**4. Embracing Hope(lessness)**

In a recent *New Yorker* essay entitled "What if We Stopped Pretending?", Jonathan Franzen writes, "If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can go on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world's inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope".<sup>29</sup> Following Franzen's second way, I sugges<sup>t</sup> that the first step toward reimagining Christian hope in the Anthropocene is to stop pretending and to embrace hopelessness. I am borrowing the notion of "embracing hopelessness" from Christian ethicist Miguel De La Torre.<sup>30</sup> In his recent book on hopelessness, writing to the pain and suffering of billions of the world's poor who experience the crushing burden of colonial and neo-colonial exploitation and oppression, De La Torre asserts that "hope is possible when privilege allows for a future". He explains that hope, "as a middle class privilege, soothes the conscience of those complicit with oppressive structures, lulling them to do nothing except look forward to a salvific future where every wrong will be righted and every tear wiped away, while numbing themselves to the pain of those oppressed, lest that pain motivate them to take radical action". De La Torre goes on to declare that "The first step toward liberation requires the crucifixion of hope ... the realization that there is nothing to lose becomes a catalyst for action".<sup>31</sup> I acknowledge that, as one who enjoys a grea<sup>t</sup> deal of "middle class privilege", the worst impacts of climate change will fall upon those of whom De La Torre writes while others of us will fare better. However, the time is approaching when fewer and fewer will fare well—even many of the privileged—as we have less and less to lose, as the losses mount. Although De La Torre's work is not about the climate crisis per se, I take his suggestion to embrace hopelessness as suggestive—even generative—for a reimagined account of Christian hope in the Anthropocene.

To embrace hopelessness as a first step in reimagining hope means to accept that we are in the midst of an utterly disorienting, overwhelming, and intractable crisis and that the conditions that threaten life and well-being on Earth are going to ge<sup>t</sup> worse. To release a false sense of hope that things are going to ge<sup>t</sup> fixed—by political will, technology, or an "Omni God"—provides clarity and a more realistic set of expectations. Any credible account of hope will begin with truth-telling, which includes accepting what climate scientists are telling us about the future unclouded by false hopes *and* coming to terms with human responsibility for our current condition.<sup>32</sup> Roy Scranton's *Learning to Die in the Anthropocene* is an exception among the titles addressed earlier in that he does not try to peddle optimism that things are going to ge<sup>t</sup> better, that there will be a last minute rally to avoid disaster. Scranton writes that "The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead".<sup>33</sup> Scranton draws on his time as a soldier in Iraq to argue that the human future depends on accepting the fact that our civilization is already in its death throes, just as he had to

<sup>29</sup> (Franzen 2019).

<sup>30</sup> (De La Torre 2017).

<sup>31</sup> Ibid., pp. 5–6.

<sup>32</sup> Truth-telling about climate crisis will also involve persons in the world's most industrialized and developed nations—i.e., the Western colonial powers—to acknowledge their greater complicity in bringing about the crisis and to take steps to aid persons and communities that have lesser responsibility for the crisis but will suffer disproportionate impacts. Theologically, we would call this confession, repentance, and restitution.

<sup>33</sup> Scranton, *Learning to Die in the Anthropocene*, p. 23.

come to terms with the inevitability of his own death, not just in order to survive, but also so as to function in the midst of war.<sup>34</sup>

The Jesuit priest Walter Burghardt famously described contemplation as a "long loving look at the real". For Burghardt, human wholeness emerges from a willingness to allow one's whole self to respond to what is most real in the world. This includes the appreciation of beauty and virtue, but it also involves gazing, clear-eyed and lovingly, on the broken and the tragic. The "real" includes war, poverty, disease, and climate chaos. "Contemplation does not always summon up delight", warned Burghardt. It also involves confession and grief.<sup>35</sup> If we are to live into the future in the best ways possible, we will have to embrace a faith, hope, and love that are capable of acknowledging the realities of our diminishments and capable of helping us to face the world as it is, the world we have made. As the spiritual writer Margaret Swedish wrote several years ago, faith must be able to "encompass our ecological crisis, provide it with content and meaning", insisting that "we need a spiritual space large enough to contain all of our fears and hopes, our questions and our bewilderment".<sup>36</sup> Any account of hope that dismisses, discounts, or cannot face our realities or include our anxieties will, indeed, be a placebo.

