supporting young people to lead the way

At our Midlands region 'Creation Care & Climate Justice' gathering on 23rd November, one of the workshops in the afternoon (led by my friend and colleague here in Hodge Hill, Tim Evans of Worth Unlimited) brought together a handful of young people and adults, all passionate and articulate about the issues, to explore together how young people are leading the way, and how adults can support young people to do so - both within church contexts, and far beyond. Here are some of the things they discovered together:

What helps:

• Family and friends encouragement
• Supportive headteacher
• Protection from negative adults
• People telling their story/having space to tell my story
• Having a platform
• Adults who cheer us on and who get its an inter generational concern
• Feeling part of something bigger/that you're making an impact
• Being driven by a sense that something is unjust and unfair 
• Understanding that this is educational - e.g. logistics, communication, teamwork, public speaking, art/photography etc 

What gets in the way:

• Parents who do not see it as important or a form of education
• Not being listened to properly/taken seriously
• When others come along doing 'unrelated protesting'
• Unsupportive Headteachers
• Being isolated with the consequences of speaking out/action

What can adults do to support:

• Create platform/space for young people
• Educate Headteachers and parents that this is important and educational
• Enable connections and networks for young people
• Get that this is an inter generational issue and persuade other adults
• Be in solidarity
• Get climate change on the curriculum
• Help young people set up 'earth societies' etc in school
• Bring experts into schools/youth groups etc to help other young people understand

What else are young people bringing:

• Sense of urgency - the now
• Educating adults
• Making a point eg by not being in school
• Praxis learning - action and reflection that then enables the participation of other young people

If you are a young person keen to lead on creation care and climate justice issues, or if you are an adult who is keen to support young people to lead (within a church congregation, or in other parts of society), then we in Hodge Hill are keen to support, network and help find resources for you. Do get in touch via hodgehillvicar@hotmail.co.uk 

tick tock

The spoken word piece below was written by 15-year-old Erica Lees-Smith for the September Youth Strike 4 Climate in Leicester. Erica delivered it again at the "Creation Care & Climate Justice" gathering for Christians across the Midlands, held at Hodge Hill Church last Saturday (23rd November). With her permission, I'm sharing it here:

Tick tock

I don’t know about you

But I’ve already started counting down to

The year-consuming, stress-inducing four letters

G C S E

Nearly sixteen,

Why would I be truanting, why would you be truanting,

Why should we be truanting?

Well you see, my government’s environmental policy

Is causing me to write apologies

To my school

For missing a day of education

Because instead we’ve got to educate the nation.



Tick tock

A year ago

I didn’t really care much for the climate crisis

Because nobody had told me it was one.

In fact that wasn’t even the term that was used

When we studied it in geography back in year 9

Or discussed it with mates a few random times

Never truly scraping the surface.



A year ago

A young girl,

A brilliant beam of light brightening the dismal skies

Of 2018 politics and calling it a

Climate crisis.

Armed with an aura of certainty and science,

Sixteen years of denying the liars

And compassion,

Unknowingly igniting the fires

Of an international movement.



And as she began rallying behind this justified cause

Something

Snapped

Inside me.

The far-off fantasy of global warming,

A cosy, tourist-centred ideology,

Of businesses profiting with oceans simultaneously,

And something

Snapped

Inside me.

We’ve got time, they said,

It’s okay, they say,

a few centuries left to pass yet,

Not our problem but for our great-great-great-great

Grandkids to deal with

But as it’s become a great-great-great and even greater problem

Now we’re facing the consequences

Why should it take Western recognition

For true international validation

When for years the great-great-great-great problem has been

The reality check for too many

Each and every day?



Life on earth struggling for breath

Fog and smog clouding our vision,

Literal and metaphorical.

The thing is, we’ve lost our way

In life’s meandering paths,

Amidst distractions of the universe,

Success stored in gold treasures held tight to our chests

But now we must

WAKE UP.



We are here to push your head back down from the clouds

Eradicate the blissful ignorance of the burning abyss

WAKE UP

From your dreaming amidst the flames.

No, “12 years left” isn’t simply a stat

To be memorised or recited

Under watchful eye of an exam hall clock

TICK TOCK

But to be shouted in the streets today

As we rise and say

Enough is enough

To a government who

Won’t prioritise what’s justified,

The victims that are the cost and we’ve lost,

Lose, will lose to the war we waged on humanity

In blood and fire and greedy rage

200 years ago.

