Video: Religion in Times of Earth Crisis: The Practice of Wild Mercy: Something Deeper Than Hope

This was the fifth event is a six-part series, Religion in Times of Earth Crisis.

Can personhood be granted to mountains, lakes, and rivers? What does it mean to be met by another species? How do we extend our notion of power to include all life forms? And what does a different kind of power look like and feel like? Wild Mercy is in our hands. Practices of attention in the field with compassion and grace deepen our kinship with life, allowing us to touch something deeper than hope. Great Salt Lake offers us a reflection into our own nature: Are we shrinking or expanding?

Speaker: Terry Tempest Williams, HDS Writer-in-Residence

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

Terry Tempest Williams joined HDS as a writer-in-residence in 2017. She is the author of numerous books, including the environmental literature classic "Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place." Her most recent book is "The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks," which was published in June 2016 to coincide with and honor the centennial of the National Park Service. Her writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion Magazine, and numerous anthologies worldwide as a crucial voice for ecological consciousness and social change. While at HDS, Williams has taught seminars on the spiritual implications of climate change, apocalyptic grief, and centering the wild and non-human voices, among others. For more information on the full series, "Religion in Times of Earth Crisis: A Series of Public Online Conversations,"

This event took place on March 4, 2024.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: The practice of wild mercy, something deeper than hope. March 4th 2024.

DIANE L. MOORE: 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, it's my pleasure to welcome you to this fifth installment of our six part series entitled Religion in Times of Earth Crisis. Tonight, we have the pleasure of hearing from our beloved friend and colleague, Terry Tempest Williams.

This series is co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University, The Center for the Study of World Religions, the Constellation Project, and Harvard X.

Please pause with me for a moment as I now read out the acknowledgment of land and people for Harvard University.

"Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral lands of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay tribute and respect to the people of the Massachusett tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people."

Webinars like this take a village or even a city, and I would be remiss not to acknowledge my wonderful colleagues here at Religion and Public Life who, behind the scenes, have created the opportunity that we're all about to enjoy this evening. I, especially, want to acknowledge Rachelle Swe, Rima Tasi, Tammy Liao, and Natalie Campbell.

I also want to Thank our office of communication here at Harvard Divinity School, with a special shout-out to the amazing Christie Welch for her creation and-- design and creation of the beautiful posters that have animated this entire series. And finally, a shout-out to Kama Lord from our IT department who, behind the scenes, has made sure that we can deal with and not crash with the volume of people interested in this series. So thank you all to my beloved colleagues.

This entire series was really inspired by our colleague, Professor Mayra Rivera, who focused on these sets of questions, what does religion have to do in times of catastrophe, for her 2022 American Academy of religion presidential address. She was elected president of our body of scholars of religious studies and used that occasion to really lay out both an opportunity and a challenge, for those of us in religious studies, to take seriously the intersecting issues relevant to the earth crisis that we now face.

So I want to share a brief quote from that address from Mayra Rivera who gave the first talk in this series. And I also want to read a quote from Amitav Ghosh, from his The Nutmegs Curse, which is also relevant to our work and has been an inspiration for this series as well.

So from Mayra Rivera, "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 have shaped both environmental devastation and responses to it. We need a world within our many worlds."

And from Amitav Ghosh, "this is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of 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, that is from Amitav Ghosh.

Before I turn to introduce Terry, I want to just say a couple of things to remind you all that this event is being recorded and we will be able to share that recording on our website as soon as it's available, with transcripts, full transcripts. I also want to say that Terry will be speaking for approximately 50 minutes and then we'll have time to entertain questions from the audience.

So I now have the wonderful honor of introducing, in brief form, someone who I am proud to call not only a colleague but a beloved friend, Terry Tempest Williams. I think for many in the audience, Terry needs very little introduction and I'm only going to give a short one now. Given her many accomplishments, we would literally be here all night just speaking about her prolific writing.

But relevant to HDS, Terry Tempest Williams joined us as a writer in residence in 2017 and is continuing to join us in that capacity through June of 2025. She's the author of numerous books, including the environmental literature classic, Refuge-- An Unnatural History of Family and Place. She has many, many other publications.

What Terry has been able to do here with us is she has taught several courses, primarily writing courses, for our students, and I've had the pleasure of co-teaching two courses with her. The most recent, last semester, called a Wild Mercy-- a Wild Promise, I'm sorry. Her talk tonight is partly a wild mercy. A Wild Promise. And that commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, which, of course, is what we're celebrating this year.

I just want to say that what Terry Tempest Williams brings to every encounter that she has, whether it be public or private or personal, is an incredible integrity, a deep, deep, deep commitment, and great heart to the issues of our time. She has been a leader in raising consciousness about the earth crisis for decades now, and we are incredibly honored to have her with us as part of this speaker series.

So please join me in welcoming Terry Tempest Williams to offer her presentation tonight called A Practice of Wild Mercy, Something Deeper Than Hope. And I'll turn it over to you, Terry. Thank you so much for being with us.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Thank you so much, Diane. It's such an honor to be here. And I'm just going to get the full screen here so I can imagine the audience. Diane, I love you. You know that. And thank you for bringing us here together.

I think one of the most radical forms of education is what's happening in Religion and Public Life at the Harvard Divinity School. And I'm just so grateful for your leadership and the ways in which you're bringing issues of social justice and climate justice together as two hands in prayer. And your commitment to peace.

Good evening, friends all over the world. It's daunting to be part of this series. And like Diane, I really want to thank the community that puts this together, specifically Rachel Sway, thank you for helping with the visual aspects of tonight's program. Reem, thank you for your integrity, and Tammy, for your care, and, certainly, Natalie, for helping to get the word out. And all of our community that is so committed to the spiritual axis on which we turn on this planet we call home.

My deepest vows to our colleague, Mayra Rivera, who inspired this series, as Diane said, and grounded us in the importance of our own home ground. That these global issues are, in fact, local issues, personal. She took us on her own journey to her own beloved home ground of Puerto Rico in times of crisis.

And who can forget the image of that young woman holding her dog, both wearing halos, facing the flood in times of crisis. It put a contemporary urgency on what is happening at this moment in time. That in so many ways, we are living toward the future. A future that is uncertain, terrifying, but also full of evolutionary promise.

We don't know how we're going to adapt but I believe we will. We will suffer losses. But as Mayra reminds us in her brilliant talk, A Procession of Catastrophes, that we need to honor our stories and tell the truth about the injustices that have shaped not only our lives but the earth's.

