Video: Religion in Times of Earth Crisis: Apocalyptic Grief: Reckoning with Loss, Wrestling with Hope

This was the fourth event in the six-part Religion in Times of Earth Crisis Series.

Human-caused climate change already contributes to manifold global disasters. As the planet inevitably continues to warm, these disasters will be routine and unrelenting. Addressing the reality of loss must become a basic spiritual task of our climate present and future, along with summoning the resolve to respond to all our losses. In this session, Matthew Ichihashi Potts considered the apocalyptic roots of the Christian tradition in order to diagnose how Christianity has contributed to the present crisis and suggest possibilities for a different way forward. Through particular attention to grief and hope as religious categories and with specific reference to various moments and movements from within the Christian tradition, Potts reflected upon the spiritual crisis at the heart of climate catastrophe and suggests the potential for a religious response.

Speaker: Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church

Moderator: Diane L. Moore, Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life

Matthew Ichihashi Potts, MDiv '08, PhD '13, was appointed the Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church and the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in 2021. Potts has served on the faculty at Harvard Divinity School since 2013 and has focused his teaching on sacramental and moral theology, ministry and pastoral theology, religion and literature, and preaching. He is the author of two books, Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament: Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Forgiveness: An Alternative Account (Yale University Press, 2022). He sits on the editorial board of the journal Literature and Theology. He is also co-host of the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. Potts served as both an officer in the United States Navy and as a college administrator before being ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church.

For more information on this series, visit this article on the HDS website. 

This event took place on February 26, 2024.

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SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Apocalyptic Grief, Reckoning with Loss, Wrestling with Hope. February 26, 2024.

DIANE L. MOORE: And welcome to all of you who are joining us live for this live web seminar. And welcome also to those who will be viewing this event in a recording of this tonight's session. I'm Diane Moore, and I'm the Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life here at Harvard Divinity School. And on behalf of myself and our Dean, Marla Frederick, we are delighted to welcome all of you to the fourth in a six part series entitled religion in times of Earth crisis.

This series features faculty from Harvard Divinity School, and is intended for a larger public audience of which you all are representative of and we are delighted to be in conversation with you about this critical issue in this critical time. This series is sponsored by Religion and Public Life, and we are in partnership, in co-sponsoring with our colleagues at the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University. Our dear friends and colleagues at the Center for the Study of World Religion at Harvard Divinity School, the Constellation Project, and Harvard X.

Please join me as we pause now to offer the Harvard land acknowledgment of land and people. Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay tribute to the people of the Massachusett tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people.

These events, of course, don't happen in a vacuum. And I am eager to offer appreciation and thanks to our colleagues at Religion and Public Life, who behind the scenes have made all of this happen. Rochelle Siu, Romatzyh, Tammy Liao, and Natalie Campbell. I also want to thank our wonderful colleagues in our communications department, particularly Kristi Welch for the beautiful posters that animate this series in such a powerful way.

And our dear friend and colleague, Kamal Lord, in our IT department who helps make sure that this series runs with as few glitches as possible. The entire series has really been inspired by our colleague, Professor Mayra Rivera, who was the president of the American Academy of Religion, which is the professional associations of scholars of religion.

She was the president in 2022, and gave a powerful address for her presidential address. And I want to read an excerpt from that presentation. And then also another scholar and colleague who has inspired us with his writings, but first from Mayra. We need a more capacious sense of collectivity that can only emerge when we are willing to honor our stories and tell the truth about injustices that are shaped both environmental devastation and responses to it. We need a world of our many worlds, and that's from Mayra Rivera.

And the second quote is from Amitav Ghosh in his remarkable publication called The Nutmegs Curse. This is from Ghosh. This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in telling stories. To us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to non-humans. As with all the most important artistic endeavors in human history, this is a task that is once aesthetic and political. And because of the magnitude of the crisis that besets the planet, it is now freighted with the most pressing moral urgency. Again, Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg's Curse.

We're so excited to share the work of our colleagues at HDS because like colleagues in religious studies and all of the humanities, so much of the conversation about climate, and climate catastrophe, and the Earth crisis is about the science and the challenges that beset us in public policy. These are very critical questions and issues.

But what is often overlooked is the contribution that the humanities can offer. And what the humanities invite us to consider is, what are the ways that we are even thinking about these challenges? And particularly relevant to Ghosh's quote, what are the stories that shape both the current way that we think about crises across a variety of genres, but also what other stories can invite us to think imaginatively in fresh ways about what we think we already know?

And that is what we hope that this series of conversations will spark both for us as we engage with each other, and also with you, our audience. So before I turn to introduce our speaker for the evening, I just want to remind you of a few things. This event is being recorded.

It will be-- a recording of the event will be available on our website at Harvard Divinity School Religion and Public Life in a few days time once the transcripts are provided for that sharing. I also want to say that Professor Potts will be speaking for about 50 minutes, and then we will have time for question and answers for another 40 or 45 minutes, depending on the timing, and we will end promptly at 7:30.

So please, as you're hearing him and listening to him, please be thinking about questions that we hope you will put into the Q&A function at the bottom of the web screen, and trust that we're all quite familiar now with Zoom and webinars. But there is a Q&A function at the bottom, and you can ask your question either with your name or you can ask it anonymously, but we hope to have a rich flow of many questions, so thank you for that.

So it is now my incredible pleasure to introduce a beloved colleague and friend, Professor Matthew Ichihashi Potts. Matt is the-- was appointed the PUC Minister in the Memorial Church, and the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in 2021, but he has been a member of the faculty at Harvard Divinity School since 2013. He's focused his teaching on sacramental and moral theology, ministry and pastoral theology, religion and literature, and preaching.

He's the author of two books, Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories, published by Bloomsbury in 2015. And most recently his very highly acclaimed and incredibly creative and critical text entitled, Forgiveness: an Alternative Account, published by Yale University Press in 2022.

Matt's presentation tonight is entitled, Apocalyptic Grief, Reckoning with Loss and Wrestling with Hope, and it is a part of his current book project, next book project, which is also tentatively titled, Apocalyptic Grief. So Matt, we'll turn it over to you, and thank you so very much for being part of this critical conversation.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Thank you, Diane. I hope everybody can hear me OK. And thanks to the Religion and Public Life, and to everyone at the [INAUDIBLE] who has done so much to make this happen. To Marie Michelle Tammy, Naomi, I'm grateful to be with you tonight and to talk about this stuff. I'm going to share my screen now, so everyone can see what we're talking about. So Apocalyptic Grief: Reckoning with Loss, Wrestling with Hope.

Just from the introduction that Diane just gave, in many ways this conversation, this series of slides I'm going to talk through with you tonight is about stories. The stories that form the way we relate to the world around us. And one of the things I'm going to try to do is think about how some of the stories that at least have formed the Christian tradition, how they have led us to the predicament we're in. I mean predicaments kind of a euphemism or an understatement, but I want to talk about how maybe one interpretation of the stories that we read together and have passed down have led us to this situation we're in.

But I also want to lift up some possibilities from within tradition for thinking through these stories in a different way. And the two main themes I want to focus on in the next 45 or so minutes are the themes of loss or grief and hope so. Those are going to be the main categories of thought, or affect, or whatever I want to explore together.

So I'm going to start with a little bit of a story. Actually, which is that I've been worried about climate change for a long time like any, I think-- like a lot of people, like most people, I think, who are paying attention to the world around us, and trusting the evaluations of those who the science. I think, I've been worried about climate change for a while. But the idea behind this thing about apocalyptic grief began when I attended a session down in Falmouth, Massachusetts, I guess it was six or seven years ago now, maybe more, seven or eight years ago.

I used to live in Falmouth, so I used to Pastor a church down there and I commuted up here to teach. And Falmouth is home to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute which is one of the great scientific centers in this country, and they have a lot of scientists working on climate change, and a lot of people in the community who are concerned about climate change. And I went to an event in one of the churches in town that was about Christianity and the climate crisis.

