Refugia Newsletter #80

lament, and some sustaining words

Refugia News

Oh friends. I’m just going to write from the heart today. I am feeling as low and discouraged as I’ve ever felt. How about you? I had allowed myself to hope that we were on the verge of an exciting—though challenging—period of transition in this country to a sense of common good, a moment in which America was indeed “turning the page” and “not going back.” And most relevant to this newsletter, I had hoped that the US could take our place as a leader in global transition to a more just and sustainable future.

Instead, a campaign based on hatred, grievance, deception, and violence has won the day. The outlook for climate work is now much more grim. And I fear the chaos and suffering coming our way. I am grieving so deeply the loss of a future I had begun to believe was possible.

As I reflect on my own feelings, I realize that what hurts most is the role of religious people in enabling, excusing, and enthusiastically endorsing this president-elect and all he stands for. All my life, I have loved God, but where is God in all this? All my life, I have loved the church and worked for church-based institutions. I wonder now: what was the point? I feel as alienated as I have ever felt from all that I have believed and served. That’s the unvarnished truth. Thank you for allowing me to share it with you. Perhaps tomorrow I will feel differently. That’s how I feel today.

My colleague Kristin Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne, has been tracking this current darkness for years from an historian’s point of view. In her Substack this week (please read—it’s good), she cited Kamala Harris’s beautiful concession speech, in which Harris urged us to shine like stars in the darkness (do you think Harris was referring obliquely to Philippians 2:15?). Du Mez takes up this darkness/light theme and writes:

The darker things become, the clearer we can see the light.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d prefer a bit less darkness right now. I wish our efforts at illumination had kept us from plunging headlong into this pit of darkness. But here we are.

Of course, for those of us who are Christians, there’s the added bewilderment of knowing that our own co-religionists helped snuff out the lights.

Just after I listened to Harris’s concession speech, I got a call from Jim Wallis. I was eager to glean any wisdom from Jim, as someone who has been in this fight for more than half a century. He was remarkably calm and grounded, and although he’s been working to influence politics for his entire career, he focused in this moment not on political power but on the witness of the church. He reminded me what I already know: history teaches us that the church’s witness always shines brightest from the margins. Christian nationalism isn’t “the Church,” and power isn’t necessary for faithfulness. Christians misunderstanding this is part of what got us into this predicament in the first place.

The margins. I am grateful to say, I have witnessed some of these beautiful margins in faith communities living on the prophetic edge of their traditions. Still, it all feels so fragile. As you know, I’ve been yammering on about refugia for a good three years now. I admit, I have often lapsed into taking a rather triumphalist view of refugia. They’re nature’s healing strategy! We nurture them and they grow and spread and renew things! Let’s do that!

This week was a sobering reminder to me that refugia presume crisis. They are remnants, margins, small pockets where life survives amid severe disturbance. I tell you: I did not want this whole refugia thing to be as desperately relevant as it is right now.

Two other things I’ve had to review with myself. First, as my friend Rev. Jim Antal reminded me on a call this week: refugia is not retreat. As tempting as it might seem to build a metaphorical bunker and hide right now, that’s not what refugia are for. Refugia are vulnerable spaces with permeable membranes. Second: refugia do not always survive. They don’t always work. Sometimes things just die.

I do not know what will live and die in the years ahead. No one does. Not in our religious communities, not in our national public life, not on this planet. I do know, now more than I ever have, that refugia are the strategy we need for survival. We have to find them, nurture them, create them. I know that large-scale change is essential and we have to keep fighting for that. But we can’t fight without grounding in a life-giving space. I hope you can find yours.

Some Bread for the Journey

Let me share with you some words and moments that have upheld me this week. Maybe we can consider these the “refugia sightings” today.

First, this message from author, pastor, and all-around dear person Brian McLaren is the most honest and galvanizing thing I’ve heard so far. Please listen. And thank you, Brian. I’ll share more about him in a moment.

@brianmclarenWelcome to reality. For more - brianmclaren.net #election #terrified #tired #harris #contemplation #faith #climatecrisis

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Next, I commend to you this short piece by the most excellent Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Episcopal priest, author, and climate activist. She presciently published these thoughts the day before the election. She reflects on Yeat’s poem “The Second Coming,” written just after World War I, and then considers Jesus’s more apocalyptic sayings. From these passages, Bullitt-Jonas derives three messages: Don’t be surprised by suffering, don’t be afraid, and don’t fall asleep.

More quotes in a minute, but first, some moments that upheld me this week:

• A Zoom call with the Third Act Faith Coordinating Committee. We met Wednesday night, listened to and encouraged each other, and began taking steps forward. I am so grateful for these good souls from different faith traditions. They are key nodes in the blessed network of people I have met in the last few years through my little refugia project. I am strengthened by so many good people who will persist in doing good work.

• My students. Some of them had such high hopes for this election. Some of them now feel terrified and threatened because they are women, or queer, or just young. In class this week, I was honest with them about my feelings, too, but we were able to appreciate being present to each other, in the moment. The syllabus called for us to discuss the bottom circles of Dante’s Inferno. I’m not even kidding. So that’s what we did. It seemed painfully pertinent—in ways you can imagine.

