Thursday 10 October 2024

When 'being interrupted' is not enough

The trigger for this piece was an article by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Or, to be more accurate, a letter in the Independent by a new friend of mine, in response to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The new friend is Liz Slade, who is (among other good and interesting things) Chief Officer of the Unitarians in the UK, a denomination rooted in Christians who dissented (politically and theologically) from the Church of England in the 17th and 18th centuries. Liz and I first connected as we in Hodge Hill were getting ready for our Lent series this year, 'God in the Ruins'.

Liz's letter was responding to Justin Welby's article in the Independent on 22nd September: 'God is green, and denying climate change is anti-Christian'. In it, he quotes the American lawyer and environmentalist Guy Speth:

"The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don't know how to to do that."

Welby then goes on to give examples of Christians rising to the 'moral as well as ... practical challenge': from reforestation in El Salvador, the Solomon Islands and Kenya, to the Church of England's commitment to reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2030. 'We must seek to persuade the powerful that it is in their interest to do good and be green,' he concludes.

In her response, Liz affirms Justin that these 'are good things to do,' but goes on to point out that 'any secular leader could encourage them. It feels like the Archbishop of Canterbury pulled his punch':

"Planting trees or insulating buildings will not address the underlying causes of the climate crisis. Our economy is rooted in a love of money, and is causing unprecedented suffering as a result. But perhaps Welby knows that his flock is not ready to hear a different message..."

In a post on social media a few days later, Liz went a bit further: 'He was doing great but somehow ended up asking his flock to get solar panels instead of rebuilding a society that is based on loving one's neighbour and the vast interconnectedness of all life. I can't work out - does he not know, can he not comprehend it, does he feel the reality cannot be heard, is he too ensconced in the power structures that have most to lose, or does he have a cunning plan that we just have to be patient for...?'

And this got me thinking.

The problem here isn't just about Christian responses to climate change (although that, in itself, is enough to bring 'the end of the world as we know it'). It's related, too, to the CofE's current resistance (in some senior quarters, at least) to the language of 'deconstructing whiteness' in our work to tackle our deeply-ingrained institutional racism (more of that another time, but soon). It's entangled too in the bankrupt and utterly disingenuous concept of 'mutual flourishing' (designed almost solely to 'protect' those who cannot accept the ordained ministry of women) and talk of a 'radical new inclusion' in relation to same-sex relationships (which so far stops well short of embracing same-sex marriage, let alone reappraising the so-called 'doctrine of marriage' itself, while allowing the loud voices of powerful, wealthy conservative evangelicals to claim they are the real victims of exclusion). And it's there, with deep and tragic irony, in the refusal of many senior people in the CofE (and the wider Church) to acknowledge that our horrific history of abuses of power is not just about the occasional 'bad apple', or even in failures of structure and process (although of course there have been), but in our dominant theologies of (and our avoidance of asking critical questions about) power and domination themselves (and yes, this is a point about the importance of examining particular theological traditions in our safeguarding conversations; theology matters; bad theology is a thing).

The central question, I think, is: how radical are we prepared to get? How deep are we prepared to dig in pursuing 'deep culture change' within the Church (and here, because it's my denomination, I'm thinking particularly about the Church of England)?

And, as it's very easy to externalise this and make it all about 'them' (those in 'central' positions of authority and decision-making power), I want to engage instead in a moment of self-critique. It's four years, almost to the day, since Ruth Harley and I published Being Interrupted: Reimagining the Church's Mission from the Outside, In (SCM Press, 2020).


It's a book I'm hugely proud of. But it would be an understatement to say that a lot has happened since then (in the world, in the Church, in our own lives and ministries), and it feels timely to begin to explore some of the 'edges' of Being Interrupted: some of the places where we might notice its limitations, some of the opportunities to critique and develop its lines (more spirals and wandering wiggles, in reality) of thinking and practice in new directions. That's definitely going to take more than one blog post (and possibly even the beginnings of a new, collaborative writing project). But here and now, I want to offer just one wondering:

I wonder if we, like Archbishop Justin, have not yet got nearly radical enough, in naming and pointing towards the 'deep culture change' that we, the Church, need to engage in.

One of the 'lines' (of critique, of argument) we took in Being Interrupted had something like these three steps:
1. In the face of the crises around us, many Christians believe that Christianity already has everything it needs to address these crises - and indeed has the moral and evangelical responsibility to offer those resources to others (we might call this a 'Provision' mindset).

2. Some Christians are conscious that the Church as we know it claims to be for everyone, but in practice it isn't. And so, in the face of some of the crises around us, they call the Church to be more welcoming, to embrace more diversity within its makeup and structures (we might call this an 'Inclusion' mindset).

3. But who thinks they are doing the 'including', and on what terms? Who is the 'we' that imagines it exercises the agency of 'being the Church'? In Being Interrupted, we sought to shine the spotlight on that imagined 'we' - particularly where that 'we' is predominantly white, middle-class and male, in makeup or in culture. We examined the 'privilege' that comes with inhabiting that 'we' - including the privilege to be oblivious of the experience of people located differently to 'us'. And we called on a white-, middle-class- and male-dominated Church to open itself up to be interrupted, challenged and changed by the gifts and challenges of its 'others' (what at times we've called 'Radical Receptivity').
And this is where I find myself being stretched beyond the (hopefully reasonably expansive) horizons that Being Interrupted sought to point to.

I find myself needing to name, more clearly and more boldly, that the structures within which we are all caught up, do more than 'privilege' some and 'marginalise' others. They are more than just an unequal distribution of power. They are structures of domination and, ultimately, of death. And they are (as we acknowledged in BI) structures that are more complex than the trio of race, class and gender. We might name them, to expand the term offered by the great (African-American feminist theorist-activist) bell hooks:

[ecocidal] imperialist white supremacist capitalist [ableist hetero-]patriarchy

Or, if that is a bit of a mouthful (and it surely is, and that is intentional to make a point about complexity, and not about academic prententiousness), we might draw on the work of poet Audre Lorde and ecofeminist Val Plumwood, and call it, simply, boldly:

mastery

(As in Lorde's famous maxim: 'The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house'.)

The thing is, mindsets 1 (Provision) and 2 (Inclusion) above are still utterly captive to mastery: being in charge, in control, centre stage. And I'm beginning to realise that our proposal 3 (Radical Receptivity) hasn't always named the power of mastery strongly enough, because in some ways it was still hanging on to it. In our chapter on the cross, for example, 'being interrupted' was worked out (through the figure of the Roman Centurion who witnessed Jesus' death) in terms of 'relocation', 'repentance', 'relinquishing' and 'receptivity': a spiral journey of a kind of 'schooling'. It was only in our final chapter - on the kind of resurrection that is located in the 'compost heap' - that we began to explore the direction that I find myself going in here...

4. Sometimes, what needs to happen, is not for us to 'provide' all the answers, or 'include' more diversity, or even 'receive' in ways that challenge and change us. Sometimes, what is needed is for us - and the structures in which we are entangled - to fall apart. To die, decay, decompose. And sometimes that Decomposition is, in fact, the only appropriate response to the crises that we face.

