On the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in August, the Working Group on Climate Change and Development - of which Columban Faith and Justice is a member - launched its latest report, Up in Smoke? Latin America and the Caribbean. It provide us with three challenges:

1) How to stop and reverse further global warming.

2) How to live with the degree of global warming that cannot be stopped.

3) How to design a new model for human progress and development that is climate proof and climate friendly and gives everyone a fair share of the natural recourses upon which we all depend.

In this issue of Vocation for Justice we look also at the the suffering that large-scale mining inflicts on our people and on our planet. We do this through a recent fact-finding visit to the Philippines which included Columban priest Frank Nally and Clare Short MP.

SPIRITUALITY

Grief and Gift
by Paul Bodenham

A founder of Operation Noah shares his experience of spirituality in a time of climate change.

As the landscapes in which we live - natural and cultural - are changing with the climate, so is the 'inscape' of the soul. That at least is my experience in six years of trying to make meaning out of global warming.

In fact, climate change is not primarily a crisis of politics or technology or economics at all. Before it is any of these, it is a crisis of spirituality. It is no coincidence that Christians and non-Christians alike testify that spirituality is gaining a new edge, a greater social intrusiveness, in this time of ecological change.

It is God’s Spirit who brings matter to life. However, with tens of thousands of people already dying every year from climate change, and a quarter of all species threatened with extinction by 2050, the Giver of Life has more to lose than any of us. The Spirit grieves with us in the scandal of climate change.

For Christians, spirituality is the quality of union between this Holy Spirit and our own spirit. In my experience, those who attempt to live in the Spirit today will at some point inevitably encounter God’s grief for creation. Christian life is a sometimes painful exodus from the beguilings of denial into the fullness of truth. It takes a steely nerve to expose oneself to the
implications of scientists’ projections of climate change. If we are to respond to the truth of the climate predicament, we must first understand our complicity in it. Yet we and our governments too easily refuse to acknowledge the gravity of what we are being told.

However if we are open to resurrection hope in Christ, we can enter into the deepest despair to which the environmental crisis exposes us. That hope is public property. As we begin to reconcile grief and hope, we find ourselves called to live at odds with society, with values which challenge its norms.

Even this I have found can too easily become a narcissistic pursuit of imposing my ego on the world. But if we allow the Spirit to cleanse our motives, we may - just - disarm the powers of death at work in our own lives and in our economy. Then we will bring forth the fruits of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5, v.22). These fruits are the ecological virtues par excellence. In the many choices and petty details of life they can dismantle the toxic materialism which currently rules our lives.

Ultimately, will we succeed?