We have seen-- when she talks about a world of our many worlds, we have seen our many worlds through each speaker. And I just wanted to give a recap tonight because I think it's important to know where we've traveled as a community together in these past five weeks.

Dan McKinnon challenged us to face our settler history. Realizing-- and I should say, histories-- realizing the harm we've caused in the disruption and destruction of communities, both human and wild, in his beautiful talk on the power of the local in Ancestors and Climate in our Own Boston Backyard.

He asked us to pay attention to the knowledge of indigenous communities, who understand that to care for the more than human world is inseparable for our care for our ancestors. And then he asked the evocative question at the end, can trees be ancestors?

[INAUDIBLE] with his kaleidoscopic view of Muslim communities and the role of storytelling answered Dan's question in his Syrian talk, Animal Stories in Crisis. The tales of Tigers and snakes and the power of ritual, to not only make peace with an animated world but engage in Acts of restoration through ceremonies, and how our lives depend on these acts of reciprocity.

Dan asked the question, can listening to these stories compel us to reevaluate and reimagine our academic approaches to religion and environments and the relationship of religious pasts and presents in our time of crisis?

What do we now do with our grief as broken hearted people? Matt Potts, in his provocative talk, Apocalyptic Grief Reckoning With Loss, Wrestling With Hope, invites us to not look away, to not fear our grief but embrace it as the moral ground of ethics, and to hold loss as our moral foundation. He allows us to sit with the question from Judith Butler, what is a grievable life? And that haunts me still.

And in a beautifully contrarian pivot, critiques hope. And reimagines hope not as something passive where we give our power to change the world and hope that it does-- excuse me. I'm sorry about that. We're in rural Utah and so there may be many surprises tonight. I'm in Castle Valley, ancestral homes of the pre-Puebloan people and Ute people, and I wish we could be sitting outside.

But what I love about Matt is the kind of contrarian pivot that he made critiquing hope. Reimagining hope not as something passive where we give away our power to change the world and hope that it does, but to put our love into action as a moral and ethical imperative.

So I wanted to begin tonight by remembering where we've traveled as a community, who cares about the role of religion in these times of the earth crisis.

The eyes of the future are looking back at us and praying that we might see beyond our time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come.

To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wildness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wildness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands.

And while mercy is what I want to discuss tonight, not in an academic way but in a personal way. The place where I belong, as I just mentioned, is Utah, in particular, a small desert hamlet, Castle Valley, along the Colorado River.

If you were here, the coordinates that you would see would be east, would be Castleton Tower, a 400-foot sandstone monolith that seismologists have told us has a pulse. And I remember going down to tell my friend Jonah Yellowman, who is one of the spiritual advisors for Bears Ears, I said, Jonah, you won't believe this. You've got to listen to this recording. Castleton Tower has a pulse. And as he put it to his ear and listened, he just nodded his head and he said, yes, I know.

If we were to look south, which I am right now, we would see the La Sal mountains, rising close to 12, 13,000 feet, and Round Mountain, a volcanic plug in a sea of sage. And to our west, in the last light of day, is Porcupine Rim. And, again, north is the Rio Colorado.

The US Department of the Interior's Bureau of Reclamation report recently tells us that the average temperature of the Colorado River basin is projected to increase by 5 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit during this century, and even more in the upper Colorado River basin, which is where we live.

With climate change heightening, extreme temperatures, drought, fires, and floods, we find ourselves entangled in a cascade of consequences. We are experiencing what climate scientists are calling a megadrought, not seen for 2,500 years. And I can tell you that this is not an easy place to live.

Last summer, there were places along the Colorado River, just north of us, that you could walk across. Temperatures, last year, in Castle Valley, exceeded 100 degrees for 52 consecutive days. The mean average being around 107 degrees, reaching as high as 116 degrees.

I remember a friend came, we were sitting on the porch drinking water as much as we could in the shade. And when I walked out to her car, I heard something flapping. And I realized my shoe had become desoled. The sole of my shoe had fallen off. That's where we're living. And it's harrowing.

One's mind melts. We've taken two night walks, becoming nocturnal like so many of the desert creatures who live here. And I've been trying to expand my night vision, my capacity to see in the dark, and I think it's been a useful exercise, both physically as well as metaphorically.

And then on January 4th 2023, the Brigham Young University report on Great Salt Lake came out with the news that Great Salt Lake was in crisis. Quote, "emergency measures were needed to rescue Great Salt Lake from ongoing collapse." Ben Abbott, the lead scientist, said, we have five years.

I cannot tell you how that penetrated my heart. I've known Great Salt Lake in flood and am now knowing her in drought. That is a day that marked a change in my life. Five years. We've had two very large years of snow and rain. Ben, just two days ago, told me that buys us about two more years.

So when we talk about religion in times of crisis, nothing could be more germane to those of us in the Intermountain West, in particular, and the American West in general.

The scientists said, in very clear language, Great Salt Lake is facing unprecedented danger. Without a dramatic increase in water flow to the lake in 2023 and '24, its disappearance could cause immense damage to Utah's public health, environment, and economy. Unquote. Boom. This is where our community is now, statewide.

This news came two months after a friend of mine, Faisal Sheikh, he's a photographer, and I circumnavigated Great Salt Lake in November, October and November, of 2022. It just so happened that that was the historic low of Great Salt Lake at elevation 4,188.

In 2000-- excuse me. In 1986, her historic high was at 4,212. That is a difference of 2,300 square miles in 1986, to 888 square miles in 2022. That's rough-- Great Salt Lake is roughly 1/3 of the water body that it was in 1986. It's hard to imagine.

Rochelle, will you show us the comparatives. Those two maps, please.

On the left, you can see, in 1985, 1986, the size of Great Salt Lake. It was a liquid hand that exceeded the square miles of Delaware and Rhode Island. It was wreaking havoc on highways and freeways, as well as infiltrating the Salt Lake airport.

Now, on the right, you'll see Great Salt Lake in 2022. And you can see the white margins of where Great Salt Lake used to be. And now she's a third of the size.

Why am I using feminine pronouns? Because those of us who live here see her as a sovereign being. As a water body that has influenced all of our lives, including the weather. That's why we have the greatest, quote unquote, "snow on earth." [INAUDIBLE] Because of the lake effect that creates this moisture, a weather making machine around the lake, that allows this fluffiness to occur in the high country in the mountains.