Yes, we’re fit to burst

A deep, growling passion

A washing machine churning a sickness inside us

So we cry out in anguish

Despite muted adolescent voices

And millions more that won’t be represented

WHAT DO WE WANT? -



You don’t understand what you’re saying.

How can you, an average teen without a vote,

Spout apocalyptic nonsense when you’re always on your phones?

How can you, an average teen without a vote,

Justify missing school when Britain’s doing just fine,

You’re conforming to this lie.



You see this may be beyond our comfortable lives

But surely if our eyes

Are distracted by this distinct lack of action

Then a generation and a nation

Without the same alleged technological addiction

Can do the same too,

So why can’t you?



But then there’s unity.

This beautiful alliance of

School strikers in solidarity with

Teachers and doctors,

Bankers and politicians,

As we point towards the light at the end of the tunnel,

Further from the pit of

Commonplace carbon recklessness.



So let’s draw on this inherent unity as

Just one unique species in creation

With scarce privilege or preference over another

And certainly not 'greater' than each other

Death and denial will not take us further

But instead let’s look back together

To the foundation we’ve built all this chanting upon,

Not material but just as strong

So that day in x years’ time

If you can’t look people in the eye when they say,

Mum, what did you do in the climate emergency?

Then let's just take a moment to recognise

And maybe then you'll realise

How different things would be

If we hadn't chosen change over catastrophe:

In a bleak dystopia

It’s hard to recall what life ever looked like before

Back when tall green things proudly reached for the skies

And we didn’t have to cover our eyes each time a monstrous machine shrouded our home with a great carbon coat



Today innovation and tech have come so far, yet we seem so far from where we surely should be,

With cracking ice and rising seas

And we can beat about the bush with a few better bins or plead politely with petitions and pretty poetic presentation

But ultimately understand this:

We can't stand this -

See, we’ve not lost this war yet but young people

Were never meant to be

defenders of the earth,

we need a whole new kind of weaponry

As we lead the charge, put an end to all this chaos, our world leaders need to take up the mantle to dismantle a system which doesn't get what's at stake,

And at last make us all take

Action.

words

“Once Upon a time, words began to vanish from the language of children. They disappeared so quietly that at first almost no one noticed – fading away like water on a stone. The words were those that children used to name the natural world around them: acorn, adder, bluebell, bramble, conker – gone! Fern, heather, kingfisher, otter, raven, willow, wren…all of them gone! The words were becoming lost: no longer vivid in children’s voices, no longer alive in their stories.”

So begins Robert MacFarlane's stunning The Lost Words: A Spell Book. A lament for what has been lost, yes. But also 'a spell book': words which, when spoken, conjure an awareness for what still is, but has slipped from the attention of our eyes, ears, minds and imaginations - conjure an awareness for what is in danger of becoming lost, unless we let the spell awaken us from our obliviousness.

I'm a fan of words. Words are what I usually turn to first, to enable me to think, to feel, to process, to explore, to wonder, to relate. Over the years I've become more aware of their limits, their slipperiness, their ambiguity and ambivalence. But I know how much I need words, simply to live.

I've mentioned before that one of the sparks that ignited my desire to better connect up my theological explorations with the tasks of creation care and climate justice was Hannah Malcolm's winning Theology Slam entry, reflecting on solastalgia, the term coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht for that 'feeling of "homesickness when you are still at home": the grief created by seeing the place you love come under immediate assault'. Quoting Walter Brueggemann, Hannah reminds us that entering into grief, practising what Extinction Rebellion call "the skill of broken-heartedness", is one of the fundamental prophetic task of the Church: "to tell the truth in a society that lives in illusion, grieve in a society that practices denial, and express hope in a society that lives in despair". Grief, Hannah suggests, "is a vital part of having a vision for a new future":

"I am going to ask you to sit amid the grief that you may already feel about our dying planet; and to mourn the brilliant, beautiful lives - both human and non-human - now extinguished by our violence and greed. Perhaps you can name them. Perhaps their names are now known only to God. Either way, they are worthy of your lament."

Hannah's powerful summons to dwell with our solastalgia prompted to me to read more of Albrecht's work - specifically his most recent book, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. On the face of it, it's the opposite of MacFarlane's book, but in fact the two are intertwined: one laments words that are becoming lost in the hope that they won't disappear entirely; the other creates new words for those experiences of loss in the hope that, by "sitting amid the grief" we might also discover renewed vision and energy for a more hopeful future.



Here, I want to share just a few of Albrecht's new words, with the conviction that they offer us n extended vocabulary for thinking and feeling that also enables new possibilities for action and change. (Most are taken directly from his glossary, pp.199-201.)

psychoterratic = emotions related to positively and negatively perceived and felt states of the Earth

solastalgia = the pain or distress caused by the loss or lack of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one's home and territory. It is the lived experience of negative environmental change. It is the homesickness you have when you are still at home.

soliphilia = the giving of political commitment to the protection of loved home places at all scales, from the local to the global, from the forces of desolation.

symbioment = a recognition that all life exists within living systems at various scales. There is no "outside" (cf. "environment") for life forms within the biosphere.

sumbiocracy = a form of government (cf. "democracy") where humans govern for the symbiotic, mutually beneficial, or benign relationships in a sociobiological system at all scales. Sumbiocracy is rule for the Earth, by the Earth, so that we might all live together.

sumbiophilia = the love of living together

toponesia = the process of forgetfulness of precious places that afflicts us as we leave the world of our childhood and enter adult life.

environmental generational amnesia = the process by which, with each ensuing generation, the amount of environmental degradation can increase, but each generation tends to take that degraded condition as the nondegraded condition - that is, as the normal experience... As that process continues through the generations, nature ends up simply fading and there is "the extinction of experience". (p.75)

ecoanxiety = a generalized worry about the future, related to a changing and uncertain environment... "Even high levels of ecological worrying [can be] constructive and adaptive, i.e., are associated with pro-environmental attitudes and actions, and are not related to maladaptive forms of worrying such as pathological expressions of anxiety." (p.77)

ecoparalysis = a response to the dilemma faced by people who could see the enormous scale of the problem confronting the world but could do nothing meaningful at a personal level to solve it... a psychoterratic condition that maintains people in a state of limbo (p.83-4)

***

A lot of Albrecht's linguistic work is an effort to shift our worldview. A 'great separation' has taken place, through which "the majority of humans have separated themselves from the rest of nature and life, from having some ongoing vital connections to nature to having virtually none" (p.94). The reasons are complex, he acknowledges, but include "the God-given human dominion over nature within Christianity; eco-alienation under neoliberalism and capitalism; the emergency of hierarchy in complex societies; imperialism and colonialism; and patriarchal development or male domination over a perceived female nature". The core beliefs of this 'great separation' include "individualism, atomism, reductionism, and autonomy based on science (evolution) and ideology (neoliberalism). These ideas imply that humans are separate from the rest of nature; humans are physically and morally autonomous; matter can be reduced to its smallest parts; competition between individuals (survival of the fittest) rules in both nature and society; and that competition in a free market within an economy is an expression of natural, competitive order" (p.95).

In the face of this dominant worldview, Albrecht highlights the profound symbiosis of the natural world of which we humans are part - from the "wood-wide-web" I've already mentioned on this blog, to the "microbiome" of symbiotic bacteria and fungi within our own bodies, "that work with us to nurture and protect our health [both physical and mental] as well as theirs". "We now have a clear understanding that bacteria, trees, and humans are not individuals existing as isolated atoms in a sea of competition. The foundational idea of life as consisting of autonomous entities (organisms) in competition with each other has been shown to be fundamentally mistaken. Life consists of comingling microbiomes within larger biomes, communities within communities at ever increasing scales, otherwise known as "holobionts". There is no clearly defined "inside" and "outside" of trees or humans, because, the closer we look, the more interaction between biomes we see, and the more permeable skin, leaves, and roots become... This is more than an "entanglement" of different but independent beings; it is the sharing of a common property, called life" (pp.99-100).

