables, and connections to the natural world in first century Palestine. Brie Stoner’s podcast Unknowing has also been the grounds for some interesting conversations about what comes after a rigid, denominational Christian identity at the dawn of the Anthropocene.
What I see happening more and more in these discoveries or reimaginings of Christianity does not fit into any denominational category. It is rather a kind of diffuse gesture, posture or dare I say (leaderless) movement. A Christian Mythodoxy seems to be one possible green shoot germinating out of the compost pile of a religion in decline (at least in the West). Stoner’s series on composting Christianity, and Sophie Strand have used that wonderful metaphor to talk about living on the edge of something that feels like both a death rattle and a birth pang (Romans 8). The so-called Anthropocene is bringing about great harm but is also opening space for something new.
What I am experiencing and observing is the idea that to be a Christian is not just to ascent to a platform of beliefs and then check one’s life against it. Rather, beyond theology (not in opposition to it), there lies a move toward a mythic praise, a mytho-doxy, grounded in the body and grounded in the cycles of the earth, that is the tangled fabric of our messy faith, which is always, already embedded in the liturgy of the cosmos, the good earth, and the breathtaking beauty of the pascal mystery.
holyscapes 