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...
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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.
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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.’
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.
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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.