And what, within this ever-changing web of life, is the responsibility of human beings? As Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan have concluded: "We have done well separating ourselves from and exploiting other organisms, but it seems unlikely such a situation can last. The reality and recurrence of symbiosis in evolution suggests we [humans] are still in an invasive, "parasitic" stage and that we must slow down, share, and reunite ourselves with other beings if we are to achieve evolutionary longevity" (p.101). Albrecht summons us to a "sumbiocentric" (rather than anthropocentric, human-centred) worldview, in which we "tak[e] into account the centrality of the process of symbiosis in all our deliberations on human affairs. It requires us to give priority to the maintenance of symbiotic bonds in the total symbioment. The aim is to maximize those bonds and to hold that state of affairs in place for as long as possible. Sumbiocentrism is also an ethical position claiming that maintaining symbiotic connections, diversity, and unity within complex systems is the highest good" (pp.101-2).

***

Albrecht goes on to develop what he calls explicitly a "secular spirituality", rooted in a (sumbiocentric) unfolding of "love" (pp.131ff.) - but also acknowledging the inevitability of what he names unapologetically as "war" between "Terranascian" (earth-birthing) and "Terraphthoran" (earth-destroying) human beings (pp.176ff.).

I feel sure I will return to Albrecht's work, through more explicitly theological lenses, in future reflections here. For this reflection on words, however, I want to conclude with some words of prayer, from Steven Shakespeare's beautiful new prayer book, The Earth Cries Glory: Daily Prayer with Creation. Steven's poetic prayers are rooted not just in the rhythms of the day and night (as daily prayer has always been), but in the rhythms of the (Northern Hemisphere) seasons too:

"Rather than follow the standard Christian liturgical year, I have opted instead to divide the year into eight roughly equal sections. These sections are tied to the key points of the solar calendar: the spring and autumn equinoxes and the summer and winter solstices. In between these turning points are four other significant dates, often known as 'fire festivals' in contemporary pagan spirituality, because of the use of bonfires and other flames in marking them... [T]he idea that Christianity tends towards the unearthly, or that we should see ourselves as detached rulers and consumers of nature, is a false spirituality that has surely contributed to our contemporary ecological and social disasters... [A]dopting an alternative way of inhabiting the year can therefore ... be a stimulus to imagine the cadence of Christian life and prayer differently, to embody spirituality differently."

Steven's re-write of the Lord's Prayer is a gem that I have already found myself inhabiting with the familiarity of more traditional versions. But here I want to share his 'Creation Benedictus', inviting the kind of peace-making within the symbioment that Glenn Albrecht and Hannah Malcolm are calling for too.

Blessed be the One who creates

Who delights in the rhythm of life

From the strangeness of matter
A universe is spun

Within the heart of being
Life emerges, vibrant and searching

Through the intricate paths of evolution
It becomes complex and beautiful

Blessed be the One who creates
Who speaks through the bodies of all creatures

On the fearful clarity of the mountain top
The Spirit sings of transformation

In the unknown depths of the ocean
The Spirit sings of rebirth

In wood and river, field and desert
The Spirit sings a new song

May the wonder of creation open us
To a life beyond our understanding

Blessed be the One who creates
Who travels across the threshold

With reverence for all creatures
Let us make peace with the sky

With reverence for all lands
Let us make peace with the earth

With reverence for all becoming
Let us make peace with the sea

May our senses be filled with the play of creation
With a wisdom of the living heart

Blessed be the One who creates
In whom all things are One!

roots

I led a primary school assembly yesterday, in which I wanted to help the kids learn something amazing about tree roots. As an experiment, I'm not sure it quite worked, but the idea was to get a number of children, randomly scattered around the school hall, to stand up and be trees - and then for each of those trees to be linked to all of the others by a complex root system - involving children around the "trees" holding the tree's ankles with one hand, and with their free hand beginning a chain of held hands, spreading outwards. If it had worked (it didn't!), one tree could have sent messages to another tree, by wiggling its "roots", and the "roots" passing on the message by squeezing hands, down the chain until another tree's roots were reached.

Somewhere along the way, the excited children got a bit lost with instructions from me that were, in the heat of the moment, just a little bit too complicated for a hurried demonstration. But what I'd wanted to illustrate was the incredible interconnectedness of our world - and more specifically, the amazing phenomena called mycorrhizae [from the Greek: mikas = fungus, riza = root].

Through scientific discoveries that date back to the late nineteenth century, but are developing right now at an accelerating pace, we are discovering more and more about the complex symbiotic (i.e. mutually dependent) relationship between plant roots and the "macrofungi" that attach themselves to them. The fungi help plants get minerals that the roots alone can't absorb, and in turn the fungi live off sugars that they get from the plant's photosynthesising processes. But more than that, the mycorrhizae are the structures of the fungi that extend the plant's root system by becoming a functioning part of it. Tiny threads of fungus called hyphae extend the mycorrhizae further by growing into spaces where the roots can't go, accessing nutrients beyond the plant's own reach.

But there's more. The mycorrhizae also connect the roots of one tree to the roots of others, in what Susan Simard has termed the "wood-wide-web". Through this web, nutrients flow to the trees that need them most (such as the youngest ones), and information and energy are transferred from dying trees to those that are continuing to grow:

"We have learned that mother trees recognise and talk with their kin, shaping future generations. In addition, injured trees pass their legacies on to their neighbours, affecting gene regulation, defence chemistry, and resilience in the forest community. These discoveries have transformed our understanding of trees from competitive crusaders of the self to members of a connected, relating, communicating system." (Simard 2016:249)

In this communicating system - over 90% of plants have some kind of mycorrhizal relationship, and some scientists believe these networks may span entire continents - chemical signals can be transmitted from a plant under attack (from insects, herbivores and pathogens in the air or soil) to neighbouring plants, stimulating protective chemical responses in those other plants. But these incredible networks are also fragile: plough up the soil or fertilize it with agricultural chemicals, dig it up to build houses and roads, and the mycorrhizae are, inevitably, destroyed. Lone trees on city streets, cut off from their neighbours, are stranded, vulnerable.

***

I dared to venture into this awesome "underland" (to use Robert MacFarlane's poetic term) with a school full of primary children, partly because it felt like a fabulous visual metaphor for the interconnectedness of all living creatures (humans included) in our world - this was a Harvest assembly, it should be said. But partly also for its own sake - I wanted to find a way of sharing with them one of the biggest "wow" moments of this year for me, discovering, through Simard's work and those who have written about it, a stunning, hidden dimension of the infinitely complex ecosystem we inhabit.

As a theologian, it is all too tempting to appropriate the mycorrhizal "wood-wide-web" as a theological metaphor, primary-school-assembly-style. And it does indeed have fabulous metaphorical potential. But in our developing "theological ecology", it feels like the mysterious fungal connections between the roots of plants and trees demands harder, more profound theological work of us. If the Holy Spirit, the "go-between God" (as John V. Taylor termed her), is not just "like" the pulses of air that constitute our human-to-human communication, but is somehow in them (Pentecost, to take the most obvious example), then might we dare say that that same Spirit is in those chemical pulses that move through the complex root-and-fungus networks stretching out through the dark earth beneath our feet? What are doing, theologically, when we poison, dig up and disrupt those networks? What would healing and flourishing look like, and what is our role as human beings within that? What might we humans - we Christians among them - learn from the mycorrhizae?

References:

• Glenn Albrecht, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World, 2019, pp.95-99
• Robert MacFarlane, Underland: a deep time journey, 2019, pp.87-116
• Suzanne Simard, 'Notes from a Forest Scientist', in Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: what they feel, how they communicate, 2016 (see also Simard's TED talk, 'How trees talk to each other')
• Isabella Tree, Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm, 2018, pp.19-22, 47

radical (ecological) receptivity

One of the things that I've found myself talking about a lot over the last few years (emerging from our intentional life nurturing community in Hodge Hill, and my PhD research that emerged from it) is what I've called (following radical democrat Romand Coles) "radical receptivity".

It sounds complicated, but it's really just asking a very simple question: "how can we be so open to the gifts, and the challenges, of our neighbours, that we are changed by our encounters with them?"

It started, for me, as a question of "mission" - our relationship, as Christians, with our neighbours who wouldn't call themselves Christians: "how can we be so open to the gifts, and the challenges, of our 'non-Christian' neighbours, that we are changed by our encounters with them?"

But then, when you start being attentive to power relationships - particularly those (de)formed by the social structures within which we live - it became a question of "privilege", at work particularly in the social structures of class, gender, and race: "how can we - as middle-class and/or male and/or white - be so open to the gifts, and the challenges, of our neighbours who are 'othered' from us by social structures, that we are changed by our encounters with them?"

