Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims,
This Friday we are delighted to welcome Wisdom Council member Cassidhe Hart and her teaching partner Grant Showalter-Swanson for a creative mini-retreat on Earth Psalter: Writing Psalms for the Anthropocene. Read on for their reflection on this spiritual practice.
My (Cassidhe’s) family moved frequently as a child, and as a soul who even then longed for a monastic sense of stability, I was often overwhelmed by the constant change in setting. When I was about 11 years old, I remember comforting myself with bible verses such as Genesis 8:22 about the regularity of the seasons and the way these consistent cycles hold us all in the midst of uncertainty and change. The rhythms of nature could be my stable home when the rest of my surroundings could not.
Global climate change has upended that, of course. What was once predictable in my home biome—the trillium and trout lilies emerge in April, the grass doesn’t get particularly crunchy until the August heat, the ground is frozen and solid in January—is now anyone’s guess. All these shifts have left me feeling unmoored on a planet that is supposed to feel like home, and I grieve for the ecosystems I was once familiar with but now don’t recognize.
This particular grief, this emotional or existential distress caused by environmental distress, has a new name: solastalgia. Much of the movement for climate justice has been focused, rightly so, on policy change and environmental protection. We live in the geological age termed “the anthropocene,” a period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on the climate and the earth as a whole, and there is understandable urgency to shift the direction of this influence. However, as we all grapple with fear and solastalgia, we experience overwhelm, despair, and even paralysis. We find ourselves in need of soul practices that support our spirits for the work of walking through this crisis with strength and integrity.
The Psalms have been handed down to us as poems that express the breadth of human emotional experience and of our relationship to the Divine. Throughout the centuries, the faithful have turned to these poems, finding comfort, challenge, and affirmation in their words. In traditional monastic settings, the psalms were chanted in prayers throughout the day, often moving through the cycle of all 150 over the course of a month. When you pray the psalms this often, the language of them gets into your bones; their forms become a scaffold and their conventions a tool for personal prayer and expression.
Earth Psalter offers the practice of composing and re-writing psalms in the form of personal poems as another pathway for engaging the Divine. Given the emphasis on figurative language and imagery within poetry, poetic imagination provides a unique window into the ineffable mystery of the Divine. In his article, “Poetry and the Christian,” Karl Rahner claims that “the practice of perceiving the poetic word is a presupposition to hearing the word of God…. In its inmost essence, the poetic is a prerequisite for Christianity.” In a world and culture that tends to make meaning through linear and literal reason, Rahner reminds us of the necessity of poetic reason in naming the mystery of God. The practice of composing or re-writing psalms offered in this retreat provides an opportunity to connect intimately and imaginatively with the Divine, and its ecological lens offers a contextual and liturgical way to connect our faith to our ecosystems and to move toward holistic action.
This retreat isn’t just for writers or ecologists. In fact, it is designed specifically with everyday people in mind. You don’t have to be a scientist to experience the devastating impacts of climate change, and you don’t have to be a writer to understand the power of verbal love and lament. We all are inhabitants of our ecosystems and woven into the suffering and celebration of the world around us. The Greek word at the root of “ecology” means “household,” after all; the Earth, as Christine reminds us, is our original monastery, the household to which we all belong and in which we seek flourishing.
Earth Psalter: Writing Psalms for the Anthropocene provides an opportunity to channel our ecological fears, longings, and loves into transformative prayer practices. Our environment may be changing in ways that leave us confused and adrift, but it is through deeper, more honest connection, rather than disengagement, that we are able to ground ourselves in a sense of unchanging belonging.
This retreat will include 20-25 minutes of writing with an option to share in a small break out group or savor extended writing and reflection time. Join us this Friday, March 21st!
With great and growing love,
Christine
Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE
