Contemplating an Ecological Chaplaincy: A Soft Manifesto for Hard Times

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.