On the one hand, it's little wonder that the Archbishop of Canterbury is unable to articulate - or perhaps even contemplate - anything more radical than preaching an inoffensive message that 'God is green', and advocate for more tree planting and solar panels. He is profoundly invested in the ongoing survival of the institution of the established Church in (and 'of') England, with all its structures and hierarchies, Canons, patronage, liturgy, theology and so on that are profoundly entangled in a historic and ongoing culture of ecocidal imperialist white supremacist capitalist ableist hetero-patriarchy - aka mastery.

On the other hand, as a prominent public disciple of the incarnate, ensoiled Jesus of Nazareth, who so profoundly challenged the cultures and structures of mastery of his day that they inflicted on him a humiliating death, we might be justified in hoping to hear something more radical from Justin.

But, to finish with a little bit more self-critique, reflecting on Being Interrupted reminds me that each of us is inescapably a 'work in progress'. When Ruth and I were finishing off writing that book in early 2020, as the first wave of the COVID pandemic was still new and strange and unsettling around us, I didn't yet imagine the ways in which I would experience - personally, professionally and more widely in my relationships, places and entanglements both local and global - the painful, messy realities of falling apart, death and decomposition (and yes, the personal and the structural are entangled, inextricable). It's fair to say I know now (in fragments of raw, embodied wisdom) things that I didn't know then. And I also know that there's no going back. 

'Being decomposed' is, sometimes, what we need. Or at least, the unavoidable reality we need to embrace.


[(2 days later) This blog post has already sparked some fascinating conversations, including questions and pushback. One of the things that I wanted to say, but couldn't quite work out how to do, is that each of the four mindsets/approaches have their time and place. Decomposition is not the only way. We need contextual wisdom, conscious of our own positionality and the relationships that are most immediately present to us in each moment, to discern which is to be embraced here and now. But I'm suspicious of those (especially those in positions of power and authority, and including myself) who seem to be stuck in 1 and/or 2, and to resist and avoid embracing 3 and 4. And to return to where we started, ++Justin's response to climate breakdown presents as clear example of that resistance/avoidance.]

Sunday 16 June 2024

coming out from patriarchy: beyond 'the line' and 'the box'

I was invited by a neighbouring parish to kick off their service series exploring their commitment to being an Inclusive Church, with a sermon on gender & sexuality. Here's the text and images that I used this morning.

Readings: Genesis 16; Mark 14:1-9

I vividly remember the birth of my first child. The overwhelming joy, of course, of seeing for the first time a living, breathing, new-born baby. A love deeper than anything I’d ever felt, for the tiny, fragile human being I got to hold in my arms. But also something of those hours before the birth. Of a long, at times stressful labour, where our baby’s heart-rate kept on dropping every time my wife pushed. And, among many, many things about that 24 hours or so, I remember being on the edges of the action: a ‘bit-part’ at best, irrelevant to the outcome, other than in a minor supporting role, offering encouragement from the sidelines.

And my first observation, in this sermon about gender, sexuality and inclusive church, is that for some of us, that experience of ‘being on the edges’ is not an everyday experience.

Let me identify myself. I am white, English, middle-class, (relatively) affluent, non-disabled (mostly), straight (mostly), male, and – this last one might be an unfamiliar word to some of you – cis-gendered. That means that the gender I identify with now is what I was assigned at birth. So look: I tick all the boxes.

So what I can’t do, in this sermon, is share first-hand experience of being a woman, or LGBTQI+ (because I’m not). And I’m not going to give you a detailed, biblically-rooted defence of blessing same-sex marriages, for example; nor am I here to facilitate a conversation that gives space to carefully and safely listen to each other, ensuring all voices are heard. Both of those are very possible, and worthwhile, but that’s not what this space is for right now.

What I can do, here and now, is turn the spotlight around, and shine it on some of the structures and assumptions, in the world and in the church, that do so much harm not just to those who are marginalised and excluded, but to all of us. And I can try to help us listen for God’s call to conversion, for God’s invitation – to each and every one of us – to break down the barriers which divide and exclude, and to enter more deeply into fullness of life for all.

But why me? Why is someone who ticks all these boxes kicking off this series on inclusive church for you? Well, do you know what? I did an internet search for images of a ‘shrug’, and guess what I found?

These are the first four images that came up… and what do they all have in common?! Yes…!

The world is set up to be as easy as possible for people like me. For people like me to see people like me everywhere we look. That’s my second observation. And there’s more.

We’ve all been trained to pretend that it isn’t really like that. That it’s just normal.

This is by a brilliant internet site called ‘man who has it all’. It’s brilliant because it flips our normal gender rules on their head and it says out loud the bits that normally go unsaid. And it helps us begin to see how ridiculous some of the unspoken assumptions are.

And there’s more…

What do the last four Archbishops of Canterbury have in common (and indeed all of their predecessors)…?! 

The church – our Church of England – is just as bad on this stuff, and often quite a lot worse.

So when we think about being an ‘Inclusive Church’, it’s natural to start by thinking about who we think needs ‘including’. But I want to invite you to think about some subtly different questions: where do we think God is? And who do we think God is with? And who, and where, are we?

Ben Wildflower, 'Magnificat'

Let’s let Mary’s Magnificat be our guide: ‘he has put down the mighty from their seat, and exalted the humble and meek; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty’. This is where God is: with those who are hungry for justice, with the ground-down who are longing to be lifted up. Which means we have different callings, depending on who and where we are:

Where we are born into privilege, we are charged with dismantling any myth of supremacy. Where we were born into struggle, we are charged with claiming our dignity, joy, and liberation.” (adrienne maree brown)

So when we’re thinking about being an ‘Inclusive Church’, this isn’t about us here deciding whether we want to be lovely and kind to those poor, excluded people.

It means believing that God is there: with the oppressed, the excluded and those who have been rejected by society, and, often, by the church ourselves. Because as Jesus himself told us, the stone that the builders rejected, becomes the cornerstone of God’s kin-dom.

Which brings us, by a roundabout route, back to gender and sexuality. Because underneath the church’s rejections, of women and LGBTQI+ folks, is a way of seeing the world, a way of structuring the world. I want us to think today about two kinds of structure: one is a line, the other is a box.

The line is a way of seeing the world that’s powerful, and has deep roots. It splits the world in two, separating it into binaries: body/mind, earth/spirit, chaos/order, dark/light, soft/hard, weak/strong, passive/active, silence/word… female/male…

And the line hasn’t just divided the world into two equal halves. It’s told us that the things on the right are more important, more powerful, more God-like… than the things on the left. The line has made a world of hierarchies, domination, control: a world of property and owners.

And that has, ultimately, been very bad news for all of us.

So how might we see the world differently?

