Since the beginning of Lent, the first few lines of TS Eliot's Ash Wednesday have been revisiting. It's not that I have any great insight into the poem but rather because a phrase is resonant for me just now: "Because I do not hope". It feels to speak to a growing awareness and a reluctant coming-to-terms with the humanly-slow, geologically-fast unfolding of environmental catastrophe.
"Because I do not hope" -for those with the power to act wisely and in a timely manner.
"Because I do not hope" -for lobbyists or the business-as-usual crowd to be stood down.
"Because I do not hope" -for systemic changes to take place.
In noticing this resonance, I realise that I had been hoping for things that now seem unlikely.
I had been hoping that enough people would realise, yesterday, how dire the prognosis is.
I had been hoping that governments would see beyond the next election
and be concerned about future generations
and so to prime collective action with policy, law and finance.
I had been hoping that our collective consciousness would kick in before tipping points were reached.
I had been hoping that if enough of us made greener decisions, spoke, wrote, pleaded and even, God forgive us,
shamed enough other people, then maybe disaster could be averted.
What to do? To go off-grid would be an act of despair.
What is needed is a turn to a way of living together where doing roughly the right thing by the environment is the default and not a special effort by a few enthusiasts with the time, money and curiosity to hug trees and eat organic.
"Because I do not hope to turn" people around me to living a one-planet lifestyle…
"Because I do not hope to turn" politicians and business leaders towards the common good
and becoming better ancestors…
"Because I do not hope to turn" a profit- and rent-seeking, mammonist, System
into a humane, modest and creation-respectful modus vivendi…
"Because I do not hope to turn" any of these things I cannot hope.
For I am, like you, helpless in the current of hopeless, misdirected, collective striving.
I no longer strive to strive for such things?
I may no longer desire the constant flow of tat and novelty
but I am carried along by the powerful rip-tides of those aggregated efforts;
billions of decisions formed and constrained by the ecosystem-eroding business as usual,
further empowering it in turn.
I know the obverse of lost hope too: anger: at the short-termism, the stupidity, the cupidity.
Anger that speaking, shouting and lifestyle changing during 40 or 50 years were dismissed; ridiculed even.
"Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?"
Civilisations -each in turn has been 'the usual reign'- have risen and fallen.
“Why should I mourn?”
Because billions of people some of whom I know and love personally will be harmed and traumatised.
If they survive the floods, the famines, the pandemics, the migrations, the resorts to violence,
they will hope that their new feudal lords may be kind and respond mercifully to their new skills of servility.
What is hope in the face of a sixth great extinction? Of another desperate dark ages?
Humanly speaking: little or none; only degrees of denial -refusing to think about it.
Perhaps this is a kind of hope. A hope that if we refuse to see it, it will turn out to be a bad dream or a mistake.
Understandable: we sense the lurking trauma in being disabused
of the deeply-embedded cultural hope of Progress and contemplating its casualties.
Time and again the usual reign has passed away. This is not new -though it is grievous.
Yet the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.
God knows us, eternally.
Also in Lent this year, the refrain from Psalm 42 has played recurrently through my mind.
"Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul, and why are you so disquieted within me?
O put your trust in God; for I will yet give him thanks, who is the help of my countenance, and my God."
-I can answer the 'why?' in one sense:
my soul's heaviness and my disquiet are prompted by climate catastrophe
and the revealed priorities of our Westminster government in the face of the pandemic.
In the face of such entrenched greed, denial and veniality,
somehow, hope-against-hope, it feels like the only recourse is as these verses state.
And as I write that I am mobbed by centuries of teaching about trusting in God,
but it somehow feels like only now do I get it. Only now am I being disabused of a human pride
that somehow with enough motivation, knowledge or cajoling we can do it.
Like with step one in a 12-step program, we can only truly hope when
we admit that we are actually, truly, powerless. Only then can we hope.
But that hope is oblique to the sources of our despair.
Such hope feels small and underwhelming, fragile even. And yet …
Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail. (Lamentations 3)
"I no longer strive towards such things" for myself.
But I do continue to strive because it is better to do good than not,
to live the change we desire to see God effect in the world.
I keep on striving because when the Day comes
we should be about our God-breathed business.
And who knows? -We may yet be surprised by hope.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
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