And they invited some folks who were fairly well known in Christian circles as eco theologians or people thinking about how Christians should respond to the climate crisis. And there were some scientists there, but there were also these theologians. And I sat through this presentation, and it really kind of bothered me because the especially the Christian theologians who were presenting the-- who were presenting their work, said things that I couldn't really agree with. They said things like, if we make the right choices now, if we do the right things, if we turn and repent from our ways, then we can avoid the catastrophes which are coming.

And it seemed to me that the scientific evidence said that there's already some catastrophe baked into the system. And in fact, if we look around the world today, we know that these things are already happening. Climate change is not something that's going to happen in the future if we do not repent in the present. Climate change is something that is happening and has been happening.

And I'm worried about this formulation, a Christian triumphalist formulation which is, if we repent, if we turn around, then God will come in and undo all the bad effects that we might have set ourselves up for. And it seemed to me an inadequate way to respond to the reality of the task at hand, which is one where there is some calamity baked into the system. And that what we really need is to think about what it means to live into and through calamity with some courage, with some justice.

And that's where I thought the Christian tradition is, could be useful to us. Not in telling us a story about how we might avoid it. Although, I think we should try to mitigate as many effects as possible, but I thought that was a little bit of a magical thinking or something, which Christianity could be rightly accused of at times. So that got me thinking about things. And it was also informed by this article that came out in New York Magazine in July of 2017 called the Uninhabitable Earth, where this author named David Wallace-Wells wrote a really harrowing account of what the future will look like if we are not able to remain I can't remember exactly the degrees. I think it was 3 or 3.5 degrees Celsius.

If we were not able to contain climate change, warming to within that range. And it was truly horrifying. I mean, there was that article, and I remember there were follow on articles saying about how bothered they were by this article. Interestingly enough, in the last year or so, I think, David wallace-wells has written again and said that even some of those predictions have gotten less severe. But still, I mean, this article really affected me, like it affected a lot of people.

But one of the things that Wallace-Wells said in that article is he said, scientists are in a bind because they don't know how to talk to the general public about dangers this grave and horrifying. He said, they feel like if they tell the truth people will despair, and do nothing, and if they lie people will not recognize the urgency and do nothing, and so their only option is people doing nothing, so what do they do?

And what I was thinking is, I think, that we have access to more realism or we can accommodate more realism than that, most humans. I think that we have access to some resolve. We don't always, but I think that we do, and I actually think that if we read the Christian tradition in the right way, we might be able to orient ourselves towards that courage, towards that resolve, without compromising any of the realism that's required. But that means that we need to wrestle with a couple of things that have been part of the Christian tradition in inconsistent and problematic ways since the beginning, which is how we deal with loss, and what we mean by hope.

And so I really want to engage ideas of grief and hope in this talk. And as Diane said, this is the beginning of a book project. What I'm going to be talking to you about tonight is like me kind of working out, working through some of the early theology. I'm actually really grateful for this talk because I forced me to get a little bit deeper into some of the questions of hope than I had been before.

But like a lot of my scholarship, my focus is going to be very much on literary work. So I'm going to talk to you about the ideas behind how I want to talk about grief and hope in this talk tonight. But if folks want to talk about literature or film, the kinds of things, the texts that I'm going to take up in the book when I eventually write it, I'd be happy to talk about that during the Q&A. OK, so apocalypse, this is the Michelangelo's Last Judgment, it's the Sistine Chapel.

I think Mayra said this in the first talk of this series, but it's important to note that what we tend to think of as apocalypse is not what the word actually means. I think right now, if you Google apocalypse or image search apocalypse, you'll see end of the world type scenarios, maybe even see this Last Judgment from Michelangelo. But end of the world is what we think apocalypse means, but that's not actually what it means. As I said, I think Mayra already covered this so I won't belabor it.

But the word apocalypse is just the Greek word for revelation or unveiling. The reason why the last book of the Bible is called the Revelations of John or Revelations is because it's-- and it's also considered an apocalypse is because it's the same word. Now, apocalypse is not only like the word for revelation, it also became a dominant literary genre from-- I'm not an early Christian, or historian, or scholar of the ancient Mediterranean, but from about 200 BCE to about 1 to 200 CE apocalypse or the apocalyptic was a dominant literary genre.

And what apocalypse does or what the apocalyptic genre does, is it reveals the meaning behind things. So especially in a situation where there is great suffering or where the world does not seem to be going according to God's plan, apocalypse was supposed to be the revelation of God's plan. Here's the meaning behind all this stuff that's going on. It looks like there's no plan here, actually, there is a plan it's just hidden, and we'll unveil it, and you will see it.

Now, often that unveiling comes at the end of time, at the end of history. And so apocalypse came to be associated with the kind of end of history narrative, but it just means unveiling, it just means the revelation of the meaning of something. And in particular, I think the reason it becomes popular in that kind of 300 to 400 year window is because there was great suffering among Jewish peoples. And this is the kind of genre that arose, how do we make sense of this catastrophe that's going on around us?

And these genres would emerge, which we're trying to make sense, trying to reveal what the meaning behind these things were. So there are many Christian apocalypses. Some would say that the whole New Testament is apocalyptic, there are lots of apocalyptic literary works or whatever. You could consider each of the Gospels, at least, the three synoptics, but maybe each of the four Gospels on apocalypse in one sense.

At the very least, each of the synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke have a chapter or two just before Jesus is killed where Jesus talks about the ends, and what's going to happen in the future, and what will be revealed, and those are often called the little apocalypses. But in a broader sense, you could also see each of the Gospels as an apocalypse. Now, to develop this kind of conversation that I want to have tonight about grief and hope, I'm going to focus on two. The first is the Gospel of Mark, and the second is what's called the Showings of Julian of Norwich.

The Gospel of Mark. So this is an image-- it's I mean, it's a cramped image, you're not seeing the whole painting. This is Tintoretto, Jacopo Tintoretto, who is a great artist of Venice, and it's a painting of the body of Saint Mark, his remains being translated to Saint Mark's Cathedral in Rome. And his body is supposed to be a thing about 600 years old by then, so he's looking pretty good. So the Gospel of Mark, I want to give you some history for the composition of the Gospel of Mark.

So the Gospel of Mark, scholars believe it was written in probably the year like early '70s AD. And that's important because it means it was written after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. And I think it's especially for Christians who don't know this history, who aren't reminded of this history consistently, it's kind of hard for us Christians, and I'm speaking as a Christian and as a Christian theologian now. I think, it's hard for us to really get our heads around how catastrophic and how apocalyptic the destruction of the temple and the destruction of Jerusalem was in the year 70 AD.

So there had been an insurrection and then Rome had decided to come down very hard. And they sieged Jerusalem for several years, and then burned Jerusalem to the ground. It was truly, I mean, truly apocalyptic. If apocalypse means end of the world, the world ended for people who lived in and around the capital of Judea at that time. Josephus, who is a reliable historian in other cases, we're not sure how reliable his figures are now, but we have no reason to believe that he was exaggerating tremendously. Probably exaggerating a little, but he said, hundreds of thousands of people were killed, hundreds of thousands were enslaved and taken to Rome.

He said, as many as 500 people a day were crucified in and around the city walls during the siege of Jerusalem. I think we have to really think through what this means. The streets in and around Jerusalem just lined with naked, tortured bodies, and crucifixes everywhere.

And then, the whole city burned to the ground and made a minor encampment for the Roman military after that. The temple and Jerusalem were the cultural and religious center of the Jewish diaspora, and that destruction was cataclysmic, it was apocalyptic, it meant the end of the world for these people. And the Gospel of Mark arises right in the wake of that, while people are still suffering. Their families still killed, their relatives, and loved ones, and friends enslaved, all of this going on.

And then the other Gospels follow. Mark was probably the first gospel of Matthew, Luke, John, they follow. So this is the apocalyptic situation in which the Gospel of Mark is written. And I think it's important for understanding what the gospel says. So two things I want to focus on about the story it tells. So the Gospel of Mark you can read in halves, there are other ways to break it up. But the first half is sort of, Jesus and his ministry in Galilee.

And then the first half of the gospel, I mean, He's working miracles left and right. He's healing everybody, and He's taking care of everybody, and He's doing magical things, He's walking on water, He's calming storms, He's feeding 4,000, He's feeding 5,000, He's raising the dead, He is exhibiting signs of immense, immense power. And as in this kind of remote backwater of Galilee, and as He exhibits these signs of immense, immense power people start following him, of course, they do.