Charlotte Gibson, 'Hagar'

The story of Hagar, that we’ve heard this morning, isn’t a simple answer to that question. For those who imagine there’s such a thing as ‘biblical marriage’, here we have Abraham the patriarch, and in the ‘big story’, the main purpose of Abraham’s women (yes, women plural) is to produce him a son. That sets up competition and conflict between the women – Sarah and Hagar – because Hagar (the enslaved foreigner) is fertile, and Sarah (the wife) apparently isn’t. Sarah has a choice here: use the little privilege she has as power over Hagar, or opt for a radical, rebellious solidarity in sisterhood. Tragically, she chooses power and abuse – and Hagar runs away. Even more tragically, God in this story tells Hagar to go back to the place of enslavement and abuse – a distant echo of a tragic story repeated in many Christian communities even today. We should be profoundly troubled by this story, and the violence and harm it has wreaked over the centuries.

We’ve seen ‘the line’ in action, in this story: centering the man’s needs, treating women as property, stoking competition, legitimising abuse. But it’s not the only story that this passage tells. There’s another story, where Hagar is centre-stage, and Abraham is nowhere to be seen…

While Hagar is on the run, God meets her. God sees her. God speaks to her. And Hagar becomes the only person in the whole of the bible to give God a name: ‘the God who sees’. ‘Have I seen the One who sees me and lived to tell of it?’ she says. And this is not the end of the story. Some time later, Hagar will be truly free from her slave-holders and abusers, and God will meet her again, and journey with her into her freedom.

I wonder what it feels like to be seen – truly seen, by the God who sees. And to be seen in a way that leads towards liberation… Here’s a God who crosses the line, who breaks down the dividing-walls, who journeys with the rejected and makes her home with them…

Ally Barrett, 'The anointing woman'

And here’s that line-crossing God at work again in our gospel story. Jesus in Mark’s gospel is always on the move, always active: preaching, teaching, healing, casting out demons, and so on. That’s the ‘big story’. But there’s another story in the gospel too. Of a Jesus who, at least occasionally, is interrupted, stopped in his tracks, challenged and changed – and interestingly, usually by a woman.

And one of them is in today’s gospel reading. She’s not named. She doesn’t speak. (So far, so typical, patriarchal world.) But what she does is profoundly subversive. She breaks open a container of expensive perfume, and pours it over Jesus’ head. And the men in the room are outraged: ‘why this waste?!’ they exclaim. In Luke’s version, they label her a ‘sinner’ – an easy, powerful way of excluding someone, rejecting their contribution. But Jesus receives her costly gift. He defends her: ‘leave her alone!’ In Luke’s version, he asks the men, ‘do you see this woman?’ – Do you see her? Is this Hagar’s God speaking here?! – And then, in Mark, this remarkable statement: ‘wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her’! Named or not, she is to be remembered, for her prophetic, priestly action: she has literally made Jesus the anointed one, the Christ. Like Hagar, in fact, she has named God! And her anointing here will be ‘sticky’ – it will stick with Jesus all the way to the cross… and beyond…

Ally Barrett, 'At the cross'

The Bible isn’t just black and white. It doesn’t draw one clear line. It isn’t just one big story. There are multiple, interwoven, entangled stories, some of which are in tension with each other, even contradictory. And in the body of Jesus, and at the cross, those contradictions are laid bare: for faithful women followers, and puzzled male officers of the Roman Empire, alike.

At the cross, we see the patriarchal binaries exposed for the lie they are: here is God in earthed body, in the chaos and darkness, soft and weak, passive and silent. Here is a God who empties himself of any of the dominance and control of patriarchy. Here is a God in whom, as the apostle Paul would later realise, there is no longer male or female.

Michael Cook, 'An Idle Tale'

Here is a God whose resurrection is first witnessed by women, who the male disciples then disbelieve. Who’s in the centre now, and who on the edges? Who is including whom, into the resurrection community?!

John Augustus Swanson, 'The Raising of Lazarus'

And here is a God who calls in a loud voice to those who are bound up, entombed in the prisons of death: ‘come out! Be free…’

I was given the task of talking about gender and sexuality today, I’ve talked a lot about men and women, and I don’t have much time left. I said earlier that we’d think about two kinds of structure that exclude and marginalise: one was the line, the other is a box.

The box is my shorthand for heterosexual marriage. It’s not a bad box. It’s a box that lots of good things can happen in. But we Christians have got a little bit lazy in using the box as the answer to all kinds of questions. Particularly the question ‘what is sex?’. Sex, the lazy answer goes, is what happens inside the box. It’s good if it’s in the box, it’s bad if it’s outside the box.

Except we know that’s not true. From Hagar to today, we know that heterosexual marriages can be places of resentment, lovelessness, manipulation and abuse, as well as places of love, joy, kindness and faithfulness. And that goes for the sex as much as any other aspect of the relationship. Talking about the box focuses on the container, and takes the focus of the contents.

And looking outside the box, I can witness to faithful, mutual, sacrificial, joyful, holy, love-filled relationships between two people of the same sex, through which I have seen clearly the grace of Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. And when I have seen LGBTQI+ friends respond to God’s call to ‘come out’ of the box, come out of the closet, come out of hiding, come out to be seen in the warm light of day and openness, honesty and integrity about who they are and who they love, I have seen liberation, and flourishing, and the fullness of life that Jesus said he came to bring.

For the last few years, my daughter and I have gone, with other members of our church community, to be part of Birmingham’s Pride celebrations. As an introvert, middle-aged, white, English, straight(ish) man, I have to confess it’s way out of my comfort zone. It’s a place where people like me are definitely not centre stage. But I have always felt utterly welcome, just as I am. I love dancing, but I’m physically and socially a bit awkward, and Pride has been a place where I’ve felt a warm invitation to dance my heart out, without judgment or competition, in a rainbow crowd of dancing people being joyfully, fully themselves, without hiding, fear or apology.

What if church were a bit more like that?!

What if God is inviting all of us to break down the dividing lines, to ‘come out’ of the boxes, to discover love, and joy, and life in the glorious, complex, embodied, interdependent, messily real world beyond the lines and boxes?

It is time, well and truly time, for some of us to stop talking, and do more listening. Sermons like today’s, from people like me, need to be at best a passing moment, before people like me step out of the way so that a multitude of less-heard voices can be more fully heard. I long for that day. When my female and LGBTQI+ siblings can shout and sing of God’s goodness within a church that has left the lines and boxes behind. I long for a church where I can, without condition, speak words of blessing over their lives and loves, and alongside them as fellow ministers of Christ.

And that’s where I’ll end: for those of you who have experienced rejection by the church, and need to hear God’s blessing spoken to you…

Trust your belovedness.

Let it be a protest, an act of resistance, a song of celebration.

Trust your belovedness in a world that is rarely satisfied.

Wear it like a badge of honor.

Speak it as confidently as your last name. Tattoo it to your heart.

When outside forces chip away at your sense of self,

when life asks you to hand over the keys,

remember the water.
Remember creation. Remember how it was good, so very good.

Let that truth hum through your veins.

Sing it so loud that it drowns out the weariness of the world,

for the bravest thing we can ever do

is trust that we belong here.

Rev. Sarah A. Speed

 

Wednesday 15 May 2024

composting theologies: an introduction


As I write this tomorrow (Wed 15th May) is the day of our 'composting theologies' gathering at Hazelnut Community Farm, Bristol - with part of the day also online. I'm so excited about this - starting with what could have been a straightforward 'theology seminar', and taking it outside, planting it in the earth, beginning with some soil work on the farm in the morning, and ending the day eating together around the farm's fire pit. We've got a little gang of practitioner-theologians, many in some kind of Christian ministry, many whose daily lives and/or work are thoroughly rooted in the soil where they live. And a couple of brilliant international thinkers offering contributions to the conversation online from different parts of the world. Here's a bit of a personal introduction to what and why we're doing this...

'Soil is not a metaphor' - so writes Emma Lietz Bilecky, who we'll hear from shortly. Nevertheless, our routes to this place are diverse: some of us starting in ensoiled practice and growing into theory, some of us starting with theory and slowly getting immersed in practice; and of course, practice and theory, of one kind or another, are always entangled together, whether we're aware of it or not.

For me, this journey feels like it started with the metaphor of composting, and moved towards the practice of it, via some pretty intense personal and political/structural/ecclesial decomposition. Although saying that, it was always rooted in a particular kind of practice.

'Each person exists inside a different landscape... Our greatest spiritual teacher does not need to be bought or sought. ... It is the specific dirt between our toes.' (Sophie Strand)

The 'specific dirt' for me has been the Firs & Bromford, an outer estate on the edge of Birmingham, where I've been involved in community-building, with friends and neighbours, nurturing a neighbourhood ecology, 'treasure seeking', 'being interrupted', opening up to the gifts and challenges of our neighbours - and especially, those of us who are structurally privileged opening ourselves to be transformed by those who have been 'othered' by the systems and structures in which we live.

Out of that locally-rooted practice, Ruth Harley and I wrote Being Interrupted, which ends with a chapter on resurrection, exploring the possibilities of 'remaining', 'staying with the trouble', grieving and 'sensing life' in the midst of trauma and death, and of 'recycling': of 'being decomposed', broken open, and discovering other, often 'underground', ways of 'making home together'. And in the midst of these emerging possibilities was a story - from Anna Woofenden, a pastor on the edges of Los Angeles - of a church community that formed around gardening, eating and worshipping together, around the compost heap, and of God the Divine Composter in the midst of it all:

'She takes all that has been, all that we've used, our best bits and our slimy bits, the endings in our lives and the pain of loss, the tantalizing crumbs from our joyful moments and the leftovers we've kept for too long. God takes all of that and says, "Okay, great, let's see what we can do with it next!"' (Anna Woofenden)

Ruth and I were writing about 'resurrection in the compost heap' in Spring 2020, in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Little did I know, but the collective trauma of COVID was to be the trigger, for me, of a series of profound, entangled and painful 'undoings': in our neighbourhood community-building work, in our church community, in my family, in my personal, parental and priestly life. And in the midst of those 'undoings', those 'decompositions', I found myself pulled - sometimes alone and often with others - outside: into neighbourhood gardens, onto our local Common, into the woods - into more intimate contact with the 'specific dirt between our toes'.

And entangled with the personal decompositions, came theological decompositions too. I've been drawn deeper into work, with friends and colleagues, on 'dismantling whiteness' - deconstructing those racialised ways of being and seeing the world that imagine a “self-sufficiency” of “possession , mastery and control” and “strangle the possibilities of dense life together” (Willie James Jennings). This has required acknowledging that “the Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house” (Audrey Lorde). But also, if our ‘dismantling’ is by other tools, also acknowledging that “there’s no such thing as ‘away’”: what happens to the pieces of the dismantled structure? Perhaps ‘decomposition’ invites us to something beyond dismantling? “Composting shit” is a cumulative, ‘additive’ process (rather than just taking stuff ‘away’) (Sophie Strand). And a process requiring a collection of unusual capabilities (as Vanessa Machado de Oliveira outlines in her book ‘Hospicing Modernity’).

In parallel, and with Simon Sutcliffe [who's shared in organising this 'composting theologies' gathering], we’ve been exploring what decomposing a particular kind of (White, western, middle-class, non-disabled, heterosexual) masculinity might look like, which has drawn us into deeper engagements: with the entanglements of life, and communities of compost (via Donna Haraway); with 'the dark night of the soil' (via Norman Wirzba); with the journey of descent into the earth ('katabasis') as a journey of 'unlearning mastery' (via Bayo Akomolafe); and with indigenous wisdom and ancient stories of compost gods, that come to us, as Christian theologies, as resonant with, but also challenges and invitations to, the Jesus stories that we know well. Where Simon and I have got to with these explorings, is that people like us need to be re-connecting with the soil - for us to (re) discover the creatureliness that we share.

And of course, in whiteness and masculinity I've named just two strands of the entanglements of mastery, the 'white supremacist capitalist [ableist hetero-]patriarchy' to which bell hooks points us, and which, we are increasingly conscious, is not only strangling and deadly to human life and relationships, but also to the multitude of creature-kin with whom we share this fragile, warming planet. Decomposing mastery, and its theologies, is an essential shared task, right now, for our life together - in the broadest sense - on this earth. 

I am haunted by a short story by Alys Fowler that I read (some time in 2021, I think), called The Woman Who Buried Herself. Something like a fairy tale, the woman of the story falls in love with her garden, and finds herself pulled deeper and deeper into the soil until there is no simple way of discerning the boundaries between her body and the earth. This tells something of the journey I feel myself being drawn on - and one way of telling why I find myself drawn towards the 'composting theologies' gathering tomorrow.

For more details of the two 'keynote' speakers tomorrow, look out for my next blog, coming very soon...

References:
Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine (2022) p.17
Al Barrett & Ruth Harley, Being Interrupted: Reimagining the Church's Mission from the Outside, In (2020), pp.204ff.
Anna Woofenden, This is God's Table: Finding Church Beyond the Walls (2020), pp.129-32
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene (2016)
Norman Wirzba, Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land (2022) 
Bayo Akomolafe, 'Unlearning Mastery' [Humans and Earth podcast, Sept 2020]
Alys Fowler, The Woman Who Buried Herself (2021)

Tuesday 14 May 2024

composting theologies: our keynote speakers

 



At tomorrow's (Wed 15th May) 'composting theologies' gathering, we are delighted to be joined online by two fabulous contributors who bring a profound depth and breadth of earthed experience, knowledge, wisdom and playfulness to our conversation.

I first came across Dr Emma Lietz Bilecky when I noticed that SCM Press are this year publishing her book, Decomposing Holy Ground. Everything about the title got my excited and intrigued. She is a fellow at Princeton's Theological Seminary's Farminary Project, who thinks, writes and teaches on the mutual formation processes between soil and human communities, while managing the seminary's small vegetable farm. She is informed by Western landscapes, love of food, and degrees in theological studies and environmental management.

