Student Chaplain C

The quotes from Chaplain H and Chaplain C both illustrate how a deep intensity pervades the pastoral care as it takes place. The content of pastoral care concerning stress from climate change is difficult to represent in all its many different and indirect shapes. As a starting point, the direct expressions regarding climate changes are characterized by being sporadically spread out through a diversity of situations, feelings, states, and beliefs. The expressions come to the fore directly almost only through short statements or quick words and questions which fall into the conversation. Because of this, the climate content is impossible to just mark with a label or distil as "pure" climate change stress separate from the rest of the content. Quite the contrary, it seems like we are dealing with invisible connections and lines, which somehow inseparably cling to the students' state of mind as "foil"—or even as something penetrating the things that go on in the lives of the students. Student Chaplain Z phrases the impact of climate change like this:

"It is like all over. Like anxiety of the future. Like their future is in liquidation. I can tell the students that it is not an individual problem. Talk with them about it. In itself that is no comfort. That something outside us sets an agenda, that we do not have the power over."

In many ways, the interviews bear witness to content that takes shape as something intangible and global. At the same time, the narratives are also characterized by being rooted in something local to them—in things that are concrete, bodily, and fleshy, which also "messes" things around in connection to the feelings, thoughts, and beliefs as they flow out during the pastoral care conversations. Continuing with Student Chaplain Z:

"A student said that she had been used to hearing a particular bird coming back to the same place year after year. Suddenly the bird wasn't there anymore. So, the student googled it and found out that it was endanger of total extermination. She became so devastated and sad that life around us is destroyed. Young people are supposed to expand, while biodiversity and climate are about to crash."

As exemplified by this quote (which some term: "ecological grief", Comtesse et al. 2021), the interviews testify that the climate's state is related dynamically to the students' states of mind as both global and local. It is experienced as materially connected to feelings of sadness, despair, loneliness, etc. In other words, we are dealing with some kind of entanglement. Rather than trying to divide or split climate change stress in pastoral care from the rest of the content, the interviews show that the global and local, entities and parts, humans and non-humans are inseparably interwoven.

In this respect, the chaplains' narratives seem to be captured, in different ways, by the thoughts of the philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist Bruno Latour (2017), not least presented in his book *Facing Gaia*. The pastoral care experiences, at first glance, seem to match his opening image drawn from "The Angel of Geostory" by Stéphanie Ganachaud:

"A dancer is rushing backwards to ge<sup>t</sup> away from something she must have found frightening; as she runs, she keeps glancing back more and more anxiously, as if her flight is accumulating obstacles behind her that increasingly impede her movements, until she is forced to turn around. And there she stands, suspended, frozen, her arms hanging loosely, looking at something coming towards her, something even more terrifying than what she was first seeking to escape—until she is forced to recoil. Fleeing from one horror, she has met another, partly created by her flight." (Latour 2017, p. 1)

Illustrating the force coming at us in this harrowing form—the "emergence of an enigmatic figure, the source of a horror that was now in front rather than behind" (ibid., p. 2)—Latour seeks to draw the contours of the *New Climatic Regime*. In this new regime, the physical framework, which has earlier been taken for granted in the modern way of thinking of the world and reality—the ground on which history had always played out— has become unstable. Contradicting the modern view, Earth seems to react to our actions.

In our climate change situation, Latour argues, this force of the Earth may be captured by the metaphor of Gaia. In the ancient Greek poet Hesiod's narrative, Gaia plays the role of a primordial and ancestral force. Gaia ('Ge' from the ancient Greek root for 'earth') is not a goddess, properly speaking, but a force from the time before the gods (ibid., p. 81). Hence, she is not a figure of harmony. There is nothing maternal about her— in the traditional understanding of "Mother", anyway; her performances are "multiple, contradictory, hopelessly confused" (ibid., p. 82). In Hesiod's telling, she animates her children to castrate their father, her husband Uranus. In that, she is an active prophetess and advisor. Gaia makes others act.

Latour calls attention to Gaia because she is presented as the occasion for a return to Earth that allows for a differentiated vision reduced to more modest, that is, "earthbound" views of reality (ibid., p. 4). Gaia reacts to us, calls us. This way, Latour describes Gaia as a force, which indicates the need for humble, situated actions that can break down or make up the blindness and blind-ended Anthropocene—calling attention to the "terrestrial" (terra) forces to become less anthropocentric, as we interact with birds, foods, seas, air (cf. the quote from Student Chaplain Z), and in our scientific approach of things, including the discipline of theology. Latour holds that when we seek to grasp what is coming at us with climate change, we need to "come back down to Earth" (ibid., p. 87).

Relating Latour's thoughts to the interviews on students' pastoral care, the point is that it matters how each of us thinks and does—coming from a view of our interaction with Earth. In this sense, supporting the students is not about serving "perspectives" on the world, distancing us from it, but about enacting the world (cf. Mol 2002). This means that pastoral care, which seeks to take this new climatic regime into conscious account, is, in the words of Latour, "to discover *a course of treatment*—but without the illusion that a cure will come quickly" (Latour 2017, p. 13). Connecting this point to the above quotes from the chaplains on the lack of any possibility of a traditional "safe comfort" through a modern view of ensuring Earth as a stable object, Latour suggests:

"There is no cure for the condition of belonging to the world. But, by taking care, we can cure ourselves of believing that we do not belong to it, that the essential question lies elsewhere, that what happens to the world does not concern us. (. . . ) In these matters, hope is a bad counsellor, since we are not in a crisis. We can no longer say 'this, too, will pass.' We're going to have to ge<sup>t</sup> used to it. *It's definitive*." (Ibid., p. 13)

What I sugges<sup>t</sup> here is that in the practice of pastoral care, the local and basic enactments of things, bodily expressions, feelings, and views which drive (and hinder) our being as belonging to the world are not separated from the issue of climate change, but they are interconnected. Climate change is not just something passive "out there" in itself that humans then relate to. Hence, Latour's alternative narrative is that instead of separating the world into a nature/culture binary, as passiveness and activeness, respectively, (which modern thinking has usually done), we ought to realize that our planet is full of 'agents'— things—which have the power to act according to their own intention, will, force, desire, need, or function. Our environments are anything but passive. Humans and things are inextricably connected. As Latour puts it:

"Don't try to define nature alone, for you'll have to define the term 'culture' as well (the human is what escapes nature: a little, a lot, passionately); don't try to define 'culture' alone, either, for you'll immediately have to define the term 'nature' (the human is what cannot 'totally escape' the constraints of nature). Which means that we are not dealing with *domains* but rather with one and the same *concept* divided into two parts, which turn out to be bound together, as it were, by a sturdy rubber band. (. . . ) They were born together, as inseparable as Siamese twins who hug or hit each other without ceasing to belong to the same body." (Ibid., p. 15)

My interviews show precisely that climate change discourse and changes in the environment are not distant issues separated from moods, feelings, beliefs, anger, joy, faith, etc., but are entangled in social activities, disciplines of science being studied, and the imagination of every single student seeking pastoral care. In this sense, climate change is socialized and incorporated into pastoral care practice. "As soon as we abandon the borders between the outside and the inside of an agent, by following these waves of action we begin to *modify the scale* of the phenomena considered" (ibid., p. 104). Latour speaks of a "multiplicity of modes of action that are capable of intermingling (. . . ) human and nonhuman actors" (ibid., p. 50). The Earth is lively, vital, and active, though certainly not as a single agen<sup>t</sup> or a unified subjectivity. Humans and nature are connected as complex, heterogenic entities, as intensely interwoven hybrids (Latour 1993, 2017). They are not distant but entangled in the same multiple bodies of the world (cf. Latour-quotation above).

From this opening analysis, leading into an earthbound approach in pastoral care, we now turn to a theological view that might further unfold the new climatic regime leading to a more specific model for pastoral care practice. For this purpose, we need a form of God-talk which does not address a God of distance, but a present and participating God—a theology approaching exactly our belonging to the world—the Earth—as the body of God.