Here's this powerful, charismatic leader who can raise the dead, who can calm storms, who can take a loaf and feed 5,000 people, they're starting to follow him and they're talking. And they're talking to each other and Jesus hears them talking, this is in Mark 8. Jesus hears them talking and says to his disciples, well, what are they saying about me? And they're saying, oh, there's some saying you're a prophet, some say this, some say that. And then Jesus says to them, what do you say about me? And this is a very famous line, and it's one that the Christian tradition does a lot of-- puts a lot of weight behind, but Peter says, you're the Messiah, you're the anointed one of God, and Jesus says, you're right.

And this is like this big turning point in the gospel. Halfway through, about halfway through Peter makes this declaration. He finally recognizes based upon all these acts of power that this is who Jesus is. And Jesus says, you're right. And then Jesus says, and I'm going to go to Jerusalem, and I'm going to suffer and die. And then Peter-- I preached about this yesterday at church, and then Peter says, by no means, that can't happen to you because what's at stake for Peter is Peter is thinking like everybody else, you are powerful, you can do the most phenomenal feats of power, you can calm storms, you can feed thousands, you can raise the dead, you are the person to lead us to this triumph.

You are the one who has the power to help us overthrow the boot of Roman oppression, which is on our necks. And Jesus says, no, that's actually not what all these miracles are about. What's actually happening is, during what Jesus is doing is Jesus is reaching out to the poor, and to outcasts, and people outside the community, to Gentiles, and this is what he holds on to.

And what He's saying in Mark 8 and my reading is, when He says we are going to Jerusalem, and He says that he must suffer and die, that must is really important. That He must suffer and die. It doesn't mean that suffering is like this necessary, redemptive thing. I think what Jesus is saying in that moment is, no, I am not going to turn away from what my true calling, my true mission is, which is not deeds of power, but serving the lost, and reaching out in mercy and goodness.

And I will go to Jerusalem and reach out in mercy and goodness. And even there, if it costs me my life, I will not turn away from mercy and goodness. That's not what they want to hear. And what happens in the second half of Gospel Mark is he stops with the miracles. He does almost no miracles in the whole second half of the gospel. He curses one fig tree, which is a weird thing. He curses one fig tree, and it withers and dies. But apart from that, He does almost no miraculous stuff. And He goes into the city on Palm Sunday, and they think that He's a new kind of warrior, general king, and they're cheering him as if He is one. And then they find out He's not, and they're upset with Him.

And when he is brought before Pilate, He goes to the death that he predicted. it's this incredibly ignominious and gruesome end to this story, precisely because He wasn't the person that Peter had first thought that He would be. But there's something really important about how it ends, when it ends. So this is the last-- I'll qualify this in a second, but this is chapter 16. The first eight verses of chapter 16 from the Gospel of Mark.

And this is actually the original ending of the Gospel of Mark, the oldest versions of the Gospel of Mark that we have. And at the end of verse 8, and this is what it says. "When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?

When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. But he said to them, 'Do not be alarmed, you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised, He is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee, there you will see him just as he told you.' And then this last line. So they went out and fled from the tomb for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."

So this is the first testimony of Jesus. The first line of the Gospel of Mark is, this is the good news of the Gospel of Mark. And the last word, the last line of the Gospel of Mark is, for they were afraid. And afraid maybe undersells it here. It says something more like, in Greek it says, for they were terrified. So this gospel, which is supposed to be the good news, it ends in terror. It ends in these women going to the tomb, seeing the tomb empty, and being terrified.

It seems to me that what the gospel is doing is different than what we think the gospel is doing when we talk about resurrection. It's suggesting something else. Now, what we know is, maybe 5 or 10 years later, they added some more to the end of the gospel, and Jesus shows up in a more overt and obvious way, and talks to them. And a few years later, they added even more to the gospel or Jesus shows up more times, and gives them more assurances. But in the first version of this, which is written when Jerusalem is still smoldering, and the bodies are still on the crosses all around, they end in terror and fear.

And it seems to me posturally, theologically, what this first version of the earliest gospel was inviting its readers to do was to think about what it means to live with and through terror and fear. What it means to look to stare into emptiness, to look into the tomb and see emptiness, and to turn, and live with that fear. And what we see looking retrospectively is that, what Jesus had done throughout, which is reaching out to the outcast, reaching out to the poor, reaching out to the marginalized, this is what it is recommending as the way we should live when we have fear, when we face emptiness.

We turn to each other because this is what it says that the women said nothing to anyone. We know that's not true because I'm talking about it right now. They said something to someone. And what happened is in the wake of this utter destruction, a community of people, who started caring for each other in the way that Jesus taught them to care for each other, rose up.

It was not one built around kind of his fabulous deeds of power, not only because they couldn't do them, but also because that's not what they had available to them. What they had were these more mundane, but also revolutionary practices of care and community. And I think this, before the more obvious physical Resurrection appearances are appended to the end of this first version of the first gospel, that is what people were suggesting this is what we do, this is how we live in this moment of emptiness, and fear, and terror.

And so this thing about resurrection and Christian triumphalism. I think, that's a hard thing to do. I think, the reason the gospel is written is because the author is looking around at the ruin and destruction around him, and is saying, we need a way to live in the midst of ruin and destruction, and here is our model. Jesus gives us our model on how we can support each other, how we can live with each other. But that's a hard thing to do because what you want instead is for everything to get better, is to not have to stare into the empty tomb, to not have to end in fear, and not have to face terror.

And so what we have are different versions of the resurrection story appearing, and being appended, and being discussed in different ways. Now, this is something we can talk about in the Q&A. I actually think that there are very viable ways to read the Gospels of Mark. And excuse me, of Matthew, and Luke, and John, which are consistent with this reading, which also want to, I think, maybe contemporary Christian readings of the Resurrection over read those ancient stories. Those ancient stories too are inviting us into this productive relationship with emptiness, with loss, with fear rather than trying to kind of shunt or push those feelings of fear and terror away.

But there's a version of Christian triumphalism that emerges which says, if we are willing to endure suffering, then there will be some resolution at the end where it will all go away. I'll say more about that in a second, but I to look at some other sources first. So this is the other apocalypse I want to discuss tonight. As far as I know, I'm not sure anyone has called this an apocalypse, but I think it must count by any broad definition of what an apocalypse is.

So I want to talk to you about the Showings of Julian of Norwich. Julian of Norwich is a Saint, well, I guess, she's not officially a saint in the Roman Catholic Church, she is in my tradition. Julian of Norwich is a woman from the 14th century, mid-14th century in East Anglia, England. She lived as an anchoress, which means that we can talk about this during the Q&A as well, but that means that she was walled in to the side of a church, to Saint Julian's Church in Norwich, a church you can still visit if you go to Norwich, and she lived there.

Now, the 14th century, if 70 AD in ancient Judea was a time of literal apocalypse for the Jewish people, then 14th century England was also a time of apocalypse in ways that will probably sound familiar to many of us. There was climate change, there was a little Ice Age in the early 14th century, which because it was an agricultural society in Europe, it led to widespread famine.

And the average lifespan drop down into the low 20s or early teens, just from the famine but there was more to come. The bubonic plague also came in the 14th century. And the bubonic plague ended up killing, depending upon your various historians estimates, anywhere from a fifth to a half of the European population.

All this death and destruction led to an incredible amount of unrest and disease among the people. Institutions that they had trusted like the church, like governments, began to be distrusted, so there were all kinds of religious rebellions, all kinds of political rebellions. There was a war between England and France that killed many people. That in England they were prosecutions of immigrants, there was an insurrection in London. I think they beheaded the Lord high treasurer, and imprisoned the Archbishop of Canterbury. All this stuff going on in the 14th century.

And at this time, this woman whose name we don't know, we call her Julian of Norwich because she was attached to the Church of Saint, Julian she had some kind of grave illness. Maybe it was plague, maybe it wasn't, but she had some kind of grave illness. And while in her grave illness, she had a vision of Jesus coming to her. And what the message Jesus brought her in her illness was one of love. And so what's called the showings of divine-- of the showings of Julian of Norwich is also known as the revelations of divine love.

