PROFESSOR Panu Pihkala, of the University of Helsinki, has written that ecological grief is a “moral emotion” (in Eco-Anxiety, Tragedy, and Hope, Zygon, 2018). He finds that eco-anxiety is rarely clinical and is rather a perfectly normal response to existential threats, both imminent and in the future. When ecological anxiety is left unprocessed, it has a paralysing effect on the individual, and on society. A socially constructed silence about the climate emergency is causing “severe and pervasive apathy”, stifling action in response. Pihkala also reports on work joint work by natural scientists and theologians in Finland to help people process their eco-anxiety.
We need to find the words to break the silence. How do we as Christians articulate this place of ecological crisis — and the current polycrisis — with faith? My Ph.D. research develops connecting points between the theology of Julian of Norwich and the trauma-informed theology identified by theologians such as Professor Shelly Rambo, and is in conversation with the work of scholars such as Timothy Middleton, who also applies trauma theology to the ecological crisis.
These intersections are articulated in Blue: A lament for the sea, which is one long narrative poem written in free verse. It voices the grief of a lone woman swimming off the Scottish Hebridean Isle of Iona today. Dusk falls. Oceans entangle birth with death. Overwhelmed, the swimmer fights to the life. The univocal turns into the universal — even touching other dimensions of time and reality.
THE beauty of poetry is that it can distil ideas and let them speak. Three concepts of arising merge in the narrative: the rising seas of climate breakdown; an apocalyptic sea flood in a medieval Gaelic doomsday prophecy, drowning all save for Iona, which arises; and geological fact — the collision of tectonic plates in deep time, forcing the earth’s crust up to the surface, and forming Iona.
The poem’s ecosystem encompasses faith and the spiritual with three further intertwining themes: the sense of everything as connected in a relational ontology, or way of being; the iconic Celtic pattern of nature intertwining with the eternal; and the faith of Julian of Norwich, for whom a hazelnut and all things homely become gateways to the divine.
The material-spiritual triad resonates further with trauma-informed spirituality and its emphasis on wounded bodies, on hurting places, and on collapsing ecosystems; and the urgent collective need to bear witness to this trauma — eyes-wide-open, heart-full thinking, taking in as much reality as possible. All these elements infused the writing of the poetry and its narrative arc, and lead to its inexorable conclusion. It bears witness in faith, and models a response. Love, even divine love, drives lament; hope is action.
THE theology was inspired by Julian of Norwich’s concept of “one-ing”. Julian develops the metaphor with great complexity in her longer text, known as A Revelation of Divine Love (as edited in Middle English by the scholars Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins). Julian’s understanding of one-ing — “alle is one love” (59.37) — evokes a contemplative, mystical union with God which has the quality of the Trinity’s perichoretic distinction. It is a delicate, profound holding in God: “All the soules that shalle be saved in heven without ende be knit in this knot, and oned in this oning” (53:52), and “thus in Crist oure two kindes be oned” (57.16).
An aspect of Julian’s sense of distinction-within-unity with God’s love is her confident “sekerness” in God — that is, of being held in a sense of security in God’s love: “With ghostely understanding that we be kept also sekerly in love in wo as in wele, by the goodnes of God” (1.20). This sense of security is a nuanced point: she warns that it does not assure us of the prevention or avoidance of suffering. In this way, Julian’s theology anticipates and fits with trauma-informed theology.
CLOSE to the end of A Revelation, Julian develops her argument: “If any such liver be in erth which is continually kepte fro falling, I know it not, for it was not shewde me. But this was shewde: that in falling and in rising we are ever preciously kepte in one love” (82.22–24) — it was not shown to her that any lover of God on earth is kept from suffering or falling; but it was shown to her that, in all our falling and rising, we are held preciously in God “in one love”.
I have embodied this theological paradox in the narrative of my poem, for example:
The One unmade who makes
with a down-lying crying-out pain
keens, suffering has no refuge from Love. . .
AS THE poetic conceit develops, it draws on the work of James Finley, a clinical psychologist and student of Thomas Merton. From his personal experiences and from working with clients, Finley found that the harrowing “axial moment” of trauma that cuts through time can be experientially brought together with the infinite “depth dimension” of God’s love, its equal and opposite: while there is no refuge from suffering, suffering has no refuge from love (Finley, 2015).
In this delicacy of touch, the trauma-informed sensitivity to the person or situation involved does not compound the suffering, but instead fully engages with reality.
The climax of the narrative evokes a medieval dream vision when words of divine love literally suffuse the seascape and landscape around Iona. Divine love comes to uphold all of material reality. From this secure holding — Julian’s “sekirness” — we are compelled to act.
Liz MacWhirter is a writer, speaker, and theologian. ljmacwhirter.com
Blue: A lament for the sea is available from Stewed Rhubarb at stewedrhubarb.org/product/blue-a-lament-for-the-sea-pre-order. She will be performing Blue: A lament for the sea on Iona on 11 October, and at the New College Festival of Books and Belief, Edinburgh University, on 8 November.