From Despair to Possibility

I’m now re-reading a book I went through very quicky to savor the contents. The editors of Not Too Late, Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua have assembled a number of articles under the book’s subheading, Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility. In another context I have been participating in an organizational review where the pandemic has brought deep grief and despair, though the participants seldom link the pandemic to the larger story.

One chapter I found moving and helpful was entitled Meeting the More and the Marrow. It began with a quote from Terry Tempest Williams, currently writer in residence at the Harvard Divinity School. Williams wrote. “A good friend wrote to me, ‘You are married to sorrow". She replied, “I’m not married to sorrow, I just choose not to look away”.

The writer of the chapter is Roshi Joan Halifax, a Buddhist teacher and some of her own insights are worth reflecting upon too. Here are a few of them:

“Before we touch briefly on the givens of hope and wonder, I think we must navigate, at least a little bit, the tough geographies of fear and of grief, as well as the moral suffering, to discover what these harsher landscapes might offer us.”

“We now face the loss of stable ecosystems in which humans have during the twelve thousand years of the Holocene. Yet it is also important to know that like grief, fear can be a kind of doorway.”

“So perhaps we can discover that fear and grief are givens. Working our grief, facing our fears can transform us”

“Transforming our suffering doesn’t mean that we are going to be returned to the state that we experienced before. But we can discover that suffering and loss have given us a greater ability to live in the present, rather than be overwhelmed by the past”.

Local & Global

This morning’s parish newsletter arrives as usual with a reminder of a coming Community Dinner. This is a project going back more than twenty years. Once a month we feed 80-100 urban poor - some occasionally homeless, but most with some kind of permanent shelter. What they don’t have on a welfare income is the ability to buy enough wholesome food. We try to provide that. It is the least we can do for these regular guests that we have come to know over the years - and sometimes they tell us their stories.

Stories count in the world of climate change and too often they are horror stories. The fires in Hawaii have hit home and in a recent Zoom meeting, people talked about the places they had been - now completely devastated. Being there in the past made it matter. They understood the loss.

What is difficult is the stories we don’t hear. I’ve been reading the book, Not Too Late, which is full of stories of parts of the world with which I have no direct connection. Many are heartbreaking as the people affected suffer the climate degradation caused by mining, deforestation and other forms of exploitation that lay waste their world, while we ignore them. What if it were mandatory for any community like mine to adopt a far off island where the people face the disappearance of their land through erosion and flooding and hear their stories regularly in their own words? It might knock some sense into us as we recognize what we are doing to our island home and its effects on our siblings.