Now, there's so much in this text, it's incredibly rich, and we can talk about it during the Q&A if you like. But I just want to focus on two parts of it, which I think are really instrumental. At least, the way I want to put it in conversation with the Gospel of Mark, and also the way I want to think about things like grief and hope. So those you are heaven and you are my crown, and I'll talk about those next. So this is a moment in the revelations.

Early on in the revelations, Julian is recounting this experience we had, she had the Jesus. And Jesus comes to her in a vision while she is in her sick bed. And the vision she has of Jesus in a way that is very consistent with many medieval visions of this sort, is incredibly gruesome. There are sheets of blood coming down his face, and his body is desiccated and dry, and the blood cakes and dries, and then more blood comes, and she's-- it's incredibly gruesome, and she loves Jesus dearly, and she's having a hard time looking at him.

And this is when this moment comes. And then I thought my reasons suggested to me as if there had been said to me in a friendly way, look up to heaven to his father. And then I saw clearly with the faith that I felt that there was nothing between the cross and heaven, which could have distressed me. Either I must look up or else reply. I answered inwardly with all my soul's strength and said, no, I cannot for you are my heaven. Now, what's really fascinating about this is that, Jesus, excuse me, Julian has this vision of Jesus in this immense pain. This person she loves in this immense pain.

And then her reason says to her, and she sees clearly that she could be carried up to the Father, she could be carried up to heaven. All she has to do is look away from the cross and look up to heaven. There is nothing between the cross and heaven which could distress her. If she looks away and looks up, she will be carried away to paradise. And she has to make a decision, and the decision she makes inwardly with all her soul strength is to say, no, I cannot for you or my heaven.

She looks at Jesus and says, you are the one I love, so you are the one I want to be with, and I'm not going to turn away from you even though I'm afraid, even though this is gruesome. Heaven is not out there someplace for me to escape the suffering or the difficulty of the present because I love you. I will remain in the difficulty of the present because you are my heaven I mean this is interesting in its own right but it's also interesting in the way it's mirrored by the language of Jesus so she has this conversation with Jesus.

And this is actually not-- this is not in his own words, but he had asked in the moment the quote I'm going to give you right now, Jesus has just said to her, are you satisfied with how much I suffered for you? And she's kind of like, what do you mean satisfied? What are you talking about? And then while they're talking about whether or not she's satisfied, whether she's pleased at what he did for her, she has another vision of these three levels of heaven, and then the first heaven is what she describes here. This is the action of the Father that he rewards His son, Jesus Christ.

This gift and this reward causes Jesus such joy that His father could have given Him no reward that could have pleased Him better. So this is what she's saying, she's saying, I had this vision, and I had this vision that Jesus had to suffer for us. And I learned that God gave Jesus this wonderful reward and I started wondering, but what could be this wonderful reward that God gave Jesus for suffering for us? The first heaven was full of bliss for the father is highly pleased with all deeds Jesus has done with regard to our salvation.

And therefore, we are not only His through His redemption of us, but also through His father's courteous gift. We are His bliss, we are His reward, we are His glory, we are His crown. So Julian comes to Jesus and says, boy, you suffered so much for us, God must have given you something really great. There must been some great reward that God gave you for doing what you did for us, for me, right? And what Jesus says to her is, you are the reward, you are the gift. There is no thing beyond you that you are the way that I get to.

There is not some greater good that I'm going to arrive at if I go through you, you are the one I love. It's a mirror of what she says to Jesus too when she sees Jesus suffering. I'm not trying to get to some other heaven, you are the heaven, love itself is the reward. And this is what Jesus says to Julian as well. I wasn't trying to suffer so I could get to some greater good beyond you, you are the greatest good because love is its own reward. And this really becomes, I think, the argument of the revelations.

Now, I don't want to overstate this, Julian has a vision of paradise of bliss beyond all this, but she also insists that love is the whole meaning of everything. And when we exist in love, we have already arrived at whatever our reward will be, even in spite of whatever sufferings we are enduring. There's a strong sense, in a way I think that echoes, obviously very differently, but in a way that I think that echoes the Gospel of Mark, which is saying that love is its own reward.

That facing terror, and pain, and loss is where-- in love is what we are meant to do, it's not some conduit or escape hatch by which we arrive at some kind of greater security or salvation. And this is where we can start talking about grief and hope in a less theological, maybe more theoretical event. So a lot of the way I'm thinking about grief comes from the writings of a really important theorist that many of you, I'm sure, have heard of named Judith Butler.

This book Precarious Life came out in the mid aughts or early aughts, I think, 2003 or four, or something. And I'm focusing on the first essay of this book, which is called Violence Mourning and Politics. And in that work she talks about grief, and grief ability, and about grief as the ground for ethics, so these are just a few quotes from her writings there. Right at the beginning of the essay, she writes, she asks these questions, who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?

She's thinking about the US involvement in Iraq at the time, and the way that we were grieving both Iraqis who were killed in the war, and American soldiers were killed in the war, but she's also talking about the AIDS pandemic in the United States when she's talking about who counts as human, whose lives count as lives. And finally, what makes for a grievable life? Despite our differences in location and history, all of us have a notion of what it is to have lost somebody. Loss has made a tenuous we of us all.

And if we have lost, then it follows that we have had, that we have desired and loved, that we have struggled to find the conditions of our desire. Butler, she's a critical-- they are a critical theorist and they often use language as is kind of difficult and in the tradition of critical theory. But part of what is going on in this quote here is that, what they are suggesting is that, what makes a life grievable is that we love it. And we love those lives, which we are afraid of losing, and which are also precarious, which could be lost.

Our urge to protect, our urge to love, our impulse to grieve after we lose that which we love is a sign that we love. She's there diagnosing this idea that grief and love go together. We love that which we would grieve losing, and we grieve that which we love. Loss is the thing that ties love and grief together. And if that is true, Butler suggests that grief can become something of foundation for our politics, but maybe not in the ways that it often is.

So here, later on in the essay, when grieving is something to be feared, if we don't think of grieving as a line with love, but think of grieving as something we have to suppress or something that we can't face, if we look away from the empty tomb and don't want to face emptiness and fear or terror like the end of the Gospel of Mark does, when grieving is something to be feared, our fears can give rise to the impulse to resolve it quickly, to banish it in the name of an action invested with the power to restore the loss of return the world to a former order, or to reinvigorate a fantasy that the world formerly was orderly.

So when we fear grief, when we can't look in that empty tomb, then we start to take actions that restore the loss or return the world to order. We either tell stories that help us to look away from the empty tomb, or we do other similar things, or we reinvigorate a fantasy that the world formerly was orderly. This inability to grieve becomes problematic because we start taking actions that don't reckon with the world as it actually is. And therefore, become inclined towards forms of injustice that we're going to in a minute.

To grieve, they say later on, and to make grief itself a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction because they're concerned that, maybe if we're thinking about grief, we're just thinking about wallowing in sackcloth and ashes. They say it's not that. It's not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as a slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself.

To grieve, to recognize what is precarious, which lives are precarious, which lives are at risk, which is all of them. Is to start to understand that these lives are precious. They're precious because they are at risk, and therefore we have an obligation to protect them. We start to pay attention to their suffering. If we refuse to grieve, if we refuse to acknowledge that things are at risk, then why would we be inclined to protect them?

It's only by acknowledging grief, sort of anticipatory grief. Only by acknowledging that which we might lose, that's the only kind of-- that's the only way we progress to a real, fulsome love. Knowing that a thing is at risk, knowing that we might lose it, knowing that we will lose it, is exactly the thing that encourages us to try to protect it, and to care for it. So failure to grieve becomes a failure to love. This becomes very ironic, or very paradoxical, or very critical if we look at something like the later versions of the ending of the Gospel of Mark.

The first version of the Gospel of Mark is fully willing to grieve. There's fear, terror, and emptiness, but it's still called the Good news of God in Jesus Christ. And all we have left are all Jesus's actions on behalf of those who are suffering and poor. That is all that's left, and that's the good news, and it looks right at that emptiness and terror. And then you have versions added on which become gradually more triumphal, gradually more unwilling to grieve in that particular way.

