In October 2019, just before Thanksgiving, the city of Winnipeg had a freak snowstorm with freezing rain, gusts of wind up to 80km/hr, and up to 35 cm of snowfall. It was one of those disasters that felt both unusual and ominous — a sign of the times. The storm damaged houses, downed powerlines, and took a particularly brutal toll on Winnipeg’s trees, 30,000 of them. An unseasonably warm fall meant the trees still had their leaves, which allowed moisture-laden snow to cling to branches like concrete, snapping limbs and downing whole trees.
One of those trees was the beautiful old elm tree in my front yard. This storm delivered its death sentence. A significant branch was broken off in the storm, leaving a gaping wound in the trunk. Over the next two summers canker worms devoured its leaves leaving it weak and stressed. Climate change added to the strain. When Dutch Elm Disease found the tree, it was unable to resist the invasive fungus carried by the Elm Bark Beetle. I came home from work one day to see the dreaded orange dot sprayed on its trunk, a sign that the city would soon cut it down, and I mourned.
You see, this tree, and all trees for that matter, perform daily acts of wonder and mercy for us and the rest of creation. They are a refuge, a playground, a source of nourishment and shelter, and they provide the very breath in our lungs. One large mature tree can provide the day’s oxygen for up to four people. We breathe for each other: their oxygen, our carbon dioxide. We are not as separate as we may think. If we lose trees, we lose everything.
The loss of my tree is a small grief, but it is nested within a much larger grief – one that many of us carry in these days of biodiversity loss and changing climate. Studies say that up to 90 percent of young people today feel at least moderately anxious about the ecological crisis and 75 percent say the future is frightening. Experiences of climate anxiety and eco-grief have risen exponentially in people of all ages. Theologian and priest Hannah Malcom writes in her edited anthology Words for a Dying World, “Our grief about a dying world – however all-consuming it might feel – is not about death in abstraction. We grieve the death of particular things, whether creatures or places.” She continues, “We mourn the death of the world because it is where we come from. But we do not come from the same places. We cannot emphasize our creatureliness without understanding our locality. We are finite, belonging to a particular community, and that finitude is not a barrier to our flourishing, but a gift.”1
Let me return to my tree for a moment. The gift of my tree’s breath reminds me that all breath originates with God. Genesis 2:7 says, “the Lord God formed the human from the topsoil of the fertile land and blew life’s breath into his nostrils.”2 As God breathed into us at the time of creation, our every exhale is a reflection of that first satisfied breath of God. It is a reminder of our intimate connection to the Creator and to the created. On Ash Wednesday, we are reminded of this fact as we are told, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”3 The Common English Bible translates this verse as “you are soil, to the soil you will return.” In Hebrew, the word in these verses for man/human is adam, and the word for dust/soil is adamah. The human created out of the humus. On Ash Wednesday we could say “remember you came from the earth, and to the earth you will return.” This isn’t meant to be a threat. Yes, it is a reminder of the inevitability of death, but it is also a call to return to our essence as God’s creatures.
Our failure to remember that we are creatures has led us to the very dire situation we now face with biodiversity loss and a changing climate. The season of Lent encourages us to enter a time of penitence and fasting. It invites us to sit with grief for a little while. Psychotherapist Francis Weller writes in his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, “Sorrow helps us remember something long intuited by indigenous people across the planet: our lives are intricately comingled with one another, with animals, plants, watersheds, and soil.”4 Weller writes that we all must undertake an apprenticeship with sorrow. As disciples of the “man of sorrows, acquainted with grief”5 there is much we can learn about lament from our teacher.
Jesus’s words to the weeping women in Luke 23 give us some insight into the role of lament in times of crisis. As Jesus is carrying the cross to his death, a great crowd follows, including a group of wailing women, some of whom may have been professional mourners — a common practice at that time. Jesus redirects their grief: “Do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.”6 He names the suffering to come, the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans, and calls them to repentance. In doing so, Jesus joins their lament and invites them to see the larger tragedy unfolding around them. This is not just personal grief, but communal grief over an empire that thrives on systems of violence and oppression.
In what ways might Jesus direct our sorrow today? Perhaps He would say, don’t weep for me, weep for your siblings whose homelands are being swept away by the rising tides. Weep for your fellow creatures who perish under rushing flood and burning forest.
Kyle Lambelet writes, “laments are prayers at the end of human agency. They confront the reality of our situation in recognition that things are not as they should be.”7 Lament does not demand joylessness, nor is it the same as despair, which assumes we already know the end of the story. Rather, lament is a form of truth-telling, a refusal to look away from what is broken. Lament allows us to see the world as God sees it: as beloved. While lament can be expressed individually, when expressed in community, we are reminded that we are not alone. It can be a powerful act of solidarity with those who are suffering and a way to upend the status quo. One outcome of lament is repentance, which means a change of direction, a turning towards God who is still creating, sustaining, and redeeming the world.
As compost transforms death and decay into life-giving soil, expressions of lament can create fertile ground for action. It can point us toward the work of repair, restoration, and reconciliation with our fellow creatures, and our Creator. My husband and I intend to plant a new tree in our front yard this summer. We know that climate change brings uncertainty, and that we are bound up in harmful systems, but we also haven’t reached the end of our human story. We are in the “messy middle”8 and there is work yet to be done. My prayer is that as we learn to weep for the world, we also learn to care for it with the same tenderness God does. This is courageous and hopeful work.
“Station 9: Jesus talks with women on his way to the cross (Luke 23:27-31)”
- Malcolm, Hannah. Words for a Dying World (London: SCM Press, 2020) xxx-xxxi.
- CEB
- Genesis 3:19, NRSV
- Weller, Francis. The Wild Edge of Sorrow (Berkley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2015), xvi.
- Isaiah 53:3 KJV
- Luke 23:28 NRSV
- Lambelet, Kyle. “My Grandma’s Oil Well,” In Words for a Dying World, ed. Hannah Malcolm (London: SCM Press, 2020), 29.
- I borrow this phrase from Mariko Clark, The Book of Belonging: Bible Stories for Kind and Contemplative Kids (United States: Convergent Books, 2024).
