No Guarantees in This Kind of Loving
I wonder how many of us are living these days with deepening grief about losing the earth we knew and loved and counted on as children and in our earlier adulthoods. Such grief is not easily speakable. Building the spiritual and societal capacity to turn ourselves in a new direction is so vital—and so difficult.
What if even when we had no words, we could go out and get down on our knees in the sand or the grass or the field or the forest and open our hearts to everyone, including each other, the oceans, the streams, the fish, the birds, the worms, the butterflies, the beans, and the trees who are here for us all.
Maybe we could do it once a week? Maybe even once a day? Perhaps we could coordinate our calendars so we could know, day by day, with whom we are opening our hearts to love the earth together.
This would be a risky way to let ourselves love.
Yet as Robin Wall Kimmerer has written, “Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.” (1)
There are no guarantees in this kind of loving.
As Margaret Renkl wrote in The New York Times a few days ago, “I am not a creature built for uncertainty. Waiting for a biopsy result, a job offer, words of love from someone who might not love me back — no matter how high or low the stakes, I want to know. Once I know what I’m up against, I can figure out a way to respond to it. Not knowing feels like a kind of paralysis.
“But I am older now, and these days not knowing often feels like a gift. The country is run by cruel, greedy, shortsighted people. The earth is heating up to an intolerable level. Birds and insects and amphibians are dying. A comprehensive list of such terrors would go on for days. The one thing I know about any of this is that I don’t know what will happen.
“That’s the beauty of not knowing: What looks terrible may not come to pass. There’s still time for people to come together and steer the narrative in an unexpected direction. Will they? I don’t know. I have hope, but I don’t know. And I am grateful for the way that not knowing allows room for a future that is different from the one I fear.”(2)
Today Bill McKibben wrote, also in The New York Times, an essay called “I’m a Climate Activist. I’m Not Giving Up Just Yet.” He mentioned some heartening shifts toward renewable energies and also acknowledged, “You would say this is good news — unless you owned an oil or gas company, or a coal mine. Then you’d understand it as a threat to your business model, and if you lived in a country that allowed essentially unlimited political expenditures, you might try to use your existing cash flow to game the system.”
Bill also noted that “people who care about climate change need to rouse themselves from understandable despair and make a new stand. Some of us are busy organizing a nationwide event called SunDay on Sept. 21. There will be electric-vehicle parades and solar-powered concerts, ribbon cuttings at solar farms — and protests at city halls and state houses demanding that they take the lead in shifting policies to make the energy transition easier.” (3)
At Downtown Presbyterian in Rochester, New York, my benediction on many Sunday mornings was something like this:
“Let us go forth from this place trusting in the power of the Holy Spirit, already at work and at play within us, around us, among us, and through us, to bring forth more miracles of love than we can ask for or even imagine.”
The Spirit, we often used to say to each other, is as near to us as our breathing.
Notes:
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braided Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, 2013, Milkweed Editions, pages 124-125.
Margaret Renkl, “The Questions Started with the Wren.” The New York Times, July 7, 2025.
Bill McKibben, ““I’m a Climate Activist. I’m Not Giving Up Just Yet.” The New York Times, July 18, 2025.