And it raises the question if it also becomes less willing. To love pays less attention to all those precarious lies because it becomes completely fixated, excuse me, less available to all those precarious lives because its vision becomes completely fixated upon that one life which is no longer at any risk, the life of this risen Jesus. So this failure to grieve could be read as a failure to love in the way that the first version of the gospel is maybe calling us to.

So let me talk about hope for a minute. As I said, I've been working through some stuff on hope, so there's more bullet points here, but I promise we won't go too deep into the weeds on some of the theology. Now, hope is one of the three theological virtues that Paul outlines faith, hope, and love. Those of you who are familiar with the Christian tradition might be familiar with the way Paul talks about this. But it doesn't really talk in any kind of exhaustive or systematic way about what these virtues are. He gives a little bit of description of them, and I want to look at the way that Paul describes them a little bit. This is a depiction of Paul here.

So this is in Romans 5. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. What's interesting here is that hope is very closely tied to God's love being poured into our hearts.

I want to talk about that again. I mean, there's also all this stuff about suffering, and I think probably our Q&A we're going to have to reckon with the Christian the harmful and problematic Christian tradition of valorizing suffering. And I think, Paul's up to a little bit of that here. But the main thing I want to point to and call back to later is this idea that hope and love are closely related. That's not the way he talks about hope necessarily in Romans 8. Paul says, "For in hope we are saved. Now, hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience."

So hope is not the same thing as seeing. If you can see it, it's there. But here, hope is something about a relationship to the future. It's something about anticipating an outcome. Now, these two versions of hope don't have to be in tension. This idea that hope is from God's love being poured into us, that hope is related to love, and that hope is about anticipating an outcome. They don't have to be in tension, but I think they are in tension in some important ways. And I actually want to lift up one and critique the other.

And the way I want to critique the other is starting with this guy here who is Friedrich Nietzsche. Now, Nietzsche in the 19th century, you'll see here the first line. This is from Human, All Too Human which is one of his earlier works. He calls hope the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man. This is a very Nietzsche line. But he's very much concerned with hope like delusion, hope is a delusion.

You have no evidence, Nietzsche would say. You have no evidence that things are going to go the way you want them to go, and yet you hope in something that has no evidence, and all it's doing is prolonging your torments. Your faith in this delusion is just a way that you're torturing yourself. And persisting, it's the worst of all evils because it is a delusion. He says also in Human, All Too Human, we are only reasonably entitled to hope when we believe that we and our equals have more strength in the heart and head than the representatives of the existing state of things.

Now, this is really important here. He says, there is some reason for hope. We can have hope in ourselves. If we are sure or believe that we are stronger than our opponents, or at least that we are stronger than the inept people who are running things, then we can hope because that's a hope where we can have some confidence. But what he's really worried about is what he's calling here extraterrestrial hopes.

Nietzsche was just kind of anathema to any kind of hope in anything beyond this world, any kind of supernatural anything, any kind of supernatural hope, or religious hope, or theological hope he would call it, he saw as poisonous. He said because what that does is-- he said it was a kind of nihilism. He's often accused of being a nihilist, but it's actually the opposite. He thought that if you had placed all your hopes in some great beyond or in some other world, that naturally would stop paying attention to this world. That you would believe in something which doesn't exist out there that other world, that supernatural world, which he did not believe in.

And displacing all your cares and concerns to that world would make you ignore what is right here in front of you, which is where you should be focusing actually, all your energy. So it was in particular extraterrestrial hopes or supernatural hopes that he hated. But he also had other ways of speaking about hope, when hope was placed in the here and now. In particular around ethics, that mankind be redeemed from revenge, that to me is the bridge to the highest hope and a rainbow after long thunderstorms. He had this recurring image of hope as a rainbow, hope is the rainbow over the cascading stream of life.

And I think that's it's an ambivalent image because the rainbow is kind of an optical illusion. But it also is a beautiful thing that is part of the world around us, part of this world where we are living. So he hated hope in the one sense, but he hated it for the way it's confidence in an outcome it could not prove could lead to delusion. Now, that's not the way more contemporary folks are talking about hope. This is Vaclav Havel, who was President of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, also a literary writer.

And in one of his books he has this short passage on hope, where he says, hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy, that things are going well. It's not the same as willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success. But rather hope is a willingness to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

Hope is the willingness to work for something because it is good in itself, not because of what it is going to become or succeed. Think of Julian looking at Jesus's face and saying, no, you are my heaven. I don't love you so I can get to someplace else, I love you because I love you. Or Jesus in turn saying to Julian, you are my reward. I didn't love you so I could get something better from God for the sake of you, I love you for you. Hope is a willingness to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is.

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It's not the first version of Nietzsche's critique, which is that things are going to turn out well for no reason. You have no evidence to believe it will. It is not the conviction that things will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out. Now, I don't know if the translation from Czech makes sense is, to me, makes sense seems not really to carry the full weight of what he's trying to say, but the certainty that what we are doing has meaning whatever the outcome.

That what we are doing has meaning whatever the outcome. That I did this for you, not because you could get me to someplace else in the way that Julian and Jesus say to one another. This is Gustavo Gutierrez, the founder of Latin American Liberation theology, who around the same time that Vaclav Havel was writing what he was writing about hope, he had an interview in which he said this, hope is not the same thing as optimism. Optimism merely reflects the desire that external circumstances may one day approve there's nothing wrong with optimism, but we may not always have reasons for it.

I think the implication there is, if we have no reasons for it, there could be something wrong with it because it makes us believe that things will improve even though they won't, and that makes us complacent in a way that Nietzsche, I think, would find reprehensible. The theological virtue of hope is much more than optimism. Hope is based on the conviction that God is at work in our lives and in the world. So this is Terry Eagleton in a recent book of his, which is called Hope Without Optimism, where he's really playing on and developing these ideas of Havel and Gutierrez, although he doesn't-- I'm not sure he actually directly attributes either of them.

And then when he's talking about hope here, he's quite grave in his description. There are occasions when men and women must die in order to defend a principle that makes life worth living. I mean, this is the description of Jesus in the second half of the Gospel of Mark, powerful enough to rule with power and to lead insurrection, but committed to principles that peace, and mercy, and forgiveness, and goodness are the values by which he is going to live.

And so there are occasions when we live by hope, when men and women must die in order to defend a principle that makes life worth living. There is more at stake in acting than dismal or agreeable outcomes. Hope can acknowledge loss or destruction to be unavoidable, which is where it differs from some currents of optimism, it still refused to capitulate. Hope can acknowledge that a bad outcome is unavoidable, but it acts not because it feels it can guarantee a good outcome, but because the action is worthwhile in itself because the thing for which we were acting is good and deserves our action, even if we can't save it, even if we can't guarantee the outcome.

What this means is that, I think, hope is wrongly been characterized as a form of knowledge. Hope is a way we can have a relationship to what's going to happen in the future, know what's going to happen in the future. And I don't think that's actually what it is. At least in my theology like all things, it actually should be rooted in love.

And if hope is a form of love, it's actually not about knowing what the outcome of the future is going to be, it's actually deciding what is worth acting for in the present regardless of outcome. Even if I cannot save the future, even if I cannot guarantee an outcome, this is worth acting on. This is Julian looking at the face of Jesus and saying, you are my heaven. These are the women going to the tomb at the end of the Gospel of Mark saying, even though we cannot save our beloved friend, Jesus, anymore, we are going to roll back the stone we can't roll and care for this body that we can't raise.

And what I think is really important here is how this confounds the logic of capitalism. And maybe the confounds the logic of extractive capitalism in particular, where the worst-- excuse me, where the Earth exists for us to use it, so that we can ensure our own security. The purpose of the Earth by the logic of extractive capitalism is that the Earth exists so we humans can make ourselves more safe and more secure.

