Ecotheology Entangled in Thick Hope
Adapted and evolved from my essay “Teaching Thick Hope in the Middle of an Apocalypse” in the Sequoia Grove Journal.
By Christopher L. Fici, PhD
How do we understand the encounter, or the entanglement, between religion and ecology in the time of our ever-emerging, ever-mutating climate emergency? Certainly the field has evolved and hasn’t evolved in kind. It began with analysis of catastrophe and continues ever more so. The contemporary field of study concerning religion and ecology (for an excellent overview of the field read Ecology and Religion by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim of the Yale Forum for Religion and Ecology) in many ways began with a catastrophic reading of the tea-leaves. Consider the historian Lynn White Jr’s foundational 1967 essay on “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,” in which White argues that “especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.” Consider the early work of the legendary theologian John Cobb Jr., who in 1972 was already asking “Is It Too Late?”
Now four decades on, these original seeds of eco-criticism have developed into robust and dynamic approaches to religious history, theology, ecological ethics, and climate science. Many of us now take for granted that dualistically destructive models of human relationship to our networks of ecology (our integral ecology as framed by Pope Francis in Laudato’ Si—the matrix of natural, social, and internal aka existential ecology) emerged from a toxic mix of religious chauvinism, colonialist impulses, and white supremacy, rooted in the Doctrine of Discovery. The field of religion and ecology in the 21st century is also entangled righteously with local and global movements of environmental, food, and climate justice. Even more so, inspired by decolonial rubrics which open pathways to regenerative encounters with diverse modalities of indigenous wisdom (I can never recommend enough the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer and her book Braiding Sweetgrass in this regard) the encounter of religion and ecology returns back to home base: to enchanted intimacy with our fellow Earth-beings and the miraculously creative living systems which provide us with everything we need to flourish well together.
“Flourish” Neil Berrett.
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Yet, in our scholarship, in our pedagogy, and in our movement work, we face the emerging ghouls of climate migration and the Sixth Extinction (the first global extinction event primarily caused by dominating human influence). We face decades of intentionally cultivated indifference and denial and excruciatingly missed opportunities, even while opportunities for actual progress have not gone entirely extinct. The COVID pandemic is a microcosm (as strange as that may sound) of the macrocosm of ecological disruption which will be the defining experience of the 21st Century. There is no going back to normal. We now live in a time of cascading-and-receding emergencies, climate-centered and otherwise.
Is it strange, is it even possible, to feel hope in the midst of such entangled emergencies? How do we, the movers and shakers of religion and ecology, the scholars and farmers and regenerative ecologists, the Franciscan priest determined to get their community to compost, and the young climate justice advocates serving in communities like the Sunrise Movement, continue to cultivate what the physic/mystics Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry describe as our autopoietic energies of creation? The creative impulse is at the core of the design of the universe. Every being, every community, and every cosmological process is saturated with autopoietic capacities, with the capacity to “participate directly in the cosmos-creating endeavor.” (The Universe Story, 75)
How do we participate in renewable capacities of creation aka practices of regeneration, when we now live within an ecological framework which is increasingly precarious and chaotic? As I meditate about this with my dear students at Iona College in NY, we dare to consider throwing hope aside, the entire baby out with the increasingly fetid and overflowing bath water. What kind of hope is hope in such a hopeless situation? So many of us, too many of us, simply fail personally and communally at upholding such necessary principles as the Seventh Generation principle. What kind of hope is hope against the tide of ecological grief? Hopelessness is yet not an option. As Pope Francis declares “there are no frontiers or barriers, political or social, behind which we can hide, still less is there room for the globalization of indifference.” Yet many try to militarize their indifference. With the most horrific irony, the new vanguard of fascism both draws upon its original rooting in anthropocentric environmentalism and appropriates contemporary ecological concerns to promote philosophies of ecofascism. The toxic mixture of ecofascism with the increasing number of climate refugees create nightmarish temptation to succumb to politics centered in a kind of climate totalitarianism.
“Cross and Cosmos”, Cosmik Ikon 2. C
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Enough with the gloom-and-doom from womb-to-tomb professor!! Let us join with the maxim of the philosopher Roy Scranton as we say: “We’re Doomed. Now What?” Hope is not extinct either. Let us try thick hope. Hope bonded in the fierce intimacy of community. Hope rooted in genuine communion with creation. Hope immersed in the ecstasy of Earthiness. The constructive theologian Catherine Keller thickens hope back into its tangibility and Earthiness by calling upon the Hebrew concept of tiqvah. The constructive theologian Catherine Keller thickens hope back into its tangibility and Earthiness by calling upon the Hebrew concept of tiqvah. Tiqvah is...
“...literally ‘a collection of fibers that are twisted together to make a strong and firm cord.’ It comes from the verb root meaning ‘to collect’...This fibrous hope has nothing to do with a future abstracted from the present, with pictures of a heavenly happy ending or just a markedly better tomorrow...Tiqvah names not a projection of future but an interweave of now; it signified a cord ‘collected,’ made strong, by interweaving multiple fibers of time and narrative...It is a twisted hope that binds us to the loom of life now, in the now-moment that knots or nets the past and its traumatism to the possible. To the future not of an illusion but of the present. If we cannot hold it, bind it, in some fleshly mattering sense, it is not hope.” (Political Theology of the Earth, 174)
We must return to the experience of what the philosopher Andreas Weber describes as erotic ecology. The erotic nature of ecological systems reveals an instinct for communion and connection which is antithetical to the lowest common denominator of the survival of the fittest. As Weber writes “in erotic ecology, the feeling of joy is an integral component part of a flourishing ecosystem...Through this experience-and this is precisely what makes it erotic-every creature can perceive its reflection in every other, because we have a sensitive, vulnerable body that depends as much on bonds as on the air we breathe. According to this deep principle, we know how other beings feel, because they have bodies like we do. The affection of this body is mercy, not greed.” (Matter and Desire, 10)
“Nata Luna Sans” by sous la pleine lune immobile
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Thick hope emerges and is protected by the thick symbiotic bonds of relationship. From my own perspective as a constructive ecotheologian I strive is to live within the rhythm of erotic ecology, in which we understand “that on this planet there is a foundational erotic attraction between all bodies, a pull that calls me, my body, toward others just as the valley attracts waters.” To live symbiotically is also live in the tones of what the theorist/philosopher Donna Haraway describes as sympoiesis, making-with, becoming-with, “learning again, or for the first time, how to become less deadly, more response-able, more attuned, more capable or surprise, more able to practice the arts of living and dying well in multispecies symbiosis, sympoiesis, and symanimagenesis on a damaged planet…” (Staying with the Trouble, 98) Poetry, autopoiesis, Earthy embrace, the righteous prophetic fierceness of justice, anticipatory communities, and regenerative ecologies make up the cords of tiqvah, of thick hope.
There are numerous answers to the questions of “We’re Doomed. Now What?” One manifestation of tiqvah is the knowledge that we know what to do; it is just that too many of us refuse to center this knowledge in communion with our desires. We desire what we do not need (the unnecessary necessities which fill up our landfills and ocean-scapes) and we do not desire what we truly need. Movements of climate justice and ecological restoration are and must be always rooted in the thick hope of Earthy intimacy. Earthy intimacy is the key and the goal. Earthy intimacy is what entangles us in thick hope.
References
Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, The Universe Story
Pope Francis, Laudato’ Si: On Care for our Common Home
Andreas Weber, Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene