Talk on Laudato Si

In November I gave a talk at St John's in Bath on the relevance and importance of Laudato Si - the Pope's encyclical on the environment.  I was asked to give an overview of the text as the world's leaders gathered to discuss their response to climate change in Paris.

Laudato Si talk by Mary Colwell

H is for Hawk - review

I've now finished this powerful book.  It reads like acid dropped onto carbonate - it fizzes and explodes with emotion and pain.  Yet there are sliver threads shining in this dark material as she describes her intense love for Mabel (her goshawk), her dad and the landscapes she hawks through.

I'm not sure I enjoyed it as much as got wrapped up in it.  But as I said in a previous blog - pain and blood drip from the pages, so it not an easy read. I left her sinking into manic depression after the death of her father and taking on a goshawk to train as a kind of medicine. This she interweaves with the sad and raw story of T E White who wrote The Goshawk, a classic account of training a goshawk which is brutal.  A desperate taming of a bird through misplaced guilt at his sadistic tendencies (a product of a cruel childhood) and homosexual desire.

As Helen withdraws from normal life to concentrate on training the hawk, she becomes mentally ill. She tries to become a goshawk, wild and free, away from the memories of houses and society. She lives on her own in a bird-filled world where all that mattered were the mood and weight of the hawk and the times when they could fly and kill.  She became fascinated in the act of death and the moment in time when life turned into food.  She loses her ability to be "normal" in society and her paranoia increases.

"Sometimes when light dawns it simply illuminates how dismal circumstances have become.  Every morning I wake at five and have thirty seconds lead-time before despair crashes in...I know that I'm not trusting anyone, or anything any more.  And that it is hard to live for long periods without trusting anyone or anything.  It's like living without sleep.  Eventually it will kill you."

But through this increasing depression she sees the world with heightened senses, as though the rawness of her wounds increases the sensitivity to landscapes, atmospheres and feelings. Some of her descriptions of places are truly wonderful. You feel you are there with her walking through a frosty, translucent meadow where realities shift with the shadows cast by a weak sun.  Or you can hear the quarrelsome rooks in the black skeletons of winter trees.  You can see Mabel flash through thin air, feel the blood of a rabbit held alive in the clutches of lethal talons.  Her observations of this wild world are dream like - as are the images she paints so skilfully.  A cinereal stratus - a cloud that has the ashen face of death.

Perhaps there is too much of the death and despair at times, one too many near misses when Mabel almost flies away and she panics, as though the ghost of her father is disappearing too.  Perhaps also too many horrible references to nasties such as Nazism and the physical effects of myxomatosis. These, combined with her own cries from the heart leave the reader with a sense of contorted darkness.

But as she lightens, as either the anti depressants, or time, or both, take effect the book seems to lift out of the hands.  You get a feeling rather like taking off a heavy rucksack after a day's walk, you are almost weightless with relief.  And so it is when she sees beauty again, as in her walk onto chalk downland.

"I take a deep breath and exhale, full of the ballooning light-headedness of standing on chalk. Chalk landscapes do this to me; bring an exhilarating, on tiptoe sense that some deep revelation is at hand."

Anyone who has walked through flowery downs will know what she means. This is where history, both natural and manmade, merge in a heady expanse of loveliness.  Where megaliths place their feet in the white earth but their heads look out over millennia. And this seems to be part of the healing journey where she comes to know that she cannot be a hawk, cannot run to wildness to get away from pain, cannot escape the hard reality that her father is dead and gone.

At the end of the book she visits the old cottage that used to belong to White when he had his goshawk. Despite seeing the owner gardening she resisted the urge to talk to him.

"White is gone. The hawk has flown. Respect the living, honour the dead. Leave them be...And then I turned and walked away. I left the man who was not a ghost, and I walked south. Over the bright horizon the sky swam like water."

And so it ends.

Ultimately this is not just about hawks and grief, it is about a love that is deeply and tremulously held for her father and for natural world in every hue.  It is about mental illness and the awfulness of depression that very nearly destroyed this talented woman.  Helen comes across as both fragile and strong, obsessive and loyal.  Someone who is intriguing but I imagine quite hard to get close to.

I'm not sure I understand falconry any better, despite all the explanations and pleadings.  I don't have the desire to tame the wild, but if you do then this book will have an extra dimension.

Would I recommend it?  Oh certainly I would.  But with caution if you are carrying painful grief of your own.  Is it a masterpiece?  Yes I think it is.  And I salute Helen for her honesty.  Even if I had a fraction of her talent I'm not sure I could put myself out there like this. Lay my soul on a marble slab for dissection.  It takes courage to tell the world about your heart in such vivid prose.  Well done Helen, you are inspirational. You stand alongside White as a writer of a goshawk classic - but I'm not sure you would feel totally comfortable with that.

Laudato Si - another blog

Theos published a blog of mine on the encyclical.  The pope calls for a new relationship with nature.

National Justice and Peace Conference Talk

Yesterday I gave a talk at the National Justice and Peace Conference, which as ever is full of people who make you realise goodness is alive and well and thriving in our community as yeast in a dough.

My talk challenged the Christian churches to speak out about the life and landscapes that share this planet.  I stress I don't expect an alliance with Greenpeace but I do expect and opinion or contribution - and I won't accept total silence on many of the big environmental issues of the day.

At the end of the talk, literally right on my last word, there was a huge clap of thunder, bright lightening and all the lights went off!

National Justice and Peace Talk by Mary Colwell

Mystical Matter

From Reflections of a Curlew

Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest and philosopher who had interests similar to my own - geology, paleontology and earth sciences. According to Wiki he took part in the discovery of Peking Man. He had a huge vision for the creation and evolution of the Cosmos which got him into trouble with the Vatican but has recently been bought to the fore again. He is now greatly acclaimed as a visionary and as having profound things to say about God and our role in the natural world.

I need to get to know his work a lot better. Thanks to my Jesuit friend Chris Boles who runs the Lauriston Jesuit Centre, for reminding me of this:

HYMN TO MATTER

‘Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn rock: you who yield only to violence, you who force us to work if we would eat.

‘Blessed be you, perilous matter, violent sea, untameable passion: you who unless we fetter you will devour us.

‘Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.

‘Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards or measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God.

‘Blessed be you, impenetrable matter: you who, interposed between our minds and the world of essences, cause us to languish with the desire to pierce through the seamless veil of phenomena.

‘Blessed be you, mortal matter: you who one day will undergo the process of dissolution within us and will thereby take us forcibly into the very heart of that which exists.

‘Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.

‘I bless you, matter, and you I acclaim: not as the pontiffs of science or the moralizing preachers depict you, debased, disfigured — a mass of brute forces and base appetites — but as you reveal yourself to me today, in your totality and your true nature.

‘You I acclaim as the inexhaustible potentiality for existence and transformation wherein the predestined substance germinates and grows.

‘I acclaim you as the universal power which brings together and unites, through which the multitudinous monads are bound together and in which they all converge on the way of the spirit.

‘I acclaim you as the melodious fountain of water whence spring the souls of men and as the limpid crystal whereof is fashioned the new Jerusalem.

‘I acclaim you as the divine milieu, charged with creative power, as the ocean stirred by the Spirit, as the clay moulded and infused with life by the incarnate Word.

‘Sometimes, thinking they are responding to your irresistible appeal, men will hurl themselves for love of you into the exterior abyss of selfish pleasure-seeking: they are deceived by a reflection or by an echo.

‘This I now understand.

‘If we are ever to reach you, matter, we must, having first established contact with the totality of all that lives and moves here below, come little by little to feel that the individual shapes of all we have laid hold on are melting away in our hands, until finally we are at grips with the single essence of all subsistencies and all unions.

‘If we are ever to possess you, having taken you rapturously in our arms, we must then go on to sublimate you through sorrow.

‘Your realm comprises those serene heights where saints think to avoid you — but where your flesh is so transparent and so agile as to be no longer distinguishable from spirit.

‘Raise me up then, matter, to those heights, through struggle and separation and death; raise me up until, at long last, it becomes possible for me in perfect chastity to embrace the universe.’

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ
Jersey, 8th August 1919

Happy City

From New Album 06/05/2009 08:13

Bristol in the summer

I went to an new initiative in Bristol this week called Happy City, which seemed like a good idea. It is basically a networking idea that puts people who are trying to do good things in their community in touch with others doing the same thing or those who would like to have a go. It is also trying to change our perceptions of what is happy, I'm not a great one for leadership games, I get embarrassed and try to hide, but there were some interesting ideas. One thing we had to do was go up to a stranger in the room and ask them about something that had made them thoughtful that week - I asked a man in his 40s I guess. He said he was walking with a friend in the Mendips and she had said she thought cities needed more uneven surfaces to walk on - nothing in nature is dead flat, walking on uneven ground is natural and makes us feel more connected to the surface of the earth. I can see what she means - stand by Bristol City Council for some humongous accident claims though.

He also said he was about to become a father for the first time - quite late in life - and he is terrified about the effect it will have on his life - so he prayed and he said something definitely "shifted". Amazing the conversations you can have with strangers.

I gave a talk last night at a musical evening for Catholic primary schools focusing on caring for the earth. it was lovely - really uplifting. I showed a couple of clips - including this one - some pictures set to Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong. David Ogden is conducting. The children sang some lovely songs - What a Wonderful World, Make Me a Channel of Your Peace, Let All Creation Sing, Sent By the Lord Am I, Consider Yourself At Home and others - great.

St Bedes 4.mp4

Good for schools, they are really taking this on board.

Climate Change Science

Deforestation in Brazil

The inevitable backlash against climate change is gathering pace. First we had the revelations about exaggeration and bias in research on climate science from the University of East Anglia, then the disappointment of Copenhagen and now even more pressure on UEA about withholding emails and contravening the freedom of information act. Suddenly a cloud of suspicion is cast over all the science that so many have taken to be the incontrovertible evidence that the earth is warming and we are heading for disaster. The widely perceived failure of Copenhagen showed that the governments of the world could not agree on something they all say is of vital importance - so maybe it isn't? Perhaps the whole thing is hyped up?

Ever since I began to think about environmental issues I have worried about the intense concentration on a single issue, big as it is. Concern for global warming has taken such a precedence that it has dominated environmental news and the concerns of government and civil society alike. It is as if climate change=the environment.

Obviously a change in behaviour such as recycling and so on is excellent in many ways because our profligate western lifestyle has to change - but there is a huge negative side to seeing care for the earth as a single issue based on how much CO2 we emit.

A total consensus on any single concern is rare, but when that issue involves changing the economy, the balance between north and south and a huge shift in industrial and domestic energy use, then it is bound to create division. Vested interests become a driving force, camps for and against vie for column inches and attention and every aspect of the issue comes under scrutiny. And when the outcome of a warming earth is portrayed as utter catastrophe then those of us in the middle will, not surprisingly, find comfort in any doubts raised.

The main problem now is that because climate change is "the environment" it will become very much more difficult to raise concerns for other environmental issues if it is dismissed as mass fraud.

This was all so inevitable and all very depressing.

I don't know about the University of East Anglia and what it did and didn't do, but hopefully the legal process will sort that out. If it acted improperly then I hope those culprits are punished. But what I dread is that the dust thrown into the air about climate change will turn people away from the wider picture - that we misuse the earth on many levels, not just the amount of CO2 we produce - and that we have to change to put right what is going wrong.

Over fishing isn't to do with climate change, destroying habitats, degrading soils, pulling down forests to replace them with monoculture isn't to do with climate change. Putting pollutants in the fresh water systems and the oceans isn't climate change and building dams across most of the rivers of the world isn't climate change. Building on greenbelt, pulling down hedgerows, using large amounts of pesticides, concreting over wetlands isn't climate change. All of these do immense harm, wipe out species and degrade our earth. The effect of continuing to ravage the earth will be lack of fresh water for all, difficulty in producing food, a depleted ocean (and therefore fish to eat) and unknown problems with access to new medicines. We will not be able to pollinate plants or cleanse water - or carry out the many other "eco-system services" that we take for granted and that are provided free of charge by the earth.

E.O Wilson, the great Harvard biologist, talks about the evolution of the earth seeing the end of the age of the fish, then the end of the age of the reptiles and now we are now coming to the end of the age of mammals and entering the age of loneliness. We will live in an impoverished world where only humans relying on science and technology and a few scavengers will survive.

There is so much to care about and so much we have to do to change our perception of what the earth is for. Even if the climate change scientists have exaggerated, even if glaciers take a hundred years to melt not fifty and so on, we still have to change our lifestyles, reduce our consumption and undergo a dramatic change of heart, because all environmental issues depend on us reducing our assault on the ecosystems and resources of the earth.

And as for unscrupulous science - there have always been unscrupulous scientists, as we have seen with the MMR fiasco, but simply because some are charlatans doesn't make all medical research suspect and wrong. It is the same for climate change science.

I hope we won't be put off course by this worry over East Anglia and I hope we keep our eye firmly on the ball. Concern for the earth is not just acting on climate change, it is much, much more than that.

In the Shadow of the Moon

Photo by Chris Sperring

I've just had a letter published in The Tablet about the moon. I've been very interested about the search for water, what an amazing concept that frozen oceans might lie underneath the rocky surface; but I am disturbed by the methods being used.

I wonder if I am the only one to be concerned about the unchallenged assumption that it is fine to slam a 2 ton rocket into a crater to produce an explosion large enough to send a 10 km cloud of dust and debris into space? Why is it OK to bomb the moon?

I know it happened in a dark area inside a crater, but it is the principle that matters. It lays bear our basic assumption that we have a right to do anything to the natural world. It is sad the moon now no longer just has our footprints, it has a bomb crater and debris. I'm not sure looking at it will be quite the same again and I wonder if this is just the start of the path of destruction we see so much on this planet.

No More Fox Night

The fox has gone - haven't seen him/her for weeks now and a neighbour put a note through all the doors on the street complaining.  Apparently it killed their pet one evening and wants the fox eradication unit to be called if anyone ever sees a fox here again.  It is sad that the neighbour has lost a pet and really sad we can't live next to wild animals.  But it highlights it for me that our relationship with the natural world isn't all misty-eyed sunsets and pretty flowers.  We are competitors in a harsh world and we compete for space, food and resources.  So bye bye fox - it was really fun to see you while you were here.