A second aspect of a credible account of hope in the Anthropocene is an expanded notion of the experience of God or the Sacred. Swedish writes that we need "Faith that can enlighten and inform all this disturbing news by providing a framework of meaning for it, a place for an experience of the Divine *within* it".<sup>37</sup> The Christian quest for the Sacred through much of history has largely sought God *outside* of or above the natural world. The logic of that quest has caused humans to attempt to extract ourselves from the rest of the world. The dualisms of matter/flesh and spirit, sacred and profane, heaven and earth, Creator and creation that run throughout the history of Western Christianity have served to desacralize the world of "nature" and located the quest for God in an otherworldly sphere and in the realm of ideas or reason. As many scholars have shown, the quest for God outside of or apart from the earthly has contributed to the establishment of hierarchies in which, in the earthly sphere, humans have established themselves at the top, hovering above the rest of a world seen as external to humanity.<sup>38</sup> Such a view of the world understood "nature" to be a resource to subjugate and exploit to the fullest. Such a view has greatly contributed to the crisis we now face.

There are many Christian—and other religious and non-religious—accounts of spirituality that find the sacred embedded within the world; a new account of hope needs this. Partly, this means acknowledging that we are a part of a larger whole and celebrating our connection to a vast, remarkable, mysterious, and still vital world. As Dahr Jamail writes, it means being present—fully alive to—what remains of beauty and wholeness, even as we grieve what we are losing.<sup>39</sup> It also means learning to experience the sacred in "nature" or "nature" *as* sacred, becoming comfortable with that, and learning to speak about that experience vividly. Many examples of this are available to us. Sallie McFague has o ffered a model of theological language along these lines, naming the Earth itself as "the body of God". That is, she understands God as embodied in the universe itself, and all bodies on the planet as incarnations of God.<sup>40</sup> Theologian Mark Wallace has written eloquently of his "palpable experience of

<sup>34</sup> Ibid., pp. 13–27.

<sup>35</sup> Dahr Jamail's *The End of Ice*, like Scranton's work, is an exception to the literature on climate crisis cited in this essay. Reporting on his journeys around the globe observing the effects of climate change on glaciers, coral reefs, and indigenous cultures in the Arctic, Jamail also refuses to promote optimism that we might restore what has been lost. Rather, in an elegiac work, Jamail encourages us to grieve what we are losing, to give ourselves to the work of repair without expecting a particular outcome, and, like Scranton, to ask ourselves who we now want to become and how we want to live in this time. (Jamail 2019). There is much literature on grief as a response to ecological loss, both academic and theological, thus I will not treat it here.

<sup>36</sup> (Swedish 2008). 

<sup>37</sup> Ibid.

<sup>38</sup> e.g., (Merchant 1980; Plumwood 1993, 2002).

<sup>39</sup> Jamail, *The End of Ice*, pp. 214–15.

<sup>40</sup> (McFague 1993).

God in the Earth", swimming in a Mississippi coastal river as a child and hearing an ancient, mournful song of Pascagoula legend in the water. "The river was a site of numinous powers, greater than myself, that both transcended and interpenetrated the everyday world of boyhood activity I normally inhabited", he recalls. "God, I sensed, was in the river, but God was also beyond the river".<sup>41</sup> This childhood memory serves as the basis for Wallace's book on the relationship between God and the world. Finally, Lisa Dahill gives us a wonderful example of speaking about finding God in the world in her address to the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality a few years ago. Describing her own spiritual transformation, Dahill tells how her discernment led her outside of traditional modes of Christian discourse, practice, and experience, literally to the outside—to the woods, the creeks, the wind—as the space of sacred encounter. She writes, "Jesus is dissolved: all that's left is the wind ... the *literal* wind, the outdoor wind breathed from trees and cold fronts that fills my lungs".<sup>42</sup> Christian hope in a time of climate crisis must relinquish ideas of a God radically separated from this world who is expected to intervene from outside to repair the damage we have done. It must relocate notions of the experience of God from transcendent ether-worlds to this Earthy-world so that our conception of the encounter with the sacred is radically immanent.