My first encounter with Dr Bayo Akomolafe was reading his beautiful book These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: letters to my daughter on humanity's search for home (2017). It brought together some of the newest scientific understandings of our beautiful, complex, entangled world, with 'new materialist' feminist philosophy, the earthed wisdom of Bayo's Yoruba roots, and his personal reflectios of growing into parenthood - and it made my heart sing. And then, beyond his written words, I heard him speak, in a number of stunning podcast conversations, on science and non-duality, 'unlearning mastery', 'composting Christianity' and more. He has a breathtaking, poetic touch with words that invite us deeper into the mystery of our entanglements with all life in our more-than-human world. He is a celebrated international thinker, writer, teacher, and founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide initiative that seeks to convene communities in new ways in response to the critical, civilizational challenges we face as a species.

We are so fortunate to have them both joining us in conversation. I can't wait for the conversation to begin!



Saturday 11 May 2024

An earthy ascension?

Thursday 9th May, Ascension Day
(Contribution for 'Chapter & Verse' in Reform magazine, May edition)

The ancient Egyptian myth of Osiris tells of a ‘green’ god, born of earth and sky, a river god in a dangerously overheating world, who offers his cooling waters to the parched earth. After being brutally dismembered by his jealous brother, his widow Isis gathers the pieces of his corpse and plants them across the land of Egypt. Once a king, he has become the soil of the kingdom itself.[1]

However ‘earthy’ our understandings of the incarnation of God in Jesus, the story of his ‘ascension’ can all too easily undo that earthiness. Having been buried in the earth, Jesus is not just resurrected (literally, ‘stood up again’), but his body is ‘taken up’ and away from his disciples. It is easy to find ourselves, with them, left standing ‘looking up towards heaven’ (Acts 1:11), swept up in a return to the kind of ‘sky god’ theology that devalues the ‘down here’ in ways that, as we are now all too aware, have been profoundly damaging in our relationship with the earth (and by ‘our’, I mean particularly we who are children of Western modernity).

There are two pointers in the text to suggest that this should absolutely not be the case. First, there is the angelic couple who ask the disciples why they are still standing there and tell them that Jesus ‘will come in the same way as you saw him go’ (v.11). Second is the promise from Jesus himself of the power of the coming Holy Spirit (v. 8). There is a continuity between the Jesus they have seemingly ‘lost’ and the Spirit who is coming, that redirects their attention somewhere other than ‘up and away’. We cannot think (or preach) Ascension without Pentecost. The two are one ‘moment’ in the story, just as Good Friday and Easter Day are one inextricable ‘moment’, even if both such ‘moments’ also contain a hiatus, an uncomfortable ‘in-between time’, that demands a thoroughly grounded patience, an insistent waiting, a stubborn ‘sticking together’ (that often women, in these stories, seem to be better at than men).

Contemporary science and ancient indigenous wisdom both remind us of an ecological complexity to the world that we modern Westerners have tended to forget. They also complexify the ‘up-down’ cosmology of the ascension story and its theological legacy. It might have made sense of the writer to the Ephesians to declare Christ as ‘far above all rule and authority and power and dominion’ (Ephesians 1:21), ‘far above’ the oppressive politics of Empire and domination that the Christians of Ephesus would have known well. But what if the immeasurably different power of God (v. 19) is more akin to the complex, underground, connective systems of roots and mycelial fungi that enable the sharing (between trees, for example) of nourishment, communication, care and wisdom?[2] An elusive yet powerful ‘undercommons’ that the powers of Empire will never comprehend?[3]

What we humans notice as mushrooms are merely the above-ground ‘blooming’ of such vast, subterranean fungal networks. The mushroom’s caps shelter a whole host of tiny spores which, eventually, are ejected with huge force (10,000 times the G-force experienced by astronauts leaving Earth), high up into the air. Fifty million tons of spores enter the atmosphere every year, following the wind, riding the currents, attracting water molecules, accumulating into rain clouds, and finally falling down to earth again in the rain, creating the perfect, damp conditions for mushrooms to grow…[4]

“be glad, and rejoice in the Lord your God, for … he has poured down for you abundant rain… I will pour out my spirit on all flesh…” (Joel 2:23, 28)

Are we perhaps offered here an ecological parable of a more embodied, more ‘earthed’, Ascension-and-Pentecost? Instead of searching for some distant heaven, why don’t we learn to sing and dance in the rain, in the outpouring of the Spirit on all flesh? Instead of standing looking up for the Jesus we think we’ve lost, why don’t we look downwards, following the loving gaze of the one who ‘has put all things under his feet’ (Ephesians 1:22), and who reminds us that the place on which we are standing is holy ground (Exodus 3:5).

 



[1] For more, see Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2022), pp.120-4.

[2] See. e.g. Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, And Shape Our Futures (Dublin: Vintage, 2020).

[3] See Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, The Undercommons [FINISH REF.]

[4] See Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand, pp.11-12.

Friday 15 March 2024

ensoiled spirituality: living out an earthed faith

 I was invited to contribute to a series of Lent Conversations brought together by Churches Together in Clifton, Redland & Cotham with Hotwells (Bristol). The focus of the series was 'Faith, Creation and Climate Change', and I was asked to talk about 'Creation Spirituality'. As I explain in my introduction, I felt I needed to go for a subtly different title...

* * *

We begin with a moment of silence. To press our ears to the ground. To hear the cries of the earth. To hear the cries of the oppressed, the dying, the grieving and the raging. And to hear the birds. 



* * *

I feel the need to start with a disclaimer. This talk may be a disappointment for some of you. I am not an expert on ‘creation spirituality’. I’m not immersed in the history of Celtic Christianity. I’m not someone who had a conversion experience in the wilds of Dartmoor and has ever since lived a life at one with nature. And I’m not coming with a wealth of creative, practical resources for doing forest church, muddy church, mossy church or church on a community farm. There are others (possibly even others in the room tonight) whose expertise, experience and creativity in these areas far exceeds mine.

why are we here?

So why are we here? Why am I here?

I think I’m here because I’m a theologian, of a kind. 

A magpie kind. 



No, not that kind of magpie theologian. Although you may have come across the odd one or two of them.

I’m thinking of the kind of magpie theologian that has an eye for the odd things that catch the light, and a habit of picking them up and bringing them back to add to their nests, those patient constructions of diverse, interwoven materials, often in seemingly precarious places, that are nevertheless spaces of safety and shelter, rest and nurture: spaces of home-making.

That said, the idea that magpies are attracted to shiny things might turn out to be an unfounded myth. Some research done by the Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour at Exeter University found that the magpies they studied actually tended to respond nervously to shiny things, and, indeed, anything that might be unfamiliar to them (again, that might be more like some theologians you’ve come across). But why the folklore around magpies as ‘silver thieves’, then? According to the lead scientist on the research project, it might be more a case of the myth shaping our perceptions (what’s sometimes called ‘confirmation bias’): we’re told magpies like shiny things, so we’re on alert for the rare occasions that a magpie might have something shiny in its beak, and the myth is perpetuated.  

