Getting to Know the Climate Apocalypse 101: Grief & Lament

The role of loss in climate work

 Recently, I was a panelist for a group of faith leaders from Together Colorado interested in addressing care for creation and public policy.  Each of us on the panel was to address our own eco-theology, and our thoughts specific to being a person of faith working in the public sphere. I found myself speaking about the call to hold spaces of grief, and to name the true and hard things. I said that one of my tasks as a clergyperson has been to name that the old is passing away, and that we are called to live differently. 

After the panel presentations, we moved into smaller groups to discuss how we were moved, what resonated, and where we wanted to go. My own small group articulated a vision of hospice and midwifery, of endings and new beginnings, based in love and sanctuary and abundance. Only when we face with open eyes the endings, and grieve, can we also birth anew, and celebrate.

What is old is passing away. Species are becoming extinct and rainforests irrevocable lost weekly now. Portions of the ice making up Greenland melted 70 years early last month. If your hope about the environment rests in what was, in what is passing away before us, your heart will be broken. Franciscan theologian Mary McGann says that we are afraid to fall in love with the earth because we are afraid of having our hearts broken. And I get that. I do.

But we need not be afraid. There is new life in the endings, and only by facing the grief and lament can we move into a new vision of abundance and green sanctuary. We all carry varying images and visions for what could be. As a Christian, mine is deeply intertwined with the patterns of death and life, endings and resurrections. 

 But for us all to face the Climate Apocalypse with grace and love, and resilience, we must also face the grief, and lament. And know that this too is holy. We must discover what it means to care for this earth, and all of Creation, and how we as people of faith move and act together in a hope based in truth and solidarity.

 Rev. Jessica Abell, Prophet of the Apocalypse

Getting to Know the Climate Apocalypse 101

I loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Joss Whedon television program that aired over the turn of this century, from 1997 to 2003, generally on Tuesday nights. Facing a weekly “Big Bad” and the regular threat of the end of the world, Buffy and her team of friends and colleagues became well acquainted with crisis. “It’s Tuesday? Must be the apocalypse” was a common sentiment expressed. Perhaps my love of this fierce woman and her fight also set within me a comfort with Apocalypse. Something this show did well was to tell stories in which the endings and changes often included death, and yet always held a kernel of new life.

Nonetheless, grief and lament are real and active, and are of course part of the fear that holds at bay our requirement to face the Climate Apocalypse. Several years ago, I wrote a piece for an online journal that I’d intended to frame after the deep laments of the psalms. I titled it “God Has Left Creation” but the editor found that too stark, too severe. It is published under the title “Has God Left Creation?” And no, I do not believe God HAS left Creation. I believe that is impossible. But I certainly know that we who grieve the loss of so many things, and who grieve the death and pain to come, and search for hope and new life must also cry out. We must lament. For the curtain is being torn, much is being revealed, and all things will change.

“Marriage as Apocalypse” was my sermon title at the first same-gender wedding in the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado. The women marrying that day were good friends, and had been a couple for many years at that point, over 20. And yet I contended that the marriage itself, the new thing being entered into, WOULD bring apocalypse -in Greek, apocalypse simply means revelation, an unveiling.

Radical change due to climate shifts is imminent, and has in fact been happening for some time. Ask the residents of The Maldives.

Fires, floods, super-storms, tornadoes, bomb-cyclones, tsunamis, earthquakes and eruptions have already become more common –and all of this will only increase in frequency and scope. Climate Apocalypse is real, and what is up to us now is how we respond. Do we know who we are and who we want to be?  

I suppose that I liken this to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil narrative in the beginning of Genesis. I’ve never been comfortable with the framing of that as the FALL OF HUMANITY INTO SIN, but rather the choice to know. To know you are naked. To know you are hungry. To know you do not know. The choice to leave paradise. The choice to make, to create.

And so perhaps the Apocalypse we enter into now is like that as well.

A chance to choose. A choice in how to live.

Because something that Buffy taught me is that Apocalypse can only be faced with open eyes, in community and with love.

Rev. Jessica Abell, Prophet of the Apocalypse