But I wanted you to see this map to understand the case study that I'm going to share with you tonight. Thank you, Rochelle.

So as you can see, for those of us living in the Intermountain West, this is a reckoning and an awakening. We can read this alarming story of Great Salt Lake and her retreat, not just as the cyclic nature of change, but as the narrative of now.

Diversions, drought, and climate collapse, toxic dust devils whipping up arsenic from the exposed salt bed of Great Salt Lake, creating clouds, threatening the health and well-being of 2 million people along the Wasatch Front. The headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

The life of Great Salt Lake, the entire watershed and ecosystem, is at risk. Its saline waters, its healing waters, a reservoir for our spirit, sunsets dazzling in the fullness of the day, the migratory home of 12 million birds. This, all of this, is at risk.

But I think the thing that pierced my heart the most happened on June 29th of 2023, last summer. The white pelicans who have been nesting on Gunnison Island and have had a presence on other islands in Great Salt Lake and Lake Bonneville, that stretch through Utah, Nevada, a prehistoric lake 10,000 years ago, white pelicans have been here for the last 12,500 years, not to mention 6 million years of evolutionary perfection. On that day, June 29th, the white pelicans of Gunnison island left.

When I was working on a book called Refuge in the '80s, 1980s, I remember going out to Gunnison Island with Ron Paul who was a wildlife biologist. It looked like a white beaded buckskin. 10,000, 12,000 white pelicans were on that island. One year ago, in March, there were 5,000. Now, no nesting white pelicans.

I hope they come back. We all hope they come back. But my question tonight is, what do the white pelicans know that we don't, and are we listening?

We are eroding and evolving at once. Great Salt Lake is a living being. Even Utahn of the Year in 2021, mentoring us on the nature of change, our refuge in flood and in drought, Great Salt Lake is bringing us to our knees. How do we put our love into action? We can create new stories, building from the past.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- Our mother lake is calling us home. She is terminal. Her water body is disappearing in drought, evaporating faster than clouds can promise rain or rivers can rise. Avocets and stilts stand in her shallows, reflecting hope. But that is not enough. We need to bring water to Great Salt Lake. This, we can do. And if we do nothing, death becomes us.

We are the water bearers of her future. Great Salt Lake and the lives she supports depend on us and what we choose to bring. Let it be water not promises like dust. Let it be actions, creative and bold. Let it be love.

Great Salt Lake is a mirror of who we are, shrinking or expanding. Birds are prayers with wings and we can hear their devotions at the water's edge. We will bring water to Great Salt Lake. This is our vow. This is our work. Under our watch, we can accept nothing less.

Who will forgive us if we do nothing? Until all we can hear is the silence.

[END PLAYBACK]

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Thank you for watching that. You know, Amitav Ghosh talks about the burden of writers and artists. I don't see it that way. I don't think it is a burden. I think it's a privilege. And I wanted to share that with you because how do we put our love in action?

And Eric Overton is a filmmaker. I'm a writer. It was a weekend. He sent me-- a friend sent me what he had been working on, this short film that was very rough. And she decided, I just wanted you to see how beautiful his work is.

And I'll be honest with you, I was supposed to be grading papers, Diane, and I just needed a break. And I just started writing to this. And I send it as, really, just a note to Eric saying how much I admired what he'd done.

And he called back and just said, let's just put it together. And we did. We did it over a weekend and then we just gave it away to friends, to nonprofits, anyone that wants to use this. It's 1 minute and 34 seconds.

And I feel like, this is what each of us can do with the gifts that are ours. How do we collaborate, which I really believe is the way forward in these times of crisis, and then offer it up in the name of community? Each in our own way, each in our own time, with, again, the gifts that are ours.

I'm haunted by that silence. And when I saw the footage that Eric had done, it was the silence that haunted me. And I am desperate for silence in my life. We live in the desert for that reason.

But this is not a restorative silence. This is not a spiritual silence that nurtures and inspires us. But it is a silence that unsouls us. U-N-S-0-U-L-S. And I've never known that word until yesterday.

I was in Salt Lake City and a young activist came up to me, very discouraged about what the legislature had done and not done. And he said, they are asking us to unsoul ourselves. And that has stayed with me. And that, to me, is what that silence, this penetrating silence, could be if we do not get water to Great Salt Lake.

And I'm sharing this story with you because this is not personal. I told you it would be a personal rendering. What I mean by that is, every one of us, in the places we call home, whatever town, whatever city, whatever country, whatever community we are a part of, you have your own Great Salt Lake. A place that you love that is dying to come back to life.

And this is where I believe that our obligation comes forth. This is our wild mercy in this moment. To ask the question, how can I help? And again, how can we put our love into action?

There was something surprising about the Brigham Young University report on Great Salt Lake last year, and it was on the last page. And the header was this, What We Need More Than Water.

That, in itself, was shocking because all of us thought, we have to get like to the water. Whether it's-- which we will talk about in a minute-- whether it's subsidizing alfalfa farmers, where 80% of the water to Great Salt Lake is diverted and growing alfalfa to be exported out of the state to raise food for cows, or whether it's hoping that the Mormon church will release some of its water shares, which they have done and they are promising to do more, or conservation of water.

So many strategies. What could be-- what do we need more than water when it comes to the revitalization of Great Salt Lake? And want to read you the first sentence. And this is by scientists.

"Perhaps the biggest deficit we have in facing this crisis is trust. Trust is what we need more than water." It goes on to read, and I want to read you this paragraph, "conservation measures have been taken throughout the watershed but many water users and providers do not yet trust each other to shepherd conserved water to the lake. We desperately need transparency and shared sacrifice to reinforce trust and solidarity.

We hope that this intention comes through in our writing. Many of us currently involved in agriculture or have farmer heritage in the Great Salt Lake watershed are asking this question, who can we trust? As farming families and communities, that we will be most impacted by changes necessary to rescue the lake. We need to ensure financial, legal, and professional support for farmers during this transition."

This also could be communities at risk. This could be communities of color. This could be all manner of people, legislators, who do not have trust. So I point that out because, again, I think as a species, and I can say as a state in Utah, we are always underestimated. But I believe this is not just a political issue, or even an ecological issue, but a spiritual issue. Where is our devotion? How can we help?

We can build trust together. We can create together. We can create collaborations together. We can mobilize our gifts, each in our own way, and offer them up in the name of community.