As the writer Anais Nin once put it, “we do not see things as they are, we see them as we are”. Which is a two-fold invitation: to question our habitual ways of seeing; and to look more closely at ourselves.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying: as a theologian, I’m interested in the work of home-making, as creature-kin, together, with God, on this planet we call Earth. I’m interested in how and why we’ve made such a mess of it, and what kind of resources of faith and imagination might help us to do it better. In fact, like the magpies of recent research, maybe I’m actually a bit nervous of things that look a bit too new and shiny. Maybe I’m actually wanting to pay more attention to the stuff that’s more familiar to magpies, the stuff we might sometimes call ‘dirty’, the stuff that we humans (or some of us, at least) have been trained to distance ourselves from. That’s why in the title of this talk I’ve used the words ‘ensoiled spirituality’ and ‘earthed faith’. That’s where I want to begin.

locate ourselves

‘Each person exists inside a different landscape… Our greatest spiritual teacher does not need to be bought or sought. … It is the specific dirt between our toes.’ 

(Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine, p.27)


We need to locate ourselves. 

This comes harder to some of us than others. I am, for example, a middle-class, straight-ish, non-disabled-ish, cis-man racialised as white. This is worth saying, because people like me so often breeze through life assuming that we are the ‘norm’ from which everything else, everything ‘other’, is a deviation. 

One of the clumsy terms we’ve begun to use for this curious phenomenon is ‘multiply privileged’. Inhabiting multiple layers of ‘structural advantage’ within the unjust systems of the world as we know it. But if we look more closely at those systems, we might also notice them producing (in human beings more or less like me) multiple layers of disconnection from our human and more-than-human creature-kin, and from the earth itself. Those systems we might name as an entanglement of capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, ableism, and what the Brazilian academic and activist Vanessa Machado de Oliveira names ‘modernity/coloniality’: a globalizing of a certain kind of violent (and inherently unsustainable) expansion, possession, extraction and consumption, with roots that are profoundly entangled with the history of this land, this island, indeed this city of Bristol.

These systems have enabled people like me to imagine all kinds of ridiculous things to be true, including: one, the idea that I can think about ‘who I am’ without thinking about my particular body, without thinking in and with my particular body; and two, the idea that where I am, the ‘specific dirt between [my] toes’, as Sophie Strand puts it, doesn’t really matter, doesn’t profoundly shape us; which leads to three, the ridiculous idea that I can, in any sense, think of myself as an ‘individual’, a ‘self-made man’, even – and not utterly dependent on, entangled with, the agency, movements and simple bodily presence of my human and more-than-human kin and the mountains and hills, oceans and rivers, trees and plants and fungi that are not just our ‘environment’ but the ‘ecosystem’ of which we too are a part.

So let’s start again by starting here: with my body (and your bodies, each of you), with the landscapes we exist inside, the specific dirt between our toes, and with those who share this earth with us.

starting again, starting here


Let me try introducing myself again, differently: I was born on one island (Portsea), baptised on another (Thorney), and lived the first year of my life on a third (Hayling), all clustered together on the edge of a stretch of water called the Solent, on the south coast of England. 


After 22 years of not calling anywhere home for more than 3 years, the West Midlands became my home, and for the last 14 years I have lived to the east of Birmingham city centre, between the River Tame and the River Cole, in the parish of Hodge Hill. Neither river is more than a stream where we are, with the Tame running through a concrete channel, under the concrete pillars of the M6 motorway. My neighbourhood, Bromford, is named after an old ford crossing the River Tame, and the tall, yellow-flowered bushes of Scotch broom that are still rampant on the small triangle of scrubland that is Hodge Hill Common, on whose common ground I pray, with local colleagues, every Wednesday morning.


The River Tame comes to us from two sources in the Black Country, in Oldbury and Willenhall, and from Bromford wanders on towards Tamworth (to which it gives its name), and then northwards to Alrewas, where it joins the Trent and heads onwards to Nottingham and then to Hull, where it feeds into the Humber estuary, and out to the North Sea by Grimsby, which, coincidentally, was where my mum was born. Her parents stayed there for just six weeks around her birth, apparently because they wanted her to be a ‘Lincolnshire yellowbelly’ like her grandparents. (The roots of the local nickname are, according to Wikipedia, widely disputed.)


This is, I have to confess, a new way of introducing myself. These details will not be found on my CV, and I am not yet in the habit of locating myself in relation to rivers and broom bushes. But it’s me who’s the odd one here, relative to most of human history and much of the world’s current human population. There are still many, many people in our world whose relationship to their place, to the land, to ‘the specific dirt between their toes’, is much more intimate. And in that relationship, that rootedness, is much profoundly earthed wisdom. It is preserved and treasured among those peoples we have come to call ‘indigenous’. There is much in the pages of our bibles, from the people of Israel’s nomadic roots, and from the agrarian peasants of Galilee among whom Jesus grew up. It can be discovered in some of the earlier arrivals on this island (the Celts among them), and in the lived experiences of many much more recent arrivals – as well as among the small minority in this country who still live in close and respectful relationship with the land. 

The erasure of this ‘traditional’, ‘earthed’ wisdom has much to do with colonialist violence, against indigenous peoples, and against the land itself. And also a lot to do with urbanisation, itself a form of colonialism, so often driven by the enclosure and ‘privatisation’ of the commons, ‘uprooting’ cheap labour for the systems of capitalism. To locate ourselves in specific places, then, is also to locate ourselves in specific histories, politics and economics…


A river as a channel for human waste. A river as ‘property’ owned by private companies, its water sold for profit, according to the law of the market. But what if another law ruled? What if we saw a whole river, from the hills to the sea, with all its tributaries and wildlife, as one vast interconnected ecosystem? 


What if we acknowledged, with the world’s indigenous peoples, the ‘personhood’ of a river, their rights? Paid attention to their health? Thanked them for their generosity? Revered their authority? Listened to their song? 

But for many of us, I suspect, such wisdom, such a worldview, is pretty alien. We might catch glimpses of it on summer holidays by the sea, or a day out walking in the hills. You might have a microcosm of it in your garden, whether neatly tended, or (like mine) running a little wild due to intentional, or unintentional, neglect. Maybe there are stirrings of a desire in you for reconnection, knowing that being ‘grounded’, breathing fresher air, getting out into ‘nature’ is good for our physical and mental wellbeing. Maybe there’s something else stirring too, perhaps from somewhere deeper or more diffuse, perhaps coming out of anxiety or loving concern or both, a sense that we need to reconnect with what we have (in a strangely detached way) called ‘nature’, because the future of home-making on the planet, at least for us humans, but also for millions of other species too, seems to be increasingly desperately dependent on it. But for many of us, such glimpses, such stirrings, tend to be pushed to the edges of our daily life, our day-to-day experience, our familiar world.

look to the edgelands


So let’s look to the edges. Or, to put it more accurately, let’s look to the places we’ve been trained to see as ‘edge-places’. Let’s shift our attention from the places that the systems of the world as we know it have made their centres – centres of wealth, of power, of activity, of ‘news’, of value – to those places (and the bodies that inhabit those places) that have been asset-stripped, marginalised, exploited, overlooked, devalued. And for those of us who I have named ‘multiply privileged’, ‘structurally advantaged’, that will often mean not just shifting our attention, but moving our feet, re-locating our bodies to places where it is we who are the stranger, the outsider, the guest, the one hovering cautiously on the edges, dependent on and vulnerable to the unfamiliar inhabitants and life and wisdom of these places where we are not at home. 