And we use it, and we do things to it, and we master it, and we become lords over it in order to shore us up and make us more secure. It's a tool by which we build ourselves up. That's what capitalism, extractive capitalism in particular would want us to do with carbon resources. But if instead we think about the Earth not as something to be used, but as something to be cared for regardless of the outcome, whether or not we can save it, whether or not it's going to make our lives easier or longer, then we come into a different relationship with this Earth.

And that relationship of love for things acting on behalf of things, merely for the sake that they exist because they are good, rather than what they can do for us, that does confound the logic of capitalism. And I worry that actually, I'm going to skip to the last bullet here as I-- I'll talk about some of these other things, but I'm going to skip to the last bullet for a second.

I worry that the way we read the resurrection story now, actually inclines us more towards the idea of extractive capitalism where other things exist for us to sacrifice them to our sense of security. I mean, you think about the way that this resurrection story is told, the one suffers immensely, but that suffering buys everybody else security. And if the one suffers, everybody else gets to be safe and secure forever, and that's the way we think about. I mean, that kind of utilitarian approach to the body of Jesus, to the life of Jesus, is also this kind of triumphalist resurrection account.

There are lots of ways that the Christian story and Christian stories can be used to show a kind of disordered, and I would say sick relationship that much of the Christian tradition has to the natural world. You can think about the Eden story of where we're banished away and separated from the Earth, and have to toil and struggle against it rather than to live in a more peaceable way, that's certainly one of the stories.

But another story, I think, is this idea that, oh, what it takes for me to be secure is for somebody else to sacrifice. And especially when we think about the way that climate change is not just dangerous for everybody, but how the levels of that danger are unjustly distributed among peoples. And how much people in the North and the First World are very much willing to allow others to suffer first and more for the sake of our security, this it troublingly follows the logic of resurrection.

But I think within the Christian story, there are other ways to think through what it might mean to look at emptiness, to look at fear, to look at outcomes we cannot predict, even outcomes that we worry will end badly and still say, it's worth acting, it's worth loving the world as it is because it is good, because God told us it's good. Not because we can save it, not because if we save that it will save us, but just because it deserves to be loved. We care for it because the beloved deserves our care, not because it will reward us.

I have some examples. I'll just close like talking about one example from pastoral life since that's the first bullet here. But the reason I had this intuition is not because I'm a theologian, it's not because I went to a talk in Falmouth from some scientists and Christian theologians, it really comes from my work as a pastor, which is limited. And I'm sure in this audience, there are people with a lot more pastoral experience than me.

But in that article from New York Magazine that I referenced at the beginning of this talk, when David Wallace-Wells talks about, we present people with a horrible news, and they'll either deny it, and hide their heads and pretend it doesn't exist, or they'll despair and not do anything. And it's a different scale. Climate change is an absolutely unique thing for us. But I've been with several people who have received apocalyptic news, when people-- with people when-- who have received the most awful news they can imagine.

When their loved one or someone they love dearly gets catastrophic apocalyptic cataclysmic news, news of terminal illness or that kind of thing. And in no cases, it's a small sample size, but in no cases among those good people that I've had the honor to sit with in those conversations and to journey with through the course of their illnesses, and as they accompanied their loved ones through illness. In no cases did people throw up their hands and say, well, I deny it, it's not going to happen. Or don't tell me that, or whatever.

Obviously, people are shocked, and people are hurt, and people are sad. But in every case of a person, including very personal ones when people get this kind of news, what I find is that human beings when given-- when told the truth about how much time is left and what they can do, they do everything they can to love one another as much as they can with the time they have left. I think we humans are capable of this. I actually think that Christian tradition gives us all the tools we need to do it if we read the tradition the right way.

The problem now is one of scale. I mean, we're thinking about a habitable planet that is in a similar situation, which is getting pretty grim news. The question is, will we be able to respond the way that I see so many of my parishioners respond on a fairly consistent basis, which is to respond with love. To look to the thing that maybe we can't save and decide to love it not because we think we can save it, or not because we think by saving it, it will save us, but simply because it's good.

DIANE L. MOORE: Matt, thank you on an incredibly powerful, and rich, and illuminative conversation you've sparked for us. The scale and scope of what you're addressing here, I think, just is remarkable both in its depth as well as its breadth because you really give us some language and tools yet again, to think about what we-- to think in fresh ways what we think we know.

And just incredibly grateful for the richness of the resources that you represented here. I'm going to encourage folks to go ahead and start putting questions in the chat. We've already got a few but one of the things I wanted to ask you about is, first of all, I'm sure the connections with other stories and scholars that I'm sure the synapses are just like firing for you throughout this whole journey.

I'm just so struck by your comment about what it means to not just what-- I often quote Donna Haraway in this series because I think she's such a powerful interlocutor around these questions. And of course, her latest work is called Stay With the Trouble. And what I hear you doing here Is the same thing.

It's like we can't be thinking about the consequence of actions, but to stay with the action, to be present. And the question I wanted to raise for you relevant to that, and to Butler's notion of we can't love what we can't grieve. I'm just wondering, what are your reflections on our connections with the non-human world? How do we move into a space of the recognition that is so critical relevant to life, non-human life around these same questions?

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: I think, yeah, that's absolutely-- that's the right question. And I think Butler is a really great tool for us to do that because I think what's implied, it's not in this essay, but in other of their work what's implied is, when we ask what lives are grievable, they're also talking about non-human life. And I think what they would say is that, our failure-- something like climate denialism is a failure to grieve.

It's a failure to grieve the world around us, failure to grieve what we're losing natural places, non-human, beyond human creatures. It's our unwillingness to see, to grieve those lives is an inability to love those things as well, which in any reading of-- I mean, even the most conservative readings of the Christian text is a betrayal of humans obligations to the world around us.

The inability to grieve, I think, as a sign of our failure to determine that the world needs love and care, yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And that's what Butler is calling us to. Think about who you're not grieving. We can start with humans like gay men during the AIDS pandemic. And we can-- or we can expand it out to victims of war and violence in various places in the world. But I think they're also saying, what else are we losing? Because we're losing. The ones you're not paying attention, you can know what you love by what you grieve, and that's what they're inviting us to try to grieve as broadly as possible.

And that's not something that's-- I mean, just to name my own community. For all our proclamations, that's not something Christians like to do or humans in general, I think, but it's grief is hard, and it's hard to lose things, and we want to turn away from that. And what Butler suggests is like, no turn toward it because you're not going to know, you're not going to learn how to protect it, you're not going to have the courage to face it, you're not going to do what needs to be done to love it, even bracketing the question is saving it, you're not going to do what needs to be done to love it until you're willing to grieve it. And yeah, and so I think you're right to point it towards the beyond human and non-human. Yeah.

DIANE L. MOORE: Yeah. Thank you. Just one quick other comment, and then want to turn to some of these really great questions. I'm so moved by your experience. And think which everyone in this talk can relate to about what does it mean to hear a terrible news about people we love, and what do we do with that news? And I just find that simple but very relatable experience so powerful that we don't run, we don't say, well, I give up, we stay, we stay in the pain, and because that is our expression of love. So I just want to say, simple but very powerful connection, so thank you for that.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: I mean, the analogy would be like, I will care for you these next three months as long as you get better.

DIANE L. MOORE: Right.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: None of us would ever say that. On the contrary we say, if it's two months, whatever I will do whatever I can for as long as I have just because the act itself is the gift. You are my heaven, that's the--

DIANE L. MOORE: Yeah. Really beautiful. Thank you. Thank you for that. One of our beloved students, Rebecca, who's in your forgiveness class says that she's seeing real deep parallels here. And so her question for you is, how do you see the relationship between hope and forgiveness?

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Yeah. That's a great question. I think, as I've gotten deeper-- and I'm not very deep in this writing project, I've had the idea and I kind of the books I want to write about and I'm developing ideas of hope is the thing that-- I'm a sports fan, it's the hope that kills you they say in sports, right? And so like the hope has been the thing I've been avoiding just because there's-- yeah, the sources are difficult, and it's a complicated topic.

I think maybe what you see the way I'm-- the more I'm-- let me start over. The more I'm thinking about hope, the more this looks like an analogous problem to the one I found with forgiveness. And not to derail this conversation, but that it can be used and it has been used by the Christian tradition towards the ends opposite of what it's intended for, I think. This kind of, I think, the idea of hope as a kind of religious form of optimism as a way of saying, oh, everything will be all right, it can lead to some complacency. It can lead us to not care. It can lead us not to grieve.

