Ecological Grief, Seminary Education,

​and Funerals for Lost Glaciers
​

Credit: Francois Lenoir/Reuters: The sun shines low in the sky just after midnight over a coastline near the Norwegian Arctic town of Longyearbyen. The water is usually frozen solid, but climate change has impacted the area.

Iceland holds funeral for first glacier lost to climate changeNation commemorates the once huge Okjokull glacier with plaque that warns action is needed to prevent climate change.  Click ​here.

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Dear God of Lost Glaciers,

I am preparing for Christian ministry.  I feel called by You toward this kind of life.

​I am taking courses in the Bible, the history of Christianity, theology, worship, and pastoral counseling.  In the counseling courses my teachers are sharing skills to help me support people who are grieving.  And in the worship courses my teachers are sharing skills to help me lead worship services.   

​But I am needing a skill that my teachers seem not to have considered.  Specifically, I need to have the counseling skills to help people who are suffering from a grief that seems to have no end and that will intensify over the course of their lives.   I'll call it ecological grief.  I'm suffering from it, too. 

​It's not just grief about this or that environmental problem; it's a more generalized grief about the chaotic state of the world and the sense that there's no turning back.  We've lost too much.  I think more and more people are feeling this.  We need to mourn.

So I need the worship skills to create and lead rituals of mourning that can help us own our ecological grief.  These rituals can't be about praising You.  Maybe there's a place for that; but we can have too much of it, too.  For my part I am tired of imagining You as a king on a throne.  I imagine You as the open and relational (process) theologians do: as a companion to the world's sufferings and a fellow sufferer who understands.  You don't have to be all-powerful for me to love You.

The worship skills can't simply be calls to action, either.  I think we are growing a little weary of activism that lacks spiritual depth.  It proceeds from rage or anxiety, but not from a quiet heart and clear-eyed vision.  We need to act from a gentle and deep place that is honest about what has happened and is happening, and that calls us to preserve what can be preserved.   I'll be honest.  I think we're called toward a salvage operation not a grand utopia.

So we need rituals of mourning; we need funerals.  If You are mentioned in them, we'll appeal to the fact that You mourn with us.  We'll be honest about how the glaciers are lost to you, too, except as a memory.  You are, after all, the Deep Remembering. 

I'm not asking You to reverse what has happened.  I know you can't do that.  You can't change what we've done.  I'm just asking you to give us the strength to cry and be sad, along with You and then, as we mourn, feel your call to save what can be saved.

Is that OK?

​Jennifer

​Ecological Grief

Is climate change causing us to experience 'ecological grief'?

How does ecological grief differ from other types of grief?

"Ecological grief is a very different form of grieving in some ways because many people have described it as a grief without end. Right now we're living in such a chaotic world of loss. Some people have identified it as the sixth mass extinction. We know there's climate change, there's biodiversity loss, weather shifts and things that impact us on a daily basis, but also things that are going to impact our planet and the health and well-being of many species moving forward. In some ways its very similar to other forms of grief because it can be very isolating and debilitating, but simultaneously it can also be something where we find comfort in others and in community. Another important difference about ecological grief is we don't have rituals to celebrate passing or death of more than humans in the same way that we do with humans."

Like funerals and other kinds of things?

"Yeah, we don't have those similar moments where we mark a loss or a passing and where a community comes together to support the people who have lost."

Interfaith Funeral for Dead Glaciers:
​
​Need Music and Poetry

Dear Pastor Dorothy,

We are the college students who meet at your church every Wednesday night. 

We want to hold a funeral for dead glaciers.  What provokes this letter is a dead glacier in Iceland, Okjokull, recently memorialized in Iceland.  But it's not Okjokull alone that is our concern, or even all the dying glaciers.  Its more than that.   It's all that is dying in our age of climate change.  

Can you recommend some music for us?   Maybe some poems, too.   It's OK to choose material from the Bible, but we'd also appreciate some materials from other sources.  We are an interfaith group; and some of us are spiritual independents, not affiliated with any organized religion.

We know that when you receive requests like this, you often choose music that is uplifting or at least hope-giving.  We get that.  But here want to memorialize what has been lost.  We call it owning the shadow.   

For us, the shadow is what we hide from.   The shadow includes our own sadness and the sad state of affairs of the planet, from which people and animals and others suffer.  And it includes our sinfulness in bringing about some of the sadness.   Sadness and sinfulness hidden-from-view: that's what we mean by the shadow. 

At our memorial service we want to be honest about the shadow, to know it and feel it.   We want to feel the perishing.  Of course we hope that this owning will lead to some kind of creative transformation.   We are committed to helping bring about a new kind of society.  We call it Ecological Civilization.  

But for our funeral, we really don't want to focus on hope.  Without genuine grieving, hope is impossible, if possible at all.  Can you recommend some songs for our funeral?  We lean toward weird electronic music and death metal, but are open to other kinds as well.

Gladys