So I would ask you, what is it in your community that is dying to come to life again? And what are your gifts that you might offer up in the name of your community? How might you help? I think we need this kaleidoscopic approach in this beautiful, broken world we call home.

Science, art, storytelling, poets and politicians, enlightened, compassionate public servants, and religious leaders who are coming together in the name of wild mercy is what can inspire us. If grace is something God grants us unearned, undeserved, freely given, then mercy is what we as human beings can offer the earth, to our fellow citizens, and all those beings with whom we share this planet with, including rocks, rivers, mountains, and an inland sea called Great Salt Lake. We can put our love into action through the gifts that are ours.

There's a woman in our community named Nancy Moore. She's a poet. She has used her gifts of language to ignite a community. What she said to us last year was, we can become a lake-facing people. We have not been a community of lake-facing people. We have faced the mountains, never the lake.

When Brigham Young said, this is the place, what he also embedded was that this was a lake of wasted water. Water in the desert that no one could drink. We can become a lake-facing people.

But she didn't just speak her words, she embodied them. And for the past two years, 2021, 2022-- no, 2022, 2023, and now this is the third year. For the last two years, she created vigil. She camped on the shores of Great Salt Lake from January through March.

Throughout the Utah State legislature. That is not easy to do. Brooke and I went to visit Nan last year and we are hardy people. We've camped everywhere. In the west, in the Arctic, et cetera. We brought our sleeping bags, we brought our tent. It was so bitter cold. Well below freezing, reaching single digits, that Nan, at that point, was staying in a camper and offered us the kitchen table to sleep on, which we did.

Three months. This year, she took her vigil to the state Capitol. Rochelle, could you show us these slides and let's talk about them. But I can tell you so far is when the legislators heard about Nan keeping vigil, they invited her to pray. It's a largely Mormon legislature.

This year, she took her vigil to the Capitol itself and invited the public to join her. This is an image on January 20th. It was the beginning of the Utah legislature, their legislative session, and 1,200 people showed up.

It was so exciting. It was so joyous. It was diverse. There was so much love, I cannot tell you. Next slide.

There's Nan with her green scarf, green hat. She was the host of this rally with many other nonprofits. Everything from the Sierra Club to Save Our Great Salt Lake, to Friends of Great Salt Lake, to Center for Biological Diversity, to Mormons for the Environment, to Indigenous Voices to Marginalized Communities, Law Students for the Lake, everything you can imagine. And it was powerful.

What was also powerful-- next slide, please-- is that Nan told me not long ago, if you would have told me that in my 40s, 50s, I would be a puppeteer, I would not have believed it. For the past year, she, with an incredible artist named Eli Nixon from Rhode Island, together, they created waves and a community that would be making waves. So that every time the legislators would have to come to the Utah State Capitol, they would have to see people making waves and walk through the water.

Next slide, please. Not only that, but on the edge of the lake, they created species from the Lake Community. So you see red winged blackbirds, you see brine shrimp, you see bison, you see eared grebes, you see California gulls, our state bird, all manners of species.

And next slide, please. Those species showed up at the State Capitol. And every day of every session, you know how unions have a union line, a picket line that you can't cross? Well, every day, our state legislators had to cross the species line and then again cross the waters of people making waves before they could get to their desk in the Capitol.

Next slide, please. That might be the last one. What I can tell you is this, there were people that thought that this was superfluous. That this was silly. That it was child's play. Fun and games. But what they didn't realize is that this organized a community of radical joy. It was not superficial. It was unbelievably subversive.

And what can also tell you is at that rally, one of the great joys and privileges of my life was to come dressed as an eared grebe. And I can tell you, it was not child's play. It was an homage to what I saw last January, when Brooke and I went to spend the night and keep vigil with Nan.

We walked down to the edges of Great Salt Lake. It was at least a mile walk. The water has retreated so far. And there was a stench I was not familiar with at the lake. And the lake has its own smell, believe me. But as we started walking-- it was Nan and I and another friend, single file, evenly spaced-- every 3 feet was a dead eared grebe.

We walked for a quarter of a mile, 496 dead eared grebes. Why? Because it was 27% saline salt content in Great Salt Lake. They eat-- one eared grebe eats 30,000 brine shrimp a day.

They were hungry. They were malnourished. They didn't have the strength to leave when they were supposed to leave in the late fall. They left in January when the storms hit, and they were slapped down into the water. To be able to come as an eared grebe with golden feathers on either side of my eyes, a pointed beak, red eyeliner for their red eyes. Thank you for those slides, Rochelle.

There is something deeper than hope. Engagement, community, embodiment, compassion for those creatures we live among.

At that same rally that I've been speaking of, Forest [INAUDIBLE], a Ute leader, revered and respected, stood before the citizens and said, this is our sacred lake. This is all of our sacred lake.

And then from the steps of the Utah State Capitol, he faced Great Salt Lake on the Western horizon, glistening like a line of quicksilver and said, join me so she can hear our love. Our sacred lake. Our sacred lake. Our sacred lake.

1,500 people chanting, our sacred lake, so we could become a lake-facing community. Would you believe me if I told you that in that moment, the clouds opened up and a golden light flooded the sky, Great Salt Lake shimmering on the horizon?

Do you know what one of the first actions of the Utah State legislature was in this season of 2023? HB 249, House Bill 249, known as the rights of nature or the so-called legal personhood bill. What this Bill said was, you cannot grant personhood to a lake.

They did not explicitly mention Great Salt Lake but we all knew what they meant. You cannot grant personhood to a lake or a mountain or a river or a non-animate object. Never mind that we've granted personhood to corporations.

H-Bill 249 passed the House in about 58 to 11. That's how scared they are of this movement. That's how scared they are of the species line. That's how scared they are of our pronouns that we are calling Great Salt Lake our sacred lake, our mother lake. She. Not the Great Salt Lake, great Salt Lake.

People making waves, scientists calling for trust. Again, as Jonah Yellowman, the spiritual advisor of Bears Ears, said to me not long ago and to a group of students, it is time. It is time we grant selfhood. The Great Salt Lake, two rivers, two mountains, two beings. We are not the only species that lives and loves and grieves on this planet.

Last Friday, there was a public celebration of Harry Belafonte's life at the Riverside Church in New York City. It was open to everyone. It began with drumming, [INAUDIBLE] Bob and Neil Clark and the oloomi ensemble, proceeding down the aisle of the famed and historic Riverside Church, calling forth the ancestors.