If my hope is just mere optimism. If my hope means that, oh, actually the icebergs won't melt, then I'm not greeting them, and then I'm not-- and if I'm not grieving, and then I'm not caring for them. But a different kind of hope would be one that says, oh, the icebergs might melt, but they are these non-human beyond human parts of creation are worthy of my care just on their own for no other reason. That's a different kind of thing, and it depends upon us being willing to look into this empty tomb, be willing to wait-- be willing to face grief, which is the way I also want to think about forgiveness.

Forgiveness isn't this magical way for us to undo the past, it's actually a way for us to live with a broken past. And maybe hope is the flip side. Is not a way for us to magically fix the future, it's the way to live into what might be a broken future.

DIANE L. MOORE: Wonderful. Thank you. Great question. Thank you, Rebecca. There's wonderful questions here. Just I'm going to turn to Sarah Brownsberger. Thank you, Sarah. She says, thank you for a beautiful talk. Isn't there a parallel here for refounding medical ethics. Care for the patient as a mortal self, not as an autonomous mind seeking to optimize the criteria of health, but as the doomed frail body each individual life is doomed and that's interesting and powerful language. Please.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: I mean, I think one of the places-- this is a question that Christians have to grapple with. This I think, not just what it means to have bodily life and to be mortal, but also our relationship to whatever immortality is. I think that's a problematic thing for Christians, and I think that we have not handled it well traditionally, that's also not what this talk is about. However, I do that-- I think you're right, Sarah, that part of what Butler is pointing us is to just come to the to be frank about the fact that all is vulnerable to loss, that all everything around us is potentially grievable.

And the degree to which we grieve it is the degree to which we love it. Yeah. And I see this from the kind of chaplain side. I worked very briefly at CPE as a chaplain, but also as a priest working in a pastoral situation, and also with loved ones of my own who have had terminal illnesses and died from terminal illnesses. There's a point in every illness where the conversation shifts from, how do we get more days, to how do we-- or at least not in every illness, but in some of these experiences I'm talking about.

Where the conversation ought to shift, sometimes it shifts later than it should from, how do we get one more day because one more day means that we don't have to face the end, to how do we live this day with as much caring and love as possible? And not to make it too personal, but my mom died last year. I think, if we could go back now, she would probably say, she waited a couple of weeks too long.

And I think thats to alot of folks because I think the medical establishment with its great skill at prolonging life is inclined towards doing this and has trouble having that conversation. I'm grateful for really wonderful chaplains, many of whom are trained by this school, and by the CPE programs in Boston for helping us, people who have loved ones going through that, and helping medical clinicians and so forth. Make that turn, have that conversation as early and as thoughtfully as possible. So I think you're right.

I mean, I can't-- I'm not an expert in medical ethics, so I can't speak broadly as to how it might reorient Christian medical ethics. But I do think there is a difference between approaching a human body as a body available for saving as opposed to approaching a human body as one which is mortal and finite always and already.

DIANE L. MOORE: Right. I'm so stuck to buy that. Deeply understandable in my own experience too of the desire to have one more day, which that doesn't also address that. That's about me wanting more time for my beloved.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: That's right.

DIANE L. MOORE: It's not about the well-being of and the confrontation of the frailty and our finitude. So thank you. Beautiful. Thanks for the wonderful question. I'm just skipping around. These are wonderful questions. But this is from an anonymous attendee. You talked about anticipatory grief and this makes me think of solostalgia, or the grief one feels from the loss of place due to environmental change.

I think, you can also-- I just want to say, I think, that can also be not just about environmental change, but loss of place around refugees, loss of place around a host of things, that's my addition. Back to the question. I'm curious how you think we can work with anticipatory grief that you identified in a way that feels fruitful and not paralyzing.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Yeah. I mean, I think that-- I think grief-- I think, I oversimplify that pastoral example, a little bit because I think for the first day or two, sometimes people are paralyzed. And there often is denial for-- there often is denial for a period of time. I just, I think we have to look lean into that, look into it because in my limited experience, people move through that stage towards other stages of grief.

And so it may be that really turning towards grief in a self conscious and deliberate way will feel paralyzing, and will fill us with despair. For a period of time, I think, the women going to the tomb or running away in terror, that is something we move through as we do that. One of the things that I taught a class with Terry Tempest Williams, who's going to be talking later on in this series that was also titled Apocalyptic Grief, I've been using this title for a while now.

But she had us do an exercise at the beginning of the class, which was incredibly memorable, and affecting, and effective. That she didn't give anything away maybe the way I'm talking already did. But it was the first day of class, and she invited everyone to take out their journals, and write for 10 minutes about a place they love. Just the place you love most in the world. And everyone has that place.

And people were writing, and you could see that they were taking themselves to that place with their writing. And then after 10 minutes, she told us to break. And she said, OK, now, imagine that place will be gone in five years. I mean, kind of enforced solostolgia. Imagine that place will be gone in four years, five years, whatever it is, now right how you will spend that five years. Write what you will do with the next five years.

Well, how would you relate to that place knowing that it's finite, knowing that it's frail, knowing that you can't save it? And I know no one's writing, turn away, find a new favorite place. And this is I think these sorts of exercises can be useful. That really-- I mean that I said sticks with me, I still remember the place I wrote about, I still remember she didn't tell me she was going to do this, I still remember kind of the shock of that prompt, the second prompt. And then trying to think about what would I do.

And then she did because she's a skilled writer and caring teacher, she just kind of used that as a way to broaden out the scope of what that grief could look like. Because we had a room of 20 people and they all had a different place, and now all of these places are all at risk, and all of us are in relationship with one another. She was, I think, there are ways that we can invite people to turn towards grief that can-- will feel shocking and may feel even like fill us with despair or something like an emotional paralysis or something.

But that's something we can't be afraid of because it maybe we can-- maybe what's needed is to face that, and then endure that so we can move through it towards the care that these places deserve.

DIANE L. MOORE: Yeah. Wonderful. We have a-- I almost didn't want to ask a question because it's, I think you partly answered it, but I think Jacob Walker has another slight twist.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Jacob.

DIANE L. MOORE: So thank you, Jacob, for this question. There's so much in your talk. Thank you for your talk. Something that seems particularly hard about galvanizing action around climate catastrophe is how removed specifically and temporarily the negative effects are from those who cause it. I can imagine those same difficulties arising in the context of failing what you call anticipatory grief.

So his question, how do we feel grief in a non-manufactured way about something that has largely not yet happened? And even when it does happen, will likely not affect us in Cambridge as gravely as it does others i.e. how do we feel genuine grief for something that is not immediately confronting us?

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Yeah. I think, that's the other part of the Christian prophetic message is it's partly sort of this imaginative work. One of the things I want to think about in my book is, in my head I have broken up chapters, I want to think about imagination, imaginative work as a way of-- and in a way that these questions are really helping me maybe anticipation or anticipatory grief is related to imagination somehow.

Imagination is one of the tools, like this thing that I think that Terry did for us and for our class was to help us use our imaginations so we could actually access our grief better, access some of those places that we were not yet grieving, or that we were not recognizing as fragile, and frail, and subject to passing. But I think the other thing that Christianity has or ought to have is its prophetic voice for justice.

I think part of what's going on in that first half of the Gospel of Mark, all the people, the crowds around him think it's about the power, and for Jesus it's about the people. It's about the man in the tombs who spends all night crying, and cutting himself with stones, and that his friends chain him up. It's Jesus going to him and saying, I'm going to care for you.

And everyone sees the power that he uses to banish the demons, but for Jesus it's about the person. For Christians, I think our job, our pathetic job is to try to get as many of ourselves and others as possible, grieving lives that are being lost right now and yesterday, even especially when very privileged. And I mean, I'm talking to you from the basement of the Memorial Church in the middle of Harvard yard there is not another more privileged Christian church perhaps in the world.

