Ruth Valerio Advises Us To “Go Brown” for Lent (Hebrews 12:2; Deuteronomy 30:19-20)
Climate Bible Study: March 2022
Christ in the Wilderness, painting by Ivan Kramskoi, 1872. The forty days of Lent, which begin tomorrow, are modelled on the forty days that Jesus spent in the wilderness before his baptism.
Our former hometown of Manhattan, KS in the US did not have a sizeable Irish community, but nonetheless the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade was always an anticipated event. Back in 2008 however, through the influence of the Sunset Zoo’s Green Team, of which I was a member, it was announced that the theme for that year’s parade was “Go Green.” Local clubs and youth groups marched in front of floats that proclaimed “reduce, reuse, recycle.” It was all festive fun—community-sanctioned environmental activism, we might call it—until I saw the forced smiles of the old Irish families as they ambled by. Their shillelaghs, green vests, and over-sized shamrocks seemed out of place. Their holiday had been co-opted by what turned out to be, for my hometown, largely just a trendy moment.
What about Lent? Is Lent the official holy-day season of the climate movement? Should Lent “go green”? In 2020, when asked by our interim rector here in our new hometown of Port Colborne, ON, Canada to lead the Lenten book study, I convinced him to substitute the bishop’s recommendation for my friend Ruth Valerio’s new climate book Saying Yes to Life. It was, after all, as its cover proclaimed, “The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent Book 2020.” Meanwhile, another friend, Brian Webb of Climate Caretakers, was launching their first ever “Carbon Fast” during Lent of 2020, and the project was getting a lot of media attention.
This year, my wife has invited our new rector and her husband over for dinner next week. “But I have to tell you that Michael and I are giving up meat this year for Lent,” she told us over the phone. We are more than happy to accommodate the meaningfulness of their Lenten intentions, but I did stop and think of plenty of friends in the climate movement who would argue that vegetarianism cannot afford to be merely a forty-day phenomenon if we hope to “save the planet.” Similarly and arguably, it is not a fast from carbon emissions that we need, with allowable reprieves on the Sundays of Lent, but rather a wholescale shift to renewable sources of energy.
I grew up in a church that did not observe Lent and have only recently been introduced to its richnesses. Even now, despite the Ash Wednesday services tomorrow and other gatherings, Lent seems as individualistic and solitary an experience as Jesus’s own 40 days in the wilderness. We give up meat or unnecessary kilowatt hours, not as part of a great planetary project, but rather as a means to refocus our personal attention on God. Yet, in this way, I can appreciate how such a thing as a Carbon Fast can help bring a right relationship with God’s creation into our field of view as well. As Archbishop Justin Welby writes in the foreword to Ruth’s book: “Lent is a time for us to focus on Jesus’ death and resurrection, and our reconciliation and atonement with God through his sacrifice. This year, I hope you might spend some time thinking about the reconciliation with God’s creation as we explore the creation story of Genesis 1 [Ruth’s topic] together.”
Maybe, going back to my St. Patrick’s Day parade story, it’s the phrase “Go Green” that unsettles me, its tendency to be a trendy throw-off which treats neither the climate crisis with sobriety nor the Lenten season with solemnity. What does “Go Green” even mean? The message of Lent is certainly “Go human,” as in, that we should drill down into what it means to be created in the image of God, loved by him, and answerable to him. Or the message of “Go Christlike” as in cultivating our intentions to rise with Jesus, in practical ways, in the newness of life as we identify with his Easter resurrection in our baptisms. It strikes me that there is no more appropriate climate messaging than the same: Go human. Go Christlike.
And then I also pause when asked to conflate the message “Go Green” with “Give up something.” I know that Lent is more than just self-imposed austerities, but it is at least that, certainly in the popular mind, otherwise our preachers wouldn’t have to try so hard to convince us that “No, this is actually a good thing.” That’s why I am so glad that Ruth entitled her Lenten climate action book: Saying Yes to Life. True, the world needs to say “no” to an emissions-heavy lifestyle, but what are we asking people to say “yes” to instead? In the end, the larger “Yes” that church tradition would have us reach by the end of Lent and the beginning of Holy Week is not, in its essence, different than the “Yes” we need to say about an imagined and blessed near-term future here on Planet Earth. There will be hardships along the way but as we “fix our eyes upon Jesus” (our annual Lenten intention), we get a sense of how a larger “Yes” sustains us: “fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb 12:2).
It's hard to pinpoint where Ruth came up with the title for her book. She quotes a poem on page 77 by Revd Francis Simon that begins: “To plant a tree is to say yes to life/ It is to affirm our faith in the future.” Her first use of the phrase is in a chapter about Genesis’ Day One of Creation. Ruth writes, “Creation starts not with that which is created, but with the supreme God, who does not need to struggle and battle to bring forth life, but speaks the word and it is so. God is the one who begins by saying yes to life.” Her most personal encounter with the phrase however is described on page 33. In the middle of an afternoon coffee with friends, it had begun to rain. Ruth excuses herself. She wants to stand outside in the rain. And then, she decides to lie down—yes, lie down—right in the middle of a mud puddle. “I lay there,” she writes, “getting absolutely saturated, asking God to soak me with his presence and drench me with his love. I was saying yes to his life!” Go. . . brown. Say yes to life.
When I think about saying yes to life, my mind gravitates to, what I have heard called, the basis for all Jewish ethics: “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life…” (Deut 30:19-20). That is how I will be treating the next 40 days, by seeking to hold fast (no pun intended) to God, as an annual period of explicit decision-making about the choice between life and death.
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Ruth Valerio, Saying Yes to Life (London: SPCK, 2000). A wonderful book that is excellent for group studies. Many supporting resources at https://spckpublishing.co.uk/saying-yes-resources.
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You are very dear to God,
Lowell Bliss
on behalf of the Climate Intercessors Leadership Team