#AdventBookClub: Thursday – Internationalism – the United Nations

“Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone?” asks Jesus. And yet we know that not every adult does give to the children in their care what is good and nourishing. We know that humans hurt one another knowingly and unknowingly all the time. We know that we who have enough still resist sharing with those who do not.

In the case of managing the impact of climate change, the communities worst affected have repeatedly asked those which are most responsible for the problem, not for bread, but for serious, rapid and sustained change. And they have not received it. They have received empty promises – the equivalent of a stone.

It is, at least in part, an issue of failing to fully comprehend the depth of our interconnectedness. If we think in terms of boundaries and strangers, we can continue to resist the call for bread, for change which is essential to sustaining life, both human and non-human. If we allow ourselves to think in terms of kinship and tangled roots, perhaps we will begin to put down our stones and look around for some yeast and flour.

This year for #AdventBookClub we are reading “Sleepers Wake: Getting Serious About Climate Change” by Nicholas Holtam. For conversations and blog posts from various group members, follow the hashtag on Twitter or join the Facebook group.

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#AdventBookClub: Wednesday – Made in God’s image

This chapter raises, in a round about way, an important question: what, or who, are we in danger of allowing to usurp the place of God in our lives, our priorities, our imaginations? Is it a particular figure, as in the story of Jesus and the coin: a politician, a celebrity, even a religious leader? Is it a concept: growth, progress, stability, status, unity…?

It is a serious question. All of us, subconsciously, will from time to time elevate someone or something beyond what we should. We need to be alert to those times and prepared to check ourselves and one another, to repent – literally to turn again – and refocus our gaze on Jesus. We need to remember again whose image we bear, and whose measure of our worth is worth our attention. This is part of the work of Advent.

This year for #AdventBookClub we are reading “Sleepers Wake: Getting Serious About Climate Change” by Nicholas Holtam. For conversations and blog posts from various group members, follow the hashtag on Twitter or join the Facebook group.

#AdventBookClub: Tuesday – The richest of poor men

Before reading this chapter I had not previously come across the idea of Gross National Happiness (GNH), but I am unsurprised to discover that it came from Bhutan. When I was an undergraduate student, heavily involved in the life of my college chapel, we received a visit from a group of Bhutanese Buddhist monks. It was evident from even the briefest exchanges with them that they lived life in a very different mode from anything I had ever experienced. I have found the same among many Christian communities of monks and nuns too, although perhaps not quite to the same extent.

Finding a non-financial measure of a country’s wellbeing seems like such an attractive idea. And yet, the idea of a GNH leaves me slightly uneasy. Do we need to quantify everything? Should we – and, indeed, can we – measure and quantify happiness? Or can we think even more boldly and find new ways to order our priorities? Ones which don’t rely on replacing one set of quantifiable metrics with another, but admit that to really know the state of a country, a community, an individual requires an attentiveness beyond anything numbers alone can convey.

This year for #AdventBookClub we are reading “Sleepers Wake: Getting Serious About Climate Change” by Nicholas Holtam. For conversations and blog posts from various group members, follow the hashtag on Twitter or join the Facebook group.

#AdventBookClub: Monday – Making the most of our talents

Is it true that “we are shaped by the challenges we surmount”? Perhaps. But I’m not sure how helpful that framing is. What about the challenges we don’t “surmount”? We are shaped by them too. We are shaped by challenges in ways which stretch and expand our horizons, and we are also shaped in ways which leave us traumatised, damaged, and forever changed. A theology which cannot account for that is not worth having.

I found this chapter a challenge (though not a traumatising one!). The framing of the parables cited as examples of needing to be ready and prepared is not one which sits well with me. It’s far too close to the “Jesus is coming, look busy!” signs which are supposed to be “jokey” but exhibit a theology of cheap grace and self-sufficiency.

Advent is not a call to be busy, efficient, productive, or prepared. It is a call to attentiveness, to sit gently with the open-endedness of knowing neither the day nor the hour, to allow ourselves to notice God in the joys and the challenges of life without clinging too tightly to either.