Reverend Dr. James Forbes opened his sermon with four words in his honoring of the great activist and singer and so many other things, a great human being, Harry Belafonte. What he said in these four words were, we are one family. We are one family, he said.

Quote, "God is love. God is freedom and justice. God is power. God is powe to bring about change. God is building community." Unquote.

And then sweet honey in the rocks brought forth breath. They asked us to breathe together. And they sang the voice of the waters into being, to welcome the ancestors.

For the next three hours, the love and music and activism for civil rights, for human rights, for freedom and justice for all, brought together through the life of Harry Belafonte was celebrated. He was at Selma. He was at the March on Washington.

He was fighting justice in the prisons and against hunger, nationally and globally. It was his idea to gather musicians for "We are the world, we are the children," creating community and a song the whole world could sing. He was wherever he was needed for eight decades, and he called all of us to be there too.

The public memorial was deeply inspiring. And I thought about our community at the Harvard Divinity School, I thought about our community at Great Salt Lake, I thought about the earth community, how we are eroding and evolving at once. The cosmic awe of his devotion.

The poet RJ Mooney said of Belafonte, "the original dream defender, the choreography of care." And then she said, the artist's assignment is to love, to love, to love these beautiful chanting sentences that were proclaimed by a poet.

Harry Belafonte said each generation is responsible for its own liberation. And then he said in a clip that they shared, we have to love so fiercely, so dangerously, oppression melts. And as Whoopi Goldberg said, it's why we need to care.

We all have singing and dancing as one family, with Wynton, Marsalis, and the New Orleans band playing, "Oh, when the saints come marching in" down the aisles of the Riverside Church. And we followed them, singing and dancing, carrying the joyous, dangerously loving resistance onto the streets. May we all love better.

It struck me that as we were singing, "When the Saints come marching in," that's the same song, with different lyrics, that Nan and her species line, and all the people making waves were singing also on the State Capitol steps in Utah.

Social justice, climate justice, justice for all, these are all one movement. To love, to care, to engage in something deeper than hope. This is the open space of democracy. We can engage. We can bear witness to this burning world. And there is something we need more than water, and that is trust.

May we trust one another, not to look away. If we are present, we will know what to do with the gifts that are ours. This is wild mercy.

I want to share with you a piece that I wrote in the middle of the drought on Great Salt Lake. And when, for the first time, I stood out in the wetlands, no longer wet but dry baked clay playas, at the record low of Great Salt Lake.

"I am searching for grace. If the facts don't matter anymore and misinformation does, if we fail to listen to indigenous wisdom, our first nations, and remain unmoved toward another way of being in right relationship to earth, and the stories and statistics that scientists are bringing to us do not stir us to action on behalf of a living world that is suffering, and if the lives of our children and the future of their children's children are not first in our minds and thwarting the easy sleep of our privilege, then the question must be asked, are we too dead to the world to feel alive?

Believe the long legged birds who are circling above us desperately looking for water. Believe the forests that are burning, who's surviving trees will later stand as sentinels, hard witnesses to animal bodies reduced to ash. Believe in flash floods roaring through burnt canyons, gathering debris in rivers running black in the desert, even in times of drought.

Believe Great Salt Lake is retreating in plain sight, leaving what's left to the dust devils. Whipping up clouds of chemicals. Resting on the dry lake bed as we inhale the toxic world we have created. Believe in the once shimmering bodies of water on the horizon that are now nothing more than a mirage made of heat waves, death dancing on the salt flats. Believe in the silences.

Before we can save this world we are losing, we must first learn how to savor what remains. This is more than an ecological crisis or a political crisis, it is a spiritual one. The earth will survive us. We are the ones being baptized by fire."

What is the role of religion in this time of earth crisis? How can we put our love into action? How do we build the capacity to not look away? How do we build trust? How do we engage the gifts that are ours and offer them up in the name of community? Each in our own way, each in our own time, in the places we call home.

Mayra Rivera, again, her words, "we need to honor our stories to tell the truth of our injustices that have shaped both environmental devastation and our responses to it. Our world of many worlds. Our sacred lake. We are one family."

I hope that together, each in our own communities around the world, we can find holy resistance. That we can make waves. That we will not remain silent. That we will find the courage of a sustained focus on behalf of our earth community. It is time. Wild mercy is in our hands.

I want to close with a prayer. And. again, it's another collaboration with a dear, dear friend, Rosalie Renard. She is an exquisite photographer of birds. One of the first photographers, believe it or not, of Great Salt Lake who focused on the birds. Who came to know who these species were of the 12 million birds migrating through.

We've known each other for two decades. We hold each other bird sisters. And she put these images of hers together last night for this gathering, and I'm so grateful. This is what collaboration looks like.

I pray to the birds. I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray to them because I believe in their existence. The way their songs begin and end each day, the invocations and benedictions of earth.

I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I / and at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen. Wild mercy is in our hands. Thank you.

DIANE L. MOORE: Terry, thank you for that eloquent, evocative, deeply heartfelt prayer. I think your entire presentation was a prayer. And calling forth of our own agency to connect, to reconnect, and to be attentive to all that is at stake in this time. So thank you deeply for those moving words.

As you were speaking, I had the voice of Chief Oren Lyons in my head. And I believe you actually were the person to introduce me to his work and his important witness. And I was especially-- came to mind his particular talk on saying that we would be so much better off as a United States citizens if rather than a Bill of Rights, we had a Bill of Responsibility.

And the reason that I was thinking about that is that the notion that responsibility is about the ability to be present and respond, to be responsible, and that requires exactly what you're calling forth in us, is a sense of presence and attentiveness and recognition of the profound interdependence that we have with our own context. But in your context, the power of what it means to be deeply wedded and rooted in a place that includes the Great Salt Lake, and then your own experience of sorrow at what's happening to that beautiful, powerful entity.

So I just want to-- I wanted to share that with you, particularly because those words of a sense of responsibility, as opposed to rights, which, of course, are about the internal and the individual as opposed to a sense of the recognition of our profound interdependence, and then the accountability that that calls us to rise, to meet. So thank you for that.

I'm going to invite people to please put questions in the Q&A at the bottom. But Terry, I wanted to ask you a few things that you and I discussed. There's so much that you represented and so much more that we would love to hear from you around.