For those of us who are straight men, we may be indirectly aware of the kind of love, friendship and mutual solidarity of all-female and queer spaces; for those of us racialised as white, we may have picked up similar echoes of what Black theorists Stefano Harney and Fred Moten name the ‘undercommons’ of Black social life. And for those of us humans who have been, over generations, disconnected from the earth and our more-than-human creature-kin, we may be dimly conscious of the teeming life and entangled agencies of spaces which we human beings have neglected, retreated from, or occasionally just left alone – and so such places can be fascinating, mysterious, awe-inspiring, fearful, seductive and bewildering in equal measure.

Bewilderment: to be lost, perplexed, confused; [but literally,] to be lured into the wilds.

The contemporary English poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, in their book Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wildernesses, direct our attention towards those ‘incomprehensible swathe[s]’ of landscape that we mostly ‘pass through without regarding … as we hurry [out of our towns and cities] towards the countryside, the distant wilderness’.  But these ‘edgelands’, for many of us much closer to home, are, if we care to attend to them, pointers to the power of the more-than-human world to make cracks in our ‘man-made’ concrete structures, and push through, to rapidly reclaim what we have abandoned, to re-wild terrains where we have, even for a moment, stepped out of the way. 

‘At their most unruly and chaotic, edgelands make a great deal of our official wilderness seem like the enshrined, ecologically arrested, controlled garden space it really is. Children and teenagers, as well as lawbreakers, have seemed to feel especially at home in [the edgelands], the former because they have yet to establish a sense of taste and boundaries, and have instinctively treated their jungle spaces as a vast playground; the latter because nobody is looking.’ 

This is an invitation to transgress the borders of the ‘proper’ and the ‘well-managed’. To trespass, even, into borderlands of uncertain ownership, following the tracks, root systems and wind-blown spores of the so-called ‘wild life’, among them the resilient ‘ruderals’… 

ruderal: a plant that thrives on waste ground or among rubbish. 

Such wildlife, like their child and ‘criminal’ kin, have no regard for the invented lines of ‘private property’ and ‘enclosure’, and invite us to likewise question such things as ‘givens’ in our world.

dead ends: hallowing our limits


But not all lines are to be transgressed. Edgelands, almost by definition, are rarely well-furnished with through routes and pathways. Go for a wander in the edgelands and sooner or later you’ll come up against a dead end. A cul-de-sac. A wall or fence. A sheer cliff going up or down. Or undergrowth too thick, too tangled, to pass through. An obstacle in the way that communicates clearly “you can go no further”.

It’s not coincidental that many of the stories of ‘mastering’ nature (solo conquests, obstacles overcome, mountains climbed) are told by white, straight, non-disabled men. By contrast, disabled writers and crip theorists are among those who insist not just on communal, embodied, collaborative adventures into the wilds,  but also on the inevitability of coming up against the impassable, the limits. That reality is a daily and often painful one for disabled people, but having to live within our creaturely limits is a lesson that all of us urgently (and for many of us, belatedly) need to learn, especially those of us who have benefitted most from modernity/coloniality. The earth cannot afford our fantasies of limitlessness – of limitless extraction, limitless consumption, limitless growth.


Those who live more intimately with the land have always known this. Indigenous wisdom, including the Jewish soil from which Christianity emerged, has always been embodied in rhythms and rituals of gratitude, thanksgiving, for the abundance of created life, and practices of fair sharing and a contented ‘enoughness’.   

For those of us who have been forgetful of that wisdom, a remembering will inevitably involve reduction, loss, sacrifice. But as Quaker Paul Hodgkin reminds us, the original meaning of sacrifice is ‘to make something holy’:

‘In flying less, we make the air holy again. In not eating meat, we are recognizing the holy sentience of the 300 million animals we kill each day. In having less ‘stuff’ we are re-hallowing the Earth’s own limits.’ 

Hallowing the limits. Like the old Christian tradition of ‘beating the bounds’: walking prayerfully along the edgelands. And discovering, there, that as we lean against the boundary-stone, the stone leans into us; as we reach out to caress the fallen tree, the tree caresses us back. Discovering that in what we have unthinkingly labelled ‘dead ends’ there is often, maybe always, a barely-imaginable ‘aliveness’. 

As Nigerian-born thinker Bayo Akomolafe teaches us,

‘This is so because it is where things stop and often die, failing to continue on their way. It is where carcasses of hope rot into the ground, inadvertently fertilizing it. … Just as soils chastise seeds, and cocoons imprison caterpillars, obstacles are the universe’s hubs of unspeakable creativity, redeeming us from tired victories, from the banality of crossing the finish line, from the soundtrack of getting everything we want, and especially from the hubris of thinking we are in control.’ 

dark nights: ‘staying with the trouble’


I came up against my own limits in a very sudden and traumatic way when my then 10-year-old daughter had a near-fatal accident at the very end of December 2020. Sledging on a snowy hillside, she collided head-on with a tree, and for a time we were not sure if she would live to tell the tale. Thankfully, after a spell in the incredible care of Birmingham Children’s Hospital, she was sent home with only minor lasting damage. But for me the trauma of that day lasted much longer and went much deeper. I had to clear my diary for a month, it limited my physical and emotional capacity for a long time beyond that, and (combined with my experience of the collective trauma of COVID pandemic) left an irreversible impact on some of my closest relationships, and my sense of identity (as parent, priest, and other things too). I came to call that period, that cold December day and its long aftermath, a ‘wintering’ for me, inspired particularly by the book of that name by Katherine May. She reminded me of the uncontrollable nature of life, the honesty of our howls of anguish and times of weakness and gloom. She allowed me to acknowledge ‘that we can’t always hang on in there; that sometimes everything breaks.’ She encouraged me to hunker down, to practise the arts of hibernation, knowing that this is not an end-point, that winter is but one season in a cycle – for both our outer and inner lives. 


More recently, although my gardening in practice is non-existent, I have discovered a love for composting, both in its dark and dirty practice and in its rich metaphorical potential. What it teaches us about valuing what we so often treat as ‘waste’, about contending with the thrown-together intimacies of what remains, about the slow pace of change, and about the vital and complex interactions of the diverse, creepy, crawly, buzzy, microby ‘decomposer community’ – all these insights and more could fill a talk like this on their own. Here I just want to focus on one thing: the process of decomposition itself.

