Lenten Wilderness: The Uninhabitable Earth

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming, published two weeks ago, will help to shape my Lenten experience this year. In turn, I suspect my observance of Lent will color my reading of David Wallace-Wells’s blunt and lucid account of the present reality of climate change. My intention during Lent is to figure out every day what to give up or let go of to ensure time for a close reading of a chunk of this book along with a close reading of the Daily Office readings for that day and plenty of time for prayer. 

“It is worse, much worse, than you think,” reads the first sentence of The Uninhabitable Earth. 

“We confess to you, Lord, all our past unfaithfulness: the pride, hypocrisy, and impatience of our lives.” We pray this confession in our Litany of Penitence as one of many particular faults. All of the sins we confess on Ash Wednesday have some bearing on the particular sin that most directly speaks to the subject of The Uninhabitable Earth: 

For our waste and pollution of your creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us,Accept our repentance, Lord. 

Yesterday’s familiar Daily Office reading from John’s Gospel (John 1:1-18) reminded us of the reality of the Incarnation, the Word that came to live among us in our world of earth, air, fire, and water. While some forms of piety emphasize a heaven / earth dualism during Lent, the reality of our faith and of our lives is that we are part of the world God created and pronounced good, the same world so deeply loved by God that Jesus, God Incarnate, came to dwell here with us. Whether we can understand it, and even if we deny it, the laws of chemistry and physics and our past and present actions are resulting in big changes that have forever changed life on our planet. And whether we can understand it, and even if we deny it, God’s love for us and for all of creation, the love that we know through Jesus’s love, is with us as we respond to the huge challenges we face. 

I’ve chosen to read The Uninhabitable Earth not despite the psychological and spiritual challenge of looking squarely at our present situation on this planet, but because of the enormity of that challenge. The temptation to look away is a true temptation, a temptation to sin. Our failure to acknowledge climate change as the central issue of our time — our practice of willful ignorance, of ignoring the very warm elephant in the room as we allow ourselves to be distracted by all sorts of craziness along with all sorts of other serious concerns that will only worsen as Earth’s temperatures soar — is more than an oversight. Our willful ignorance that results in human suffering and species extinction is a sin, and the only way to repent of willful ignorance is to seek knowledge. 

I have no idea what I’ll encounter in the practice of reflecting on this latest summary of our perilous condition alongside our daily lectionary readings and Lenten prayers, but when any of us chooses a serious Lenten discipline, we have no idea what we will encounter in our chosen wilderness. By definition, the wilderness has no set paths to follow, no guarantees of what we will find. 

In this age of global warming, we are all in the wilderness, all lost whether or not we realize it.  Choosing a forty day interior wilderness journey that acknowledges our material situation seems appropriate to me this year. I’ll post some reports along the way if I find something worth sharing.

Wilderness

A week ago, those of us who observe Ash Wednesday and want to encourage others to practice those things that give us a holy beginning to Lent were wondering how much of a shadow Valentine’s Day would cast over the beginning of Lent in the greater culture. What would people be thinking about Wednesday evening — hearts and flowers, or the beginning of our forty day wilderness journey? By evening, though, the nation’s focus was on yet another in a series of horrible acts of violence, this one a school shooting in Parkland, Florida that killed seventeen people. Once again, American children were killed at school. Once again, our nation’s leaders were big on thoughts and prayers but not so interested in talking about what substantial policy changes they proposed to help protect our children from deadly violence at school. 

We are in the wilderness, and not just the figurative wilderness of our Lenten journey. We are lost in a place that is empty and disorienting and frightening. Taken as a group, the adults of our nation have forsaken our responsibilities to our children. We have said we love our nation’s children even as we allow greed and sloth and probably several other deadly sins to keep us from having policies such as those in other nations that would make our public places, including our schools, much safer places for children. 

That we Americans allow sin to keep us from protecting our children is no new revelation, of course. We have been in the wilderness a long time, watching global temperatures rise along with concentrations of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere while greed and sloth and probably several other deadly sins keep our leaders from developing policies that could mitigate the effects of climate change. 

Much has been made of the hollowness of “thoughts and prayers” without action after events like mass shootings. Prayers of confession and repentance, though, necessarily result in action. Truly changed hearts result in truly changed lives. Truly changed hearts in our nation’s adults would produce genuine love that would not let sin get in the way of protecting our children. That said, we as a culture are far from that point of conversion. So long as a short-sighted desire for a perceived private gain trumps any impulse toward the public good in the hearts of voters and the people they choose to develop our public policies, we will remain in the wilderness. 

At its best, the wilderness is a place where so much is stripped away that we see ourselves as we are — our sins along with the gift of being beloved children of God — and repent. This is why many Christians choose some sort of discipline for Lent that echoes the wilderness experience; that wilderness experience can bring us closer to God when it results in penitent hearts. When we see clearly who we are and the things that tempt us and then choose to turn our backs on the temptations, we are ready to leave the wilderness. 

But some of us won’t even acknowledge that we are in the wilderness.  If we refuse to acknowledge the reality of our situation, if we pretend that we can continue living as we do and putting our sinful desires before our love of God and our neighbors — including our children — we will remain stuck in the wilderness, lost in a place that is empty and disorienting and, if only we would let ourselves feel it, frightening.