This year for #AdventBookClub we are reading “Sleepers Wake: Getting Serious About Climate Change” by Nicholas Holtam. For conversations and blog posts from various group members, follow the hashtag on Twitter or join the Facebook group

#AdventBookClub: Advent 3 – being human

‘Dominion’ is, as this chapter discusses, a quite unhelpful work for describing the relationship between humans and our non-human neighbours. It implies a particular power dynamic which is not (at least in my reading of them) faithful to either of the creation stories in Genesis. And it has some unfortunate resonances, in a world shaped by colonialism and empire, with all those times and places where (usually white) humans have claimed dominion over (usually black and brown) other humans.

But I am not sure terms like ‘stewardship’ are any better. Still, there is a power dynamic which places humans in some sense ‘over’ our non-human neighbours. Stewardship is intended to be a more ‘benevolent’ kind of power than dominion, but it does nothing to challenge the fundamentally hierarchical understanding of the relationship.

And yet we know that however much power we may think we have (for good or ill) over our non-human neighbours, we depend on them absolutely for our survival. This is not really a relationship of hierarchy, but on of mutuality and interdependence. Perhaps we need to find new ways of understanding and expressing our relationship with our non-human neighbours, on whom we depend and who depend on us, with whom God has created us in mutual dependence and support, if we are to bring about a significant shift in our attitudes and actions.

This year for #AdventBookClub we are reading “Sleepers Wake: Getting Serious About Climate Change” by Nicholas Holtam. For conversations and blog posts from various group members, follow the hashtag on Twitter or join the Facebook group

#AdventBookClub: Saturday – the beauty of holiness

I might not have gone out today if we hadn’t run out of butter. And I would have missed out! As I walked across the park to the corner shop, I paused multiple times to admire the frost – the glitter of it across the expanse of the football pitch, the soft feathery layers of it on a fallen leaf, the sharp outlines of twigs on the path. Beauty of holiness indeed.

But beauty is not always so obvious. Recently I went walking with a friend who is particularly good at spotting interesting fungi. As we walked across woods and fields, gradually we all started to notice the fungi too. Every now and then someone would call out “fungus!” and point, and we would all gather round to admire it. Now I find myself noticing fungi more than I ever did before. Sometimes we need one another to draw our attention to beauty, and to holiness, which would otherwise pass us by.

The wonderful thing about fungi is that what we see is only the tip of the iceberg. Beyond the visible blooms we see in the grass or on a tree trunk, there is a huge hidden network, complex and sophisticated, on which the whole ecosystem depends. Beauty is not always in the eye of the beholder – sometimes it is hidden from our sight. The holiness of the creator is reflected in “things seen and unseen”.

So yes – let us delight in and give thanks for the beauty of holiness. But let’s keep expanding our understanding of where beauty – where holiness – may be found.

This year for #AdventBookClub we are reading “Sleepers Wake: Getting Serious About Climate Change” by Nicholas Holtam. For conversations and blog posts from various group members, follow the hashtag on Twitter or join the Facebook group

#AdventBookClub: Friday – fear or love?

“Fear or love?” sounds a bit like “cake or death?” – obviously we’re going to choose love. But I’m not sure the two can be so neatly separated out. Sure, “perfect love casts out fear”, but our love is not perfect. We fear for the future of those we love. We fear the harm that may befall them. We worry about whether they will be safe and happy and fulfilled. That’s a normal part of human love.

And with our planet too, as we love it we fear for its future. Both love and fear are motivating factors to change our behaviour in ways which limit our impact on the environment. And very often they are tangled up together. Even in the local (which can be easier to grasp than the global) we may be motivated to campaign against a particular development both because of fear of it’s impact on the local landscape, and love for the landscape it will mar.

And what about “the fear of the Lord”? This is not, I think, a cowering fear of a God who might punish on a whim. Rather it is a right reverence and humility in the face of the awesomeness of God. In the context of climate change, perhaps it is the opening of our eyes to the splendour and majesty of God’s creation, which reflects something of who God is.

