Words for a Dying World

Words for a Dying World: Stories of Grief and Courage from the Global Church contains thirty-five short, original reflections from six continents. Most pieces are essays, but several poems and prayers are also included. Hannah Malcolm, who edited the volume and wrote the introduction and conclusion, describes the book as an effort to help the Church recognize, understand, and fulfill its vocation to grieve for all that is lost through climate change.

Most of the contributors are theologians, pastors, climate activists, or a combination of these. Each writes from a particular geographical, ecological, and ecclesial standpoint. That particularity is crucial, because “our sites of loss are particular – creatures, seasons and rhythms, futures, forests that we know. And grief is always expressed by particular individuals. It is to the loss of the particular that this book turns” (xxxi).  

The essays in this book draw on different parts of the Hebrew bible and New Testament. The Bible, these authors note, neither sidesteps nor minimizes grief. Yet the experience of grief can generate gratitude for creation, images of healing, and energy to do what needs doing in the face of climate change.

Because Words for a Dying World has so many short articles, it is most effectively read a little at a time, instead of straight through. It would also work well for a reading group, in a church or other Christian setting. The great variety of rich narratives and perspectives form good prompts for discussion, wherein participants  can offer their own stories of climate grief. Adding a thematic index would greatly enhance this use of the book, because the individual essay titles reveal very little of the content.

The book is divided into three parts according to time (“As it was then,” “As it is now,” and “As it will be”), although many contributions transcend those boundaries. Part 1 contains laments for lost places, or lost relationships with places, or the lost wholeness of ecologies. Some of these reflections also explore the authors’ own complicity in the loss. Kyle B.T. Lambelet recalls his discovery that, for several generations back, his family received profits from an oil well on his grandmother’s land. Lambelet describes the possible responses to this discovery as repression or “forgetting” that part of family history; denunciation, which tries to excuse himself from any blame for the oil well; or lament. Laments, which are common in the bible, “acknowledge many actors—enemies, God, self, neighbour—and identify how we are all tangled up in a situation that no one can put right” (30). And lament can lead to “struggle, solidarity, and hope, with a God that is still creating” (32).

Lament is a common theme in this book, for lamentation has a long history in Christian (and other religious) traditions. María Alejandra Andrade Vinueza connects Christian laments with Gunadule traditions of Colombia and Panama. And in Sri Lanka, people of the Irular tribe also lament the loss of their forests, their food sources, and their way of life, writes Bharadhydasan Kannan (59-61). Malcolm notes that healing and reconciliation first require recognition of what has been lost and what needs reconciling to God.

Essays in part 2 address current scenarios of damage and death, and local communities’ responses to them. In these examples, climate change often seems to conspire with other human-caused factors, such as neo-liberal economics, the American ideal of “rugged individualism,” and the separation, in Western science, between fact and emotion. These essays point to at least the possibility of hope. Tim Middleton writes, “we light candles precisely because we have acknowledged and mourned the darkness” (93). However, the hope is often only a possibility, as if the writer can merely indicate that candles might be available nearby.

Several authors in part 2 do in fact describe examples of hopeful action that have arisen from grief. Pilar Vicentelo Euribe founded Vida Abundante, an organization which teaches school children to “love the environment” and grow an eco-garden (102). In his contribution, Jione Pavea writes that many people of Pasifika have to leave their islands because rising seas are submerging their homes. However, he writes, “it is not the nature of natives to give up. Natives giving up is an illusion of colonialists. Natives survive catastrophes . . . global warming and Covid-19 are the tests of our time” (120).

In part 3, Panu Pikhala and Maggi Dawn each describe intentional communal expressions of environmental grief in their respective contributions. Pikhala organizes public rituals in specific places that have been harmed by human activities. These rituals provide time for lament and for recognizing the beauty of land and its inhabitants. Maggi Dawn looks to the psalms for models of lament. She notes that “even in the darkest times, and even when the future seems unimaginable, there is still reason to hope” (174). The psalms of lament insist that “God is, in fact, present even in disaster” (175). She further chastises the common nostalgia for a lost paradise, noting that redemption always faces toward the future rather than the past.

While this review has only addressed a few of the book’s essays, every one rewards a close reading. Several themes emerge in addition to lament: (1) the importance of personal connection to a place and its inhabitants; (2) the communal nature of both grief and healing; (3) attention to issues of power—who grieves for whom; and (4) the transformation of harmed places into memorial sites as a mode of healing. It would have likely helped readers if Malcolm had pointed out these or other themes, perhaps in short introductions to each division of the text. One issue that arose for me that is not addressed by the authors is the participation of the earth itself in climate grief; most of the essays portray humans grieving for their places rather than humans grieving with those places. While anthropomorphizing is always a danger, climate grief cannot justify the reinscription of the human-nonhuman dualism. The whole topic of nonhuman climate grief may, perhaps, be another book.

Words for a Dying World is a denser and richer anthology than one might expect from the brevity of the essays. Its audience could range from Christian laypeople to scholars thinking about the multiple intersecting aspects of climate grief. While several other recent books have been published on climate grief, none bring together such a diversity of voices and Christian perspectives. Malcolm has made an excellent, original contribution to Christian work on climate change.

Laura Yordy is a retired associate professor of religion and philosophy.

Laura Yordy

Date Of Review:

January 31, 2024