But from this vantage, our responsibility is to try to grieve as much as possible, to call us to grieve, to recognize those who are suffering because as you say, Jacob, it's already happening. And it's easy for us to pretend it's-- I'll speak for myself, it's easy for me to pretend it's not, and I could very well pretend it's not for the rest-- for much of my life. But I think we have an obligation, a moral obligation to grieve as publicly as possible and to call attention to where that suffering is.

DIANE L. MOORE: Wonderful. I'm going to-- I have a thought, a brief thought that, I think, links the previous question and one that I'm about ready to share from Dan McCannon, who's another speaker in this series. But again, apologies for my returning to Haraway again. But her call around this question of staying with the trouble. Is it one of the things she asks of us to do rather than kind of avoid the grief or address stay with the trouble of whatever the times are?

And with that attentiveness to the presence, be attentive to the multiple relationships that we actually do have that sustain us, that be more attentive to the non-human kin that our lives are dependent upon. And she calls us to consciousness about that as a way to be responsible, to be able to respond because if we are not aware or attentive, we can't.

And I just-- it's that same recognition of the profound interdependency rather than autonomy of human being that, I think, is also what we have to fight against relevant to a larger framework of how we even think about the human. It goes into neoliberalism and a whole host of things, extractive capitalism. But so I just think that a paradigm shift into what it means to be human is to not be autonomous.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Yeah. That's right.

DIANE L. MOORE: So Dan's question though, is also a really rich one. And thanks Dan for it. I'm entirely convinced that the inability or reluctance to grieve is a huge part of the current predicament, but I wonder if grieve ability is the only path forward toward love? Especially, love for our more than human kin.

Every day species are going extinct, but every day species are also evolving in creative new ways. Most likely species will continue to evolve thousands of years from now. If we celebrate a story of evolutionary creativity that seems likely to outlast humanity, is that Resurrection triumphalism or is that an additional path to love?

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Yeah. That's a-- I think, yes. I think you're describing something like-- this is not one of the classical three theological virtues, but I think you're describing something like wonder. Having a relationship of wonder towards the natural world. I think that that's love also is that, it's not just grieving that which is precarious, it's also being filled with wonder in spite of its precarity the beauty, and ingenuity, and creativity of the world around us.

And the fact that the human habitable world is a very short period in the history of life on this planet. And that what we are in-- I think what we-- the relationship of grief that we have to be in is within a particular kind of habitable world. One of the things that frustrates me is when-- it's kind of when kind of folks talk about saving the Earth or saving the Earth. And just kind of placing the value of the Earth or the Earth itself in a very narrow human scale.

I think what we're talking about is an unnecessary extinctions of lots of species and ourself in the present. And thinking about grief in that sense while also remaining in relationship of wonder that far outstrips and exceeds the human, the scope and span of the human. And that also can be a-- yeah, that also can be a way.

But as I think about it though, I know grief is one of those slippery words where I can get away with a lot just because it covers so many things, kind of love, or hope, or forgiveness, which is that, again, just analogizing from the most narrow personal or pastoral examples. The experience of grieving with someone even in a stage of extreme disease or something, end of life as I was talking about, will include sadness. Affective states like sadness, and anger, and despair. It also includes joy and wonder, and in ways that are not contrary necessarily to grief.

So I take your point, Dan, I think you're right. I think it can make it one telling of the story and maybe the telling the story I gave can make it too grim or only grim, whereas reckoning with loss, if that's what grief is. If reckoning with loss is what grief is, it will include many human affective states and wonder, and kind of joy the creativity of life even as it passes. You can be part of it, I think.

DIANE L. MOORE: Wonderful. Wonderful. Thank you. Back to grief. Janet Keating. Thank you, Janet, for this wonderful question. She's basically asking, is our collective turning away from grief the major driver of climate change? And the sense she also-- she goes on to say, we also when we turn away from grief, we obsess with other forms like screens, and distractions, and a whole host of things. So we occupy our time and world.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: I don't feel qualified to answer the question, that's a cop out I guess. I think because there are so many things, especially huge institutions and economic forces that drive climate change. But I think that there's something in the Christian West and something in the Christian capitalistic system that does look at the-- that look at the world around us as something to be sacrificed for our own security.

And maybe to prop up an illusion that we don't need-- that we aren't frail and aren't fragile. And that sometimes we do that to other people in other religions. We sacrifice them to-- I mean, Baldwin has this wonderful critique in The Fire Next Time about how racism is a symptom of this. That we are willing. We cannot accept that we are mortal, and so we project our mortality on others so we can live with the illusion that we don't have to die.

And the logic of unending growth that extractive capitalism in particular tells us is certainty, is the only narrative that's possible. We must keep growing. We cannot keep-- we cannot stop growing. This is endlessly sustainable is just that's an illusion and a lie. And this is a stretch, but I think in a way that is turning away from just like a reckoning with limits, a reckoning with finitude, which is related to something like grief.

So again, like I think the-- I'm not an economist. The economic forces and all those things are not ones that I could understand or claim to. But as a theologian, boy, it looks a lot like some of these problems I see in the theological tradition about the way we think about our own fallibility infinitude.

DIANE L. MOORE: Yeah. I think, I'm really grateful to the question, I'm grateful for you tackling it with the caveat because I do feel like what's the major cause of climate change? I mean, I don't think anyone can answer that. But I do think, based on my opening remarks that we have very many instrumental answers to that question. But I think the psychological, emotional answers are what will also be required for us to be able to tackle these times in a responsible way. So thank you. Thank you for that. For both of you, for asking and answering that challenging question.

Margaret Bullard Jones, asks about-- she speaks out of her own also Christian heritage, but I think it has broad representations for others as well. I wonder how our Christian witness could be transformed if we reclaim the power of lament. So I think, I'm just going to shift that and say, have you given any thought to the relationship between grief, and lament, and love, and what that human emotion might incite in us?

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Yeah. I mean, not in any sophisticated, theoretical way. I think that's right. I think Margaret's question is right. And I think that it's more than intuition. I think, that recognition that there's a long standing scriptural and theological tradition of us turning towards grief. It doesn't start with the empty tomb in Mark, it goes all-- it's shot through the Hebrew Bible.

Turning in lament to one another and to God is something that has just always been part of the scriptural tradition that Christians inherit, and that obviously precedes us. I think that's right. And maybe this is because I'm here in the undercroft of Memorial Church, I think, that the form of grief that I-- and also because I think I have standing preoccupations with forgiveness as a topic.

The way I'm thinking about forgiveness-- I mean, excuse me, the way I think about repentance, excuse me, the way I think about grief is around repentance. It's about, oh, what have we done that we can't undo? How do we actually-- I think the failure to repent is also a failure of grief. It's saying, oh, I didn't. The thing is not broken, I can fix it. Oh, it's not that bad.

To actually turn to something and say, nope, we did this, and this is-- and we must take responsibility for it. Taking responsibility for it, I think, repentance becomes a form of lament, look what we've done. Have mercy upon us God for what we've done. Have mercy upon us all you other creatures in the world, human, and non or beyond human. Look what we've done. Being as honest with that as possible, I think, a really honest expression of repentance would be one of lament because it would be honest about what's been lost, and what can't be brought back.

But I think only when we become honest about what's been lost and can't be brought back, do we actually learn what we can do. Then you start to say, OK, then what can we do? And what must we do with the time we have?

DIANE L. MOORE: With the time we have, yeah, in the midst of it. Thank you, Matt. What a powerful, profound, illuminating presentation. And then the-- and thank you all in the room for the wonderful and generative questions. We're sadly right up against the hour of the end of our conversation for tonight. But I hope that you will join us next week for the last in the single presentation series when, Terry Tempest Williams, our beloved writer in residence next week on March 4 at six o'clock, Eastern time, she will be here presenting the practice of wild mercy, something deeper than hope.

So we're going to stay on the question of hope. So I hope you all will join us for that. And again, I just want to say thank you, Matt, for a wonderful and very thought-provoking, and generative conversation. So thank you so much, and thank you all.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Thank you Diane, and thanks everyone.

SPEAKER 2: Sponsors: Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School, the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University, The Center for the Study of World Religions, the Constellation Project, and Harvard X.

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.