• An event on Thursday night with Brian McLaren, hosted by still processing, a group describing themselves as “an experiment in community.” It was encouraging to gather with some 150 kind, curious, open people, who have formed this refugia space right in super-conservative Ottawa County, Michigan (just west of Kent County, where I live).

Much of the conversation at the event drew from Brian’s newest book, Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart, which came out in May. I highly recommend it (disclosure: I had the privilege of endorsing it). Allow me to share a lengthy quotation from pp. 84-85 in the chapter called “Hope Is Complicated”:

[I]n the words of spiritual educator Cynthia Bourgeault, "Our great mistake is that we tie hope to outcome.” If we can see a likely path to our desired outcome, we have hope; if we can see no possible path to our desired outcomes, we have despair. If we are unsure whether there is a possible path or not, we keep hope alive, but it remains vulnerable to defeat if that path is closed.

When our prime motive is love, a different logic comes into play. We find courage and confidence, not in the likelihood of a good outcome, but in our commitment to love. Love may or may not provide a way through to a solution to our predicament, but it will provide a way forward in our predicament, one step into the unknown at a time. Sustained by this fierce love …, we may persevere long enough that, to our surprise, a new way may appear where there had been no way. At that point, we will have reasons for hope again. But even if hope never returns, we will live by love through our final breath.

To put it differently, even if we lose hope for a good outcome, we need not lose hope of being good people, as we are able: courageous, wise, kind, loving, “in defiance of all that is bad around us.”

So this is my encouragement to myself, and to you if it helps: lean on good people, hold close your beloved community, seek to act out of love.

OK, one more quote to sustain.

Here’s what Barbara Kingsolver wrote on Facebook this week:

Truth and love have been smacked down, so many more times in history before today. Truth, because it’s often inconvenient, and love because it is vulnerable.

But truth is like gravity, and carbon, and the sun behind an eclipse: it’s still there. And love stays alive if you tend it like a flame. If you feel crushed by unkindness today, it’s a time for grieving, reaching out to loved ones, noticing one bright color somewhere in the day. Remembering what there is to love. Starting with the immediate, the place and people we can tend ourselves, and make safe. We can’t save everything all at once, but it’s still worth saving something. Because there are so many of us to do it.

And we are all still here today, exactly as we were yesterday. Like gravity, and carbon, and the sun behind an eclipse.

Some News

If you can manage a little news right now, I’ll share just a couple stories from the climate space. I won’t say much. Read if you can.

We can’t plan on the US federal government doing anything but standing in the way on climate action and energy transition now. Any hope for continued energy transition will come because 1) economics—clean energy is so much cheaper than fossil fuel energy now, and 2) some states are doubling down on their climate ambitions. In other states, the prospects are mixed. The staff at Inside Climate News put together a roundup article summarizing climate implications of state election results.

Globally, the US will now no doubt be conceding a potential leadership role in climate-related transitions. However, this article by David Gelles from the New York Times suggests that Ajay Banga, president of the World Bank, is going to do his best to keep the transition moving despite the US:

Banga said in the wake of Trump’s re-election, making strides in the rest of the world will be more important than ever. “It was never an America-only game,” he said. “It was always a developed world and middle-income-country game.”

We also know that China has extensive ambitions to become the world leader in clean energy. They are likely to surge far ahead now.

Finally, I commend to you this short, incisive piece by Arielle Samuelson in Heated. It’s titled “1.5C is dead. The climate fight isn’t.” Atkin outlines all the ways the next US presidential administration is likely to roll back climate policy gains and try to block action. She interviewed nine climate scientists and policy experts, including Andrew Dressler from Texas A&M. She writes:

But even with all this, it’s still possible the world can limit the temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, Dessler told me. It all depends on the actions of state governments, local governments, other countries, and regular people.

“I still think 2 degrees is reasonable,” he said. “Because again, whatever the U.S. does, the rest of the world is moving on.”

Book Review

For my blog last week, I wrote this review of Genevieve’s Guenther’s new book, The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It. The book is a dense read, but a vital one. I really appreciate how Guenther organizes climate propaganda into six themes: alarmist, cost, growth, “India and China,” innovation, and resilience. Expect the propaganda to get worse starting now. You might appreciate the preparation Guenther provides.

An excerpt from my review:

[Guenther’s] goal is to equip sympathetic readers with appropriate, fact-based rhetorical strategies in order to counter deceptive rhetoric, especially the subtle kind that sounds sensible but gets co-opted to sustain fossil fuel interests. She writes in the preface, “To undo climate change, a new collective ‘we’—me, you, everyone who reads this book, everyone with whom we share its ideas—will need to use the power of words to fight climate propaganda and transform the deep ideologies of the fossil-fuel economy. Contributing to that transformation is the goal of this book.”

Friends, thank you, as always, for reading. I am grateful for you. I hope we can sustain each other in the days ahead.

Bold text in quotations is added unless otherwise indicated.