And when "mission" and "privilege" are themselves entangled, one of the biggest theological questions for multiply-privileged Christians becomes: where do you locate Jesus? I realised that so often, when thinking about mission in so-called "marginalised" communities, Christians - particularly Christians who are multiply privileged - do one (or both!) of two things. 

On the one hand, they locate Jesus in or with "the marginalised other" as lacking, in need - with the help of a biblical text like the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, for example - "I was hungry... I was thirsty... I was a stranger... I needed clothes... I was sick... I was in prison...". This allows those privileged Christians to identify with the "and you..." who feeds, welcomes, clothes, visits "the other".

On the other hand, multiply privileged Christians have been very good at identifying with Jesus ourselves - but a Jesus, now, in the active role of feeding, welcoming, healing, etc. In recent decades, that's often been expressed through the idea of "incarnational mission", or the question, "What Would Jesus Do?". But you can trace it back much further in the Christian tradition - through the 16th century saint Teresa of Avila, for example, who famously wrote, "Christ has no body but yours... Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good, yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world..."

And all of this is OK, except for the way it risks radically deforming our relationships with our neighbours. For me, this comes to its sharpest expression in the reflections of critical white theologian Jennifer Harvey, on the "What Would Jesus Do?" question:

"It just so happens that identifying with or as the central agent in the narratives we embody is one of the broken ways of being toward which white people are prone. It just so happens that being inclined to do “for” in postures that are paternalistic is another damaged side-effect of white racialization. And it just so happens that these tendencies are valorized in the social justice Jesus who is the central power-agent in his saga. Social justice Jesus is like a superhero standing up to evil forces around him and attempting to inveigh on behalf of suffering others. And, thus, while it is laudable that he stands with or works on behalf of the marginalized, it, therefore, just so happens that the broken ways of being toward which white people are already inclined are likely to be triggered, maybe even amplified, by identifying with such a figure. ... Simply put, identifying with the divine is about the last thing that a white person whose life is embedded in white-supremacist structures should be doing."  

(Jennifer Harvey, ‘What Would Zacchaeus Do? The Case for Disidentifying with Jesus’, in George Yancy (ed.), Christology and Whiteness: What Would Jesus Do? (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp.94-5)

Since I first read that, I've found myself returning to it many times - as a warning, and as an invitation to a different way (Harvey herself calls white Christians to dis-identify with Jesus, and identify instead with a character like Zacchaeus, marginal to the story in which Jesus is the central character, but on the receiving end of Jesus' challenge to repent, make reparations, and change). And I've found myself working with it not just in terms of race and whiteness, but in terms of middle-class-ness (within unjust economic structures), and maleness (within patriarchal structures).

But more recently I had another moment of epiphany. What if we translated Harvey's challenge into human beings' relationship with the Earth and its myriad other-than-human creatures? What if we acknowledged the ecocidal (i.e. earth-killing) dimension of our social structures?

"It just so happens that identifying with or as the central agent in the narratives we embody is one of the broken ways of being toward which human beings are prone. It just so happens that being inclined to do “for” in postures that are paternalistic is another damaged side-effect of anthropocentrism (i.e. a human-centered worldview). And it just so happens that these tendencies are valorized in the social justice Jesus who is the central power-agent in his saga. Social justice Jesus is like a superhero standing up to evil forces around him and attempting to inveigh on behalf of suffering others. And, thus, while it is laudable that he stands with or works on behalf of the marginalized, it, therefore, just so happens that the broken ways of being toward which human beings are already inclined are likely to be triggered, maybe even amplified, by identifying with such a figure. ... Simply put, identifying with the divine is about the last thing that a human being whose life is embedded in anthropocentric [human-centred], ecocidal [earth-killing] structures should be doing."

Now, that may well need some qualification. Because anthropocentric, ecocidal structures are, themselves, a product of patriarchy, of white western colonialism, of exploitative class relationships. Ecocide is, on the whole, a crime of the human beings of the global North for which the human beings of the global South - as well as the Earth itself - is suffering greatly. And a crime that, while almost all of us in the global North are complicit in some way or other, has been led and sustained by the richest and most powerful in our societies.

But, to go back to where we began, what if we asked the question again, like this: "how can we human beings be so open to the gifts, and the challenges, of our other-than-human neighbours, that we are changed by our encounters with them?"