I want to start with, actually, the third question you and I talked about, which is, what does it actually mean to bear witness in your experience? You're calling us to do so, you've done so, but can you elaborate on your own experience of what it means to bear witness. Not only what it calls forth in us, but what it does to us when we're able to bear witness.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Diane, I'm going to do something that I didn't plan on doing. This is about bearing witness. I saw this flash. I'm going to take the computer and see. There are 100 deer just right outside, and I just want to see if we can-- just a minute-- if you can see them.

Hello. Diane, can you see them?

DIANE L. MOORE: Yes. Yes, we, well-- yes, we can. Yes. Yes, we can.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Look at that buck.

DIANE L. MOORE: Oh my gosh. How beautiful.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Look at these. And they're all just-- hello. Hello.

DIANE L. MOORE: How gorgeous.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Hello, little ones. Thank you for coming.

Diane, can you see them?

DIANE L. MOORE: We can.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Can you see the bucks on the ridge?

DIANE L. MOORE: It's harder to tell and see but we can see the--

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Look at this one. Can you see that buck?

DIANE L. MOORE: Oh, yes. Yes.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: So I think that's what bearing witness is. Look at the light on Castleton Tower that has a pulse. And look at them, they're just staring.

DIANE L. MOORE: Beautiful.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Meadowlarks. So it's not abstract. It's not an idea. I think bearing witness is knowing where we live, knowing who we are and who we're not. I think we're accustomed to-- I'm just out of breath because I'm so excited. I'm so excited to see that everyone-- and they stayed. Can you believe it?

I think we're accustomed to thinking bearing witness is a passive act when it's an act of extreme attention. Bearing witness is an act of consequence, an act of conscience and consciousness. And when we bear witness, it comes into our DNA.

How can you not care about those deer? These are mule deer. Threatened. They're on the decline of the sagebrush steppe. If you would have told me as a child that mule deer very different from white-tailed deer you have in New England would be threatened, I would not have believed that. But it's because of the oil and gas.

So we bear witness of their gentleness. They didn't run because they feel safe here. So I want to share with you-- Rochelle, will you share with our audience and Diane the eyes of bearing witness.

Those are eyes, to me, that do not look away. And this is a mask, a piece of sculpture, made by our beloved Mary Frank.

DIANE L. MOORE: I thought so. It looked like her work.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Isn't that powerful? 91 years old. And she just made that to remind her, we cannot look away. That we can ask for a cease fire in the name of our humanity.

DIANE L. MOORE: Beautiful. Powerful. And I hear what you're saying, that it changes us to be deeply and radically present, which is also what is required to bear witness, is to be present and to be attentive. And doing so, I think does then change us.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: It does. I think it changes us on a cellular level. And as you were saying, it is in that witnessing that is an act of reciprocity. We were witnessing the deer but they were witnessing us. It's not one way. That is that 1 plus 1 equals 3. That third point of engagement takes place.

DIANE L. MOORE: [INAUDIBLE]. Well, thank you. Well, we've got some excellent questions that I want to turn to here. Karen Watkins, thank you, Karen. Karen asked, do you know of places where rights of nature legislation has been successful?

I think you're raising what the Utah legislature did to protect against exactly this, and your comment about the power of the movement to encourage that required that counteraction, which I want to just say, is a really powerful, I would say, success. Recognizing the power of the organizing influence that you so beautifully demonstrated.

But Karen wants to know, how can individualistic Americans come to see the natural world as family? So I think she's got two questions here. One is about legislation, do we know of successes? And then what does change us, I think you've already answered that in one way. But if you have further thoughts, that would be lovely to hear.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: The rights for other species is taking hold all over the world. In Bolivia, in Costa Rica, in South America, it's in different countries' constitutions. There was actually-- and I don't have the exact city, but there was actually laws that were passed for the rights of natural beings. It passed and then it was defeated.

So it's still a radical idea but it's going to happen. It's where we're evolving to. And Robert MacFarlane, who's a terrific author, his next book is on the rights of beings. And I'm really looking forward to it.

How do we create a sense of community, both human and wild? I think we just did, entering the community of mule deer. Again, it's paying attention. The other night I was up at 5:30, it was early in the morning, for a meditation, and I heard this chirping. And I thought what bird is chirping so wildly like that in pitch black?

It wasn't going to be sunrise till 7:00 or so. And I thought, I don't know that bird. And when we were just outside, you can hear [INAUDIBLE] are arrived, meadowlarks, ravens, and I did not know that species.

I went out in my nightgown, opened the door, nothing, quiet. I heard some rustling. And maybe 20 feet away, I heard this hair raising snarl and then scream. And I realized it was a mountain lion.

And I've always heard they chirp but it never dawned on me there was one right literally in the corner of our door by our bedroom. And it was so thrilling and so incredible. And I thought, we had a houseguest, essentially. And in the morning when the light struck, well, you could see the tracks.

DIANE L. MOORE: Wow.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: But if you're interested, I would go to-- one of the first books written on the rights of other beings is, Do Trees Have Standing? And there's a lot of literature, right now, about this very movement.

The most recently that I thought was the most provocative is by David Abram, who was a visiting writer at The Harvard Divinity School at the Center for the Study of World Religions. He just wrote a piece for Emergence Magazine.

So if you Google "David Abraham Emergence Magazine," and he argues, why do we want to give personhood to lakes, mountains, rivers, streams, and animals, do they really want to be a person like us? And so he's asking, instead of calling it personhood, selfhood, which I think is really interesting. So there's already these kinds of discussions going on.

DIANE L. MOORE: Wonderful. Thank you. We've got a couple of questions on despair. And so I'm going A I'm just choosing Anne Stetson's question. Thank you, Anne.

"Thank you so much, Terry, for this beautiful call to action. My question for you is, how can we hold despair at a distance when what we-- [INAUDIBLE]-- most love is both what provokes despair and offers the greatest solace, the deer, the lake, the eared grebe, the pelicans."

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Anne, thank you so much for the work you do and your work at HDS. I think grief dares us to love once more. And a grief shared is a grief endured. That every one of those 1,500 people on the steps of the Capitol could have easily been weeping as they were cheering and chanting. And grief is love. Matt showed us that last week in his talk.

I ask Rochelle to show one picture. And I'm showing this because I want to tell you a story. Can you show the picture that is my illustration of grief, Rochelle, with Ben Abbott.

DIANE L. MOORE: Beautiful.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: This one. And we are laughing so hard. It is a belly laugh. And I'm still in my eared grebe headdress. Ben is the author, the lead scientist who wrote that report. It was Ben, who is a devout, practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, who asked about trust.