This week, much of our nation was shaken by yet another school shooting. This week also the Bering Sea lost a shocking amount of sea ice, something that should not be happening at all in February. The upshot of these big changes in the Arctic region is that changes in the Arctic create changes in weather patterns further south that promise to be very disruptive. An unstable Arctic means an unstable planet, and an unstable planet means a terrible legacy for our children and grandchildren. 

We are in the wilderness. Some of us want to do what we must to get out of the wilderness, and some of us don’t care enough about ourselves or others to even tell ourselves the truth about where we are. Our work is to do our own work of repentance, and then take the news — both the news of the reality of our situation on earth and the good news of repentance and restoration — to others. 

For everyone this year, not just observant Christians, Ash Wednesday revealed just how far astray we have gone. Jesus calls us back to the discipline of love that will make all the difference in how we live. 

Second Advent and First Snow

We had the first snowfall of the season for this part of Nebraska today. I’d been thinking about the lectionary texts for the second Sunday of Advent, especially Isaiah 40:1-11 and Mark 1:1-8, and thinking about the geography of these texts: Why is the wilderness the place to prepare the way of the Lord? Why is John baptizing and preaching in the wilderness instead of in Jerusalem?

When we go into the wilderness, we leave behind the comforts of home and deliberately place ourselves somewhere where we might have new experiences and see things in a new way. Perhaps people report having profound spiritual experiences in wild areas not only because of the beauty and wonder we find there; it could also have a lot to do with leaving behind familiar things that get so much of a hold on us that they keep us from growing.

The first snowfall of the season brings a bit of the wild into our familiar routines. Plans get changed. Errands that seemed important suddenly seem less essential. Having to let go of some of our expectations for the day can be frustrating, but it can also be freeing. We find time to go out and clear a sidewalk and feel the snow on our faces, or we stay in and do some baking or work on a project that’s gotten crowded out by other things, or we simply look out on the snow and take in the beauty.

Our reluctance to let go of a way of living that has become so comfortable for us that we can’t imagine living any other way can keep us from being better stewards of the environment. Letting go of our expectations around energy sources, modes of transportation, consumer habits, ways of growing, processing, and packaging food, and a myriad of other activities may be frustrating and difficult for some people, but it will also free us to live richer lives that allow us to care for God’s creation and make a sustainable and healthy life possible for more of God’s children.

St.Francis cloaked in snow

Wilderness Walk

The First Sunday of Lent, our Gospel reading is about Jesus going into the wilderness for forty days. This Gospel wilderness is something different from the notion of wilderness some of us have; the Gospel wilderness is an empty, desolate place, not the pristine forests, meadows, and waterways some of us picture when we think about how good it would be to get away to a wilderness area for a few days.

If the Gospel wilderness is a place of desolation, what counts as a Lenten wilderness for us today? Where do we encounter desolation that calls us to follow Jesus’ example of faithfulness on a journey through the wilderness? We don’t have to look far to find situations in our lives, both personal and communal, that can set us on metaphorical journeys through desolate territory.

People sometimes ask me how I can bear thinking about the things environmental activists need to think about. Last month, when Dr. Chris Field from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) both contributed to an update on global warming science to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, and also spoke at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago, he suggested that earlier predictions about climate change might have underestimated the severity of global warming in coming years. Earlier estimates didn’t account for things like the amount of carbon dioxide stored in the permafrost of the Arctic tundra that would be released into the atmosphere as the permafrost thaws.

This has been on my mind, and I know it has been in the news. Yet several people to whom I mentioned these reports said they didn’t know how I could think about it; they knew this was important, but couldn’t let themselves really listen to it or think about the possibility that these latest predictions might be sound. And a couple of people asked me point blank how we can think about such things without falling into despair.

Dealing honestly and openly with these issues, looking at them instead of running away from them, gives us an opportunity to follow Jesus’ example of how to walk through a desolate wilderness. This sort of journey calls for faithfulness; it calls us to do the hard work of wrestling with these issues while remaining hopeful. As followers of Jesus, we know how to say no to the temptation of despair; we know how to keep going when it would be tempting to give up and pretend everything is fine. We know how to keep focused on the light, and we know the darkness will not overcome it. Living in hope doesn’t mean ignoring problems; it means trekking through the desolate places with grateful hearts, trusting that our faithfulness will get us through.


March began here on Sunday with frigid temperatures and snow on the ground, but there are signs of spring there for the seeing. The sun had enough warmth to have melted the snow in some places, while in other places the sun’s warmth on icy ponds made water vapor visible in the cold air. There are shoots of early spring flowers coming up through the snow, and flocks of birds responding to the lengthening days. Yesterday a flock of robins arrived in our yard, and some of them were singing as if it were a warm day in April.

The month of March, when winter ends and spring begins, is a time of contrasts. ‘Lent’ comes from the Old English word for spring, for the lengthening days. Lent, too, is a time of contrasts; a time of desolation mixed with hope and joy. It’s a time to experience a wilderness walk with Jesus, relying on Christ to help us get past the temptations that would make us turn around and quit walking, and learning the faithfulness that brings hope into the most desolate of situations.

Scientists, economists, and other experts contribute analysis of data to help us understand what is happening in our world. People of faith have something else to contribute to the conversation, a voice of hope that helps us make hard choices and do the work that lies ahead of us.