That's the starting point, for me, of the next step of the adventure of what I'm wanting to call radical (ecological) receptivity. 

We might think we're quite good at being "open to the gifts... of our other-than-human neighbours" - through our appreciation of, awe and wonder at, what we call "the natural world" around us. But we're keenly aware that even that so often degenerates into relationships of consumption, exploitation and indifference.

But how do we even start opening ourselves to the challenges that come from our other-than-human neighbours? What does that even mean?

Australian ecotheologian Jan Morgan, in a recent book, explores the human - and Christian - vocation of attending to "Earth's Cry" - a cry that is not just (as the Hebrew bible often puts it) a song of praise, but also (in the language of the letter to the Romans) a deep groaning, a lament.

In the posts that follow on this blog, I want to try and explore further, and begin to embody, that radical (ecological) receptivity - and see where it takes us.

something new

I'm going to try something new.

Since 2010, I've been writing a blog, on and off, rooted in my outer estate neighbourhood on the edge of the city of Birmingham. Often its subject matter has stretched wider - touching at times on national politics, and the internal politics of the Church of England - but its focus has been, and remains, the labour of love that we call "community-building", often across dividing lines of race and class, but with a focus on nurturing relationships between neighbours rooted in particular places. Much of what I've written there over the years has been about what we've been doing in our own neighbourhood (the Firs & Bromford estate, Hodge Hill), and what we've been learning through that doing. Some of that learning became a PhD (developing a "radically receptive" political theology from the urban margins), and that in turn has turned out to be a springboard for some writing and speaking and some fascinating, stretching conversations in the wider world.

This is something different.

This is venturing into terrain that I, personally, don't know remotely well. It will be following the footsteps (and, at times, paw-prints) of people (and other creatures) that know the ground much better than me. I come as a late arrival to a "party" - or perhaps it's a walk in the woods, a picnic, a protest, a dance, a lament - that many others have been at for years.

But better late than never. And better something than nothing. As the public-theologians / comedy-rap-jazz-duo Harry and Chris put it:

"They say it's a drop in the ocean / as if that's a reason to stop.
Well maybe they've forgotten the ocean / is literally made up of drops."

So what is it?

When theology is divided into sub-disciplines, it's often labelled "eco-theology".

But many practitioners of "eco-theology" would argue, I think, that compartmentalising it as a sub-discipline is, itself, part of the problem.

An earth-centred (rather than human-centred) theology should change everything: not just the way we think about creation and salvation, but the way we think about God, and Jesus, and the gospel, and discipleship, and church, and mission, and... everything...

Eco-theology reminds us that everything that is, is connected. Interrelated. Entangled. Interdependent.

In Western theology, over the last couple of centuries, the idea that everything in theology is connected to everything else has been expressed in the sub-discipline called "systematic theology".

But the "systems" of "systematic theology" have too often been overly rigid, fixed, rational. Drawn only in straight lines. "Mind over matter", imposing their intellectual categories on messy reality. And captive to a profoundly white, Western, heterosexual male way of thinking about the world.

What if we were to think about theology not as a "system" but as an "ecology"? Where the connections and interrelations are rarely in straight lines, and are often more mysterious, hidden, buried deep beneath the surface? Where nothing is fixed - where everything grows, changes, evolves, dies? Where one thing changing, changes everything else? Where "matter" is what matters, and what thinks, and breathes, and communicates... and grows, changes, evolves, dies...?

This is what I want to call the "theological ecology".

And the blog posts that follow will not attempt, as systematic theology has often claimed, to offer a comprehensive description of all the ecology's elements and interrelations. The ecology is too wonderful, too mysterious, too complex for that to be even possible. And even if it were, I am - as I've already said - a late arrival, a novice, a stumbling beginner in this unfamiliar terrain. Here, then, I'll just offer a handful of fragments, whether picked up from others or glimpsed for myself - fragments of beauty, wonder (and sometimes terror) that I find myself turning over and over in my hand, or straining my eyes to see from a distance.

Some connections between the fragments may emerge over time. I'm expecting this to be a place, though, not just to sit back and marvel at the complex connections. But a place that calls us to jump in with both feet - to immerse ourselves in the overwhelming realities of the one world that we live in - and to action: to be changed and to change; to grow and evolve; to live and to die...