And we could just as easily be sobbing together, which we have done, as we were laughing, thinking, today was joyous. And all we know is where we are in the moment that we have.

And so, again, I think it's about being present, about finding the joy in the moments you can, about crying together in the moments when you must, and I remember saying to Ben in August, he was wasting away. He was getting thinner and thinner and thinner. And I said, Ben, you need a steak. And he said, Terry, I'm a vegetarian.

And I felt so disrespectful. And about three weeks ago, I was sent a video by his father that said, this is a picture of Ben eating a steak, and he was ravenous. And I just think it's the humor, it's taking care of each other. Ben is one of the most brave people I know.

And what I love about Ben is he is fierce, and he is faithful, and he is infiltrating the powers that be. And I feel that it's really encompassing the full range of what it means to be human. And that also embraces the idea of sacred rage, which we talked about with Mayra.

Anger has its place too, and how do we uphold the practice in this country of civil disobedience? I'm daring to cross the line with a community, upholding our values that are ultimately ethical and spiritual on behalf of life.

And I don't know. I cry every day, if you want to know the truth. And there are some days that I feel like I don't know how I'm going to get out of bed. But what I'm aware in those moments of despair is the limits of my own imagination. And imaginations shared, as you saw tonight with Eric Overton and Rosalie Winard-- imagination shared create collaboration, and collaboration, community, and in community, anything is possible.

DIANE L. MOORE: Wonderful. Thank you. I think your representation of Dan and you and that beautiful picture brings me back. I want to highlight Dan McCann, our friend and colleague's question.

Dan says, you spoke eloquently about the importance of trust and I think I understand what you mean by trust connecting all the activists gathered together outside the Utah State Capitol. And Dan asked, could you say a bit more about what trust means in our relationships with the legislators who voted to deny the personhood of Great Salt Lake, and their counterparts, in all of our diverse sacred spaces.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: It's a great question, Dan. And I think you so fully embody that kind of compassion in differences. We're bringing 15 students from the Harvard Divinity School to Great Salt Lake. They arrive on Saturday. In snow, I might add.

We're having czar, the Great Salt Lake commissioner, come to talk to us. I'm not sure I agree with him on all things, but what I do agree is that he is trying. And I agree that he is having to hold both sides at center. And I'm so excited that he's coming to talk to our students. And I'm grateful that he trusted me to be fair.

We're also bringing in Tim Hawkes, who's representing the Brine Shrimp Coalition and Industry. We're also meeting with two alfalfa farmers who have invited us to their farm. So I think, for me, it's about conversation and relationship.

I'll never forget during the Edward Abby Monkey Wrench Gangs, of which was apart, I needed a ride with one of the legislators from Southern Utah. And he was from a very deep Mormon, conservative, and we're talking right of right. And he had this big Cadillac, and I needed a ride down to Southern Utah. And I said, Hardy, can I have a ride with you? And he goes, what if someone sees you in my car?

And [INAUDIBLE] friends. And my uncle was a State Senator and we agree on nothing except for that we love the land. And I think it's about relationships, Dan. And I think it's really important in this country that we can disagree and still maintain relationships.

And then Seymour is a master at this. I mean, I can assure you the Utah legislature has never asked me to pray. And they did ask her. So I think it's about being human and finding out where our common ground is.

DIANE L. MOORE: I think that comment about loving the land is so key because it's about, also, again-- I keep coming back to this in my own-- it's a challenge, but it's also a gift of really-- or the call to be deeply present is also the call to recognize again, the interdependency of our lives with more than human species.

And I think, for me, that becomes a vehicle because that recognition of that deep interdependency is something that-- the interdependency is something we all have and share. We don't always have consciousness of it.

And I think something about the invitation to that consciousness can open doors to bridge barriers that are-- bridge the divisions that are so profound for us now, particularly in this political climate. I want to-- go ahead. Sorry.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Just to say, quickly. Brooke and I have been doing these, we call them, dinner parties, and we invite people that don't agree. And it's amazing what happens with a group of eight people that disagree when you serve food. Because people, for the most part, have good manners. And that-- I think that had a lot to do with a lot of the politics that has been shifting. And we're not the only one. A lot of people in Southern Utah are having these dinner parties, we call it casserole diplomacy.

And out here, you can't afford not to be in relationship with your neighbors because a flash flood is going to take both of your homes. So I think, again, building relationships, sharing food, being good neighbors.

DIANE L. MOORE: Yeah. Some basic things that seem somehow to muddle, befuddle us, in times of great division.

Let me-- Grace Gallagher asks a beautiful question. Can you talk about the World-- excuse me, can you talk about the word wild and how it describes mercy or grace or trust or hope. How does wild add to our religious understanding?

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: What a great question.

DIANE L. MOORE: A great question. I agree.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: You know, Grace, I take wild, that word, for granted because what we just experienced with the deer, that is a moment of wildness. Wild, to me, means unrestrained. Unrestrained mercy. A fearlessness.

Even though, in its full of paradox, I look at our jackrabbits around here-- I say our because they're our neighbors, jackrabbits and cottontails. A cottontail can die out of fear. So they're wild. Are they fearless? They're fearless in how they live their lives knowing that they're so vulnerable. I'm being anthropomorphic.

But I think wild means of holding one's integrity, let's say that. The wild here in the American West-- and I'm thinking about the wildlife creatures-- against all odds, they continue. I mean, as their landscape and territory shrinks, they're still here, adapting.

So wild mercy, I mean, it's the integrity, the sustained focus that you continue against all odds.

DIANE L. MOORE: Wonderful.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: I'm going to think about that. Thank you.

DIANE L. MOORE: It's a beautiful question. There's another-- just-- Jesse Taylor, right after Grace's question, asked a related question. I'm not sure, Jesse, if you posed this in relation to Grace's question but he says, you say "human and wild," quote unquote, how do you feel about a shift toward human with wild? Thinking about feeling beyond that distinction altogether. And then she asks-- or they ask, I'm sorry, Jesse, I don't want to presume, they put another way, how does perpetuating a distinction between humans and others impact movement building?

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I am so aware of the inadequacies of language. I mean, we are animals. Diane and I, we had a class on that. So thank you for that.

Human with wild? I mean, we have our own wildnesses, right, and it can go both directions. So this is why these conversations, this series, is so evocative and provocative. Because I think we're all struggling.