As we grapple with our love and fears for the future of our planet, and for future generations, and as we try to hold all that in the perspective of God’s awesome love, we would do well to remember the wisdom of Wendell Berry in his wonderful poem The Peace of Wild Things:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

This year for #AdventBookClub we are reading “Sleepers Wake: Getting Serious About Climate Change” by Nicholas Holtam. For conversations and blog posts from various group members, follow the hashtag on Twitter or join the Facebook group.

#AdventBookClub: Thursday – Travelling together

One thing this chapter brings home for me is how quickly things change in our responses to the climate crisis. Published earlier this year, the reflection on COP 26 already seems dated and a bit naive, read in the wake of COP 27 and in the context of (among other things) the news of approval for Britain’s first new coal mine in many decades.

But perhaps that is the point. The comparison with the Israelites wandering in the wilderness is well made. We do not know what our journey into the future will look like, or where it will lead us. But we do know that, for good or ill, we travel together, dependent on one another, caught up in one another’s hopes and fears.

Advent is a wilderness time. It is a time of knowing ourselves in the desert of repentence. And it is a time too of knowing the wilderness for what it is – not only a barren, risky, and sometimes frightening place, but also a place of profound encounter with God. We see this reflected in the prophetic texts of scripture to which we pay particular attention in Advent. “I will make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert”, we repeat each day at Morning Prayer during this season. God is the one who promises water, and guidance, and new life, and who does not wait for us to emerge from the wilderness before coming to meet us with what we need.

This year for #AdventBookClub we are reading “Sleepers Wake: Getting Serious About Climate Change” by Nicholas Holtam. For conversations and blog posts from various group members, follow the hashtag on Twitter or join the Facebook group.

#AdventBookClub: Wednesday – Twelve Steps

There is, no doubt, some merit in finding “a practical framework for addressing personal change” in relation to our consumption of fossil fuels, and other behaviours which have a devastating impact on the climate and our more vulnerable neighbours. Perhaps some parallels with the twelve-step framework may be applicable, although I am wary of applying the word “addiction” to anything other than, well, addiction.

But an emphasis on personal responsibility and personal action seems inadequate, and potentially an unhelpful diversion, in the context of something which requires collective action on a scale beyond what any of us can achieve or influence individually. And there is a wider theological point here too: the importance of interdependence and community, not as an optional extra, but as an essential.

We live in a culture in which individualism – individual responsibility, individual action – is idolised, and that culture does not stop at the boundary of the church. Truly caring for the planet we inhabit requires us to acknoweldge and act from our interconnectedness.

This year for #AdventBookClub we are reading “Sleepers Wake: Getting Serious About Climate Change” by Nicholas Holtam. For conversations and blog posts from various group members, follow the hashtag on Twitter or join the Facebook group.

#AdventBookClub: Tuesday – St Nicholas

I am intrigued by the framing of tackling climate change as an act of intergenerational generosity. Especially when juxtaposed with the account of the tradition of child bishops on St Nicholas’ Day, it feels to me a little performative. A step beyond children being valued for the cute factor, to children being valued for their wise words. But still not quite reaching the point of children being valued for who they are.

Valuing our neighbours – children, adults, animals, plants, rocks, oceans, and all the rest – for exactly who they are, rather than our tokenistic ideas of who they might be, is surely an essential move towards caring more deeply for the way our actions affect all those with whom we share this planet.

Compare and contrast with the wonderful Rowan Williams poem shared in this chapter, Advent Calendar, which allows the things of Advent – dead leaves, frost, mist, dark, blood, earth and, yes, a child – to speak for themselves, to exist in complete and ambiguous ways which draw us into deeper knowing.

This year for #AdventBookClub we are reading “Sleepers Wake: Getting Serious About Climate Change” by Nicholas Holtam. For conversations and blog posts from various group members, follow the hashtag on Twitter or join the Facebook group.