When we reach the limits of our edgelands, when we collide with the impassable obstacles, we rarely just bounce off them. Things break. And break down. Bringing together the Carmelite scholar Constance FitzGerald and agrarian theologian Norman Wirzba, we might reflect for a moment here on what Wirzba calls ‘the dark night of the soil’. We are called back to ‘the specific dirt between our toes’, and invited to journey deeper down into it. But not like a digger – rather, like a seed, on its descent into the earth for a ‘death’ that is also a ‘breaking open’.  For FitzGerald, extending St John of the Cross, the ‘dark night’ refers to both personal and societal ‘impasse’: experiences of human limitation, and the persistence of toxic structures, that leave us ‘helpless, confused, and guilty before the insurmountable problems of our world’.  ‘Every normal manner of acting is brought to a standstill,’ she observes, ‘and ironically, impasse is experienced not only in the problem itself but also in any solution rationally attempted.’  The invitation of the ‘dark night’ is to turn toward these feelings of bewilderment and the external realities that trigger them, and to slowly let go of our tendencies to try to ‘ignore them, overcome them, fix them, deny them, or justify ourselves’. 

This is an invitation to what ecofeminist Donna Haraway names as ‘staying with the trouble’: resisting the twin temptations, either to the happy ending, ‘a comic faith in technofixes’; or to despair, that ‘it’s too late’ to do anything.    Why are these temptations dangerous? Because all too often our human efforts to be the hero, the fixer, the saviour, have turned out to be catastrophically counter-productive. Because all too often our responses to the crisis, our attempts to ‘take back control’, have turned out to be a significant contribution factor to the ongoing crisis. And because even despair makes it all about us too – that because we have failed, then there’s no hope for the world.

By contrast, Haraway’s option for ‘staying with the trouble’ is about opening up to the decomposition, the breaking down, of those habitual attempts to control; opening up to the decomposition, the breaking down, of the toxic structures of the Master’s House on which many of us have leaned too heavily for too long; and instead, beginning to ‘learn [or re-learn] to be truly present’: present to these ‘mixed-up times ... overflowing with both pain and joy’; present to each other, as entangled, ‘mortal critters', ‘making kin’ across species and other dividing lines, ‘learning to live and die well’ together.

‘Staying with the trouble’ means, together, ‘in unexpected collaborations and combinations’, learning how to ‘nurture [our] capacities to respond’; cultivating our ‘response-ability’, in what Haraway juicily names ‘Communities of Compost’.

 

That includes finding ways of grieving together, for what has already been lost and for what is being lost as we speak. Grieving as prayer. Grieving as a call to witness.  


It includes responding to disabled artist Eli Clare’s call to notice where talk of ‘restoration’ can be ‘a bandage trying to mend a[n] [impossibly] gaping wound’, and instead ‘to tend the unrestorable places [and bodies] and ecosystems that are ugly, stripped down, full of toxins, rather than considering them unnatural and abandoning them’;  to ‘accept that the dying are beloved – and to treat them as beloved, even when we cannot save them.’ 


Is there hope for the world as we know it, in this time of climate emergency, cost-of-capitalism crisis and deepening social and political division? Well, it seems to depend a lot on who you talk to. But the answers I’m finding myself trusting the most are those that on the one hand urge us to courage, more than hopefulness, and on the other hand offer us the reminder that it’s not just you. 

One of the many things I’ve learnt through the humble practice of composting my food waste is that the role of us humans in processes of decomposition is very limited. At most, we chuck some stuff on the pile occasionally, and maybe turn it all over every so often. But the most significant work is done by that ‘decomposer community’ of creepy crawlies, worms, fungi, microbes and more. 


We’re not in this on our own. If there are any grounds for hope, they must be grounded in love. Love as connection, love as solidarity. Love as the divine life-force that animates the world. Love as what the world has for us, before we ever thought of loving it back. The mind-bogglingly complex ecosystems of our world – and those humans who live most intimately within them – are our best chance of survival, if only we’d spend less time and effort working against them: the trees that purify our air, the fungi and algae that de-toxify our polluted soils and rivers, the so-called ‘invasive’ species that re-wild our wastelands, and so on. If there is to be even partial healing and restoration, it will come not primarily through the agency of people like me (or indeed of people like you), but through our letting go and letting be: through our opening ourselves to being interrupted, disrupted, limited, stopped in our tracks, eaten, digested, decomposed and reconstituted by the human and more-than-human kin who are so much better at caring for this earth than we are.

* * *

There are just a couple more scraps that I want to add to this particular compost heap. A couple more findings for this magpie theology of home-making.

One is that all this talk of turning, staying, grieving, tending, loving, comes from a place of privilege, of relative comfort. Comes from, and is offered to, those who have the privilege of space and time to reflect on the world and what is happening to it.


For countless numbers of our human and more-than-human creature-kin, there is no time to reflect. If the south-coast islands of my birth are looking anxiously towards a near-future when they might be submerged, for many in our world without the luxury of flood defences, that day of drowned islands has already arrived. They feel the full force of the dying earth’s rage, and they are raging in turn. Along with our courageous turning, staying, grieving, tending and loving, we must listen courageously and attentively enough to hear the rage of the earth, and to feel the rage of those who have been made most wrecked and wretched by ecological sins of the most powerful and privileged, and which we, however unintentionally, have bought into.

take a breath: playing and conspiring in the edgelands


And then one last thing.

In less than two weeks’ time, a likely-small group of strangely-dressed adults and children will walk some of the streets and back-paths of our 1960s council estate, re-enacting a 2000-year-old story. We will end up in what many of us locally call ‘the wasteland’, next to the River Tame as it flows in its channel under the towering concrete pillars of the M6 motorway, a large triangle of land, where once there stood three tall tower blocks, which were quickly demolished when they started sinking into the flood plain. The tarmac of access roads and car parks is still there, so are numerous concrete bollards and years of fly-tipping. But the more-than-human wilds have re-claimed much of it: from the familiar nettles and brambles, to more exotic ruderals and re-wilders. The birdsong in the wasteland, especially at dawn, nearly drowns out the constant roar of the cars and lorries on the motorway.

On Palm Sunday in the afternoon, the little rag-tag group of amateur actors and neighbours (people of various faiths and none), will end up in the wasteland to enact the final scene of our Community Passion Play. We will crucify Jesus, not far from one of England’s second city’s biggest waste disposal centres, and his cry of ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ will once again echo around this patch of edgeland.

And then, so the story goes, he will breathe his last breath. And we will hold ours.

But the birds will keep singing. The magpies’ gossip, bicker, yak and snicker will continue.

And in a moment of human silence, we might just notice them. Even over the roar of the motorway. Summoned into silence by the cry of god-forsakenness, shocked into the silence of grief for love crucified by the powers-that-be, by the systems of division and destruction, colonisation and control, we may just possibly undergo a small moment of training to shift our attention elsewhere: from the so-called ‘centres of power’ to the so-called ‘edges’, and the irrepressibly wild life that has reclaimed these edgelands and called them home.

And so we come to take a breath. Time for me to stop talking. And for us to do some con-spiring. Breathing together. Present to one another, quietly, gently, in the horror, the precarity, the wonder of this shared moment in the past, present and future of our planet. Breathing, grounded on this patch of earth, but bringing on our feet the soil of other patches of earth we have trodden before. Breathing more consciously as bodies, close to other bodies, wildly interdependent with a multitude of other bodies across the planet – many of whom are struggling to breathe right now. Catching our breath for what might be to come. Breathing, in and out, the breath of the Spirit of God which animates and joins together all that is. We breathe.