For me, language is so inadequate. And more and more, I find, I'm relying on music, I'm relying on art. I just took a class on calligraphy where this zen master, Tana [INAUDIBLE], the first day said, here's how you hold the brush. We're going to make one line. And the line in calligraphy begins and ends with a dewdrop. And you must master the dewdrop before you can continue.

And so for four days, I did nothing but do dewdrops that first look like tadpoles, then commas, then teardrops. And it was a meditation. And I finally was able to do one character, which was tree. And it brought me into relationship, and Dan, if you're still there, with the divinity tree.

But thank you, Jesse. Again, I'm going to be thinking about that because I think it's the distinction, the separation, that has caused the crisis that we're in.

DIANE L. MOORE: I just have to say, it gives many, many of us-- it certainly gives me pause to have you, in your eloquence, speak about your frustration with the limitation of language. You can only imagine how the rest of us who struggle with that as well. But I hear exactly what you say as language, of course, is just itself a symbol that is itself a distancing. So something, again, about presence and silence. Yeah.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: And I think that we're coming up with new language. I mean, I'm seeing that all the time and I think that's so powerful. New words.

DIANE L. MOORE: New words. New ways to express what we know deeply is another way I think about. How do we get in touch with what we know deeply, which, again, returns to radical presence? And Peyton Ho asks a really critical question here as well, relevant to that. "I'm so moved by the call to deep presence and the prophetic call, quote, 'before we can save this world we're losing-- before we can save this world we're losing, we must first learn how to savor what remains from you.'

It seems this invites us, as a people of faith, to develop intentional spiritual practices of engagement with our local ecosystems. What do those practices look like for you and how do you engage that in spiritual community?"

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Thank you so much for your question. I think it was three Sundays ago, I got a call from this wonderful naturalist friend. We've known each other for years. And he just said, Terry, have you ever been-- and you have to keep this a secret-- have you ever been in this Canyon of flaming hearts?

And anything in the west that's within four hours is close, right. It's not the same as in New England. And I said, I haven't. And he said, would you like to go to church? And I said, yes.

So a group of us who have been doing Sunday walks as our spiritual practice went to this Canyon that none of us had been to that were calling the Canyon of flaming hearts. And it's the site of an earthquake. It's never been described. His daughter's a geologist, she came, and his son.

And there was a kind of a localized earthquake that created this liquification with seeps in the porosity of the sand. And it's like a mini upheaval, or incline, anticline. And Rochelle, would you show us that image. I brought it because I think it's so stunning. That looks like a heart of a flaming heart.

DIANE L. MOORE: Stunning.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: And not to mention, I think it's so erotic. And every, I would say, 30 feet, there was another one. And that's a spiritual practice for me. And I love how my friend Mary O'Brien-- I said, I cannot believe I've never seen this before. And, in fact, I had been to that Canyon that has another name.

And she said, well, Terry, it's not hard to miss. There's hearts, hanging hearts, every step of the way. And I loved how my friend, who was the naturalist, said, well, it depends on what you're looking at. And probably, I was just looking at the ground. One foot in front of the other.

So I think a spiritual practice can be a group of neighbors and friends agreeing to do a meditation walk each Sunday, I think it can be like the Unitarian Church in Salt Lake City that has been keeping vigil with Nan every single day at the Capitol and also when she was on Antelope Island. That is their commitment. Also, they are committed to climate change.

And when a former student of the Harvard Divinity School-- Rochelle, you can change that now-- Tim Dechristopher, came to the Divinity School after spending two years in a federal prison for buying oil and gas leases as an act of civil disobedience. That was a spiritual commitment that that community in the Unitarian Church, which was Tim's church, took on for two years, supporting him in prison.

So I think it's the full gamut of how one chooses. But I do think that it's coming from the people themselves, asking their spiritual leaders to align themselves with these earth practices of an earth community, local and global.

DIANE L. MOORE: Wonderful. Terry, we have time for one more question. And I think this is a beautiful one to end with. And I want to thank you Graham Sinclaire for raising it for us. "Please can you discuss grace as you experience it today and in your vocation." this is a question to you, Terry. "It seems, to me, grace is never oversupplied but often undersupplied. And how do you keep offering yourself grace as you watch nature be treated worse and worse? Thank you for this session."

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Thank you. And that question moves me to tears because that's the question I'm thinking about, and that's the question I'm writing around is, what are encounters with grace? I took Charlie Halsey's class on grace because in Mormon tradition, we don't talk about grace. But I think that idea of what is undeserved, freely given, I feel that the deer are an example of grace.

Freely given, unexpected, undeserved, and they stayed with us. That was a moment of grace. And I know Diane well enough to have experienced her grace that she wouldn't mind if I broke set and took the computer outside to see if we could see them.

But I'm just trying to figure out what grace is. But I think it's these surprises that take us into a state of mind where awe feels our souls. And at a time, to use the activist word, where everything around us, the rapidity with which we live, the speed, the distractions, the despair, the fear, even, especially, of our own democracy at risk, we are being unsouled.

And how to remain soulful, I think, is also an act of grace. Of slowing down, of paying attention, of developing our own practices. And in the name of reciprocity, I would just like to close, if it's OK with you, Diane, with one paragraph.

With so much gratitude for the presence of all of you on Zoom with us, Diane, for you, for creating this open space of consideration of the role of religion in public life in this time of earth Crisis, and to your staff and to the land itself.

"Grief is love. How can we hold this grief without holding each other? To bear witness to this moment of undoing is to find the strength and spiritual will to meet the dark and smoldering landscapes where we live. We can cry.

Our tears will fall like rain in the desert and wash off our skins of ash so our pores can breathe, so our bodies can breathe back the lives that we have taken for granted. I will mark my heart with an X made of ash that says, the power to restore life resides here.

The future of our species will be decided here. Not by facts but by love and loss. Hand on my heart, I pledge allegiance to the only home I will ever know. Wild mercy is in our hands.

Thank you so much. And please take special care.

DIANE L. MOORE: Thank you, Terry, for this exquisite conversation. Thank you all who joined us this evening. And please return to join us for our last session two weeks from tonight, on March 18 at 6:00 AM-- 6:00 PM, sorry, here in Eastern time, where we'll have all five of our presenters together. And we'll close in a conversation about all we've learned and what it means to engage this critical question of what can an expansive understanding of religion provide in these times of earth crisis.

So thank you again for being with us. Thank you, Terry, for this wonderful talk. And I hope to see all of you back with us in two weeks from tonight. Good night.

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 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.