Finally, a re-imagined hope emerging from an embrace of hopelessness will see virtuous action on behalf of the Earth and its inhabitants as a good in itself rather than as a means to an end. Many environmental ethicists cling to consequentialist accounts because they insist that motivation to action requires outcomes that people can anticipate. Those who research eco-anxiety report that a perceived loss of agency and lack of belief that one's actions have any meaning in the midst of a crisis of such overwhelming proportions is one of the underlying causes of feelings of despair. However, others argue that relinquishing hopes that our virtuous actions will save the planet from ruin means that we are freeing ourselves to engage in life-giving practices.

The environmental activist and writer Derrick Jensen muses, "When you give up on hope, you turn away from fear". Jensen goes on to argue that hope in the traditional sense allows the people, institutions, and ideas that are wrecking the planet to maintain control. "When you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to those in power". When we realize the agency we do have, reasons Jensen, "we no longer have to 'hope' at all. We simply do the work".<sup>43</sup> Here Jensen seems to echo De La Torre's suggestion that releasing hope spurs action.

Scranton argues that our approach to the Anthropocene has to do with who we want to be—our humanity. He writes: "The conceptual and existential problems that the Anthropocene poses are precisely those that have always been at the heart of humanistic inquiry: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to live? What is truth? What is good? In the world of the Anthropocene, the question of individual mortality—What does my life mean in the face of death?—is universalized".<sup>44</sup> Scranton argues that our circumstances call for a "new humanism", a moral and philosophical reckoning in which humans accept responsibility for our contributions to geo-planetary catastrophe and look to our cultural heritages—the philosophical, literary, and artistic inheritance of the world's many cultures—for wisdom about how to live (and die) in this altered world.

Theologically, Paul Tillich's reflections on hope o ffered in the face of the threat of nuclear war are instructive on this point. Genuine hope, for Tillich, must be distinguished from utopian expectations, and that distinction lies in the grounds of hope that are evident in the present. Utopian expectations—i.e., expectations of a dramatic reversal in planetary climate chaos—have no basis in the present. However, according to Tillich, "the basis for *genuine* hope is that there is something present of that which is hoped

<sup>41</sup> (Wallace 2005).

<sup>42</sup> (Dahill 2016).

<sup>43</sup> (Jensen 2006).

44 Scranton, *Learning to Die*, p. 20.

for, as in the seed of something of the coming plant is present".<sup>45</sup> These "seeds of hope" consist of any acts of love, justice, or mercy we might manage; they *are* the manifestations of hope in themselves. Tillich warned that we should not understand the goal of history as moving in linear fashion toward some state of future perfection or restoration, but that we must work toward what is *possible* in every given circumstance: our struggle is against "the forces of evil, old ones and new ones, which arise in each period in a di fferent way". However, "every victory, every particular progress from injustice to more justice, from su ffering to more happiness, from hostility to more peace, from separation to more unity anywhere in [hu]mankind, is a manifestation of the eternal in time and space". Tillich identifies this as the coming of the reign of God. Planting "seeds of hope" by acting for the sake of acting realizes God's reign in the moment, for each seed contains within it a trace of that for which one hopes.<sup>46</sup> Thus, without any illusions that actions on behalf of justice, community, and sustainability will bear results, we engage in them in order to become more human and to create space for the experience of God's reign in the present. Hope becomes an enacted phenomenon rather than an idealistic projection.

Theological and philosophical reflections on the nature of hope will not, by themselves, overcome the crushing angst, fear, and despair of those who experience eco-anxiety. However, releasing unrealistic and overly optimistic notions of hope that rely on technological innovation or a divine sovereign to intervene can create space for clarity and free us from paralyzing anxiety and fear. The first step to imagining a credible, generative account of Christian hope in the Anthropocene is to embrace hopelessness, not as a vice but as a virtue. When we no longer cling to delusional notions of restoration or rescue from outside, we do the work that points the way beyond despair, seeking wisdom to live more humanly.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
