Liuan Huska

I WRITE THIS two months before the November 2024 U.S. presidential election, knowing that it will land with you, dear readers, after all the votes are in and the course for the next four years is likely set. My insides lurch thinking about the potential outcomes. We are in the middle of the decisive decade for large-scale action to mitigate the worsening effects of climate change. Going in one direction or the other feels, sometimes, like a turn toward life or death for the planet.

Like many, I have learned to apply lessons from navigating the grief and pain of personal losses to our collective crises. I lost my dad suddenly to colon cancer earlier this year. A few weeks later, my mom was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Grasping for predictability amid the unknown, I tried to superimpose my dad’s illness onto my mom’s future. It did not help. My anxiety skyrocketed.

What helped, instead, was applying what Zen practitioners call “beginner’s mind.” A beginner has no background knowledge about a situation. They have no expectations for how things might unfurl. Approaching a situation as a beginner can open pathways that experts did not see.

THE THREE SHORT rows of folding chairs for the public were not full, but this was the highest attendance I had seen at a city council meeting. I was curious how the mayor and council members would respond this time. Community members had showed up to support a couple fighting what they felt was an unfair $20,000 building code violation fine.

After some preamble, the floor opened for public comment. A handful of residents of the small midwestern city where I live came to the podium for their allotted three minutes. “We’ve lost the adult in the room,” one woman said. “I implore the council to consider the human aspects,” a man said. He asked if the building board of appeals would be seated to review this case.

The mayor blinked, expression unchanged, “We can’t comment, and your time is up.”

IT'S PARTLY THE times and partly my own overthinking, but lately my mind keeps going toward the ways it could all fall apart. American democracy feels fragile, like a teacup on a saucer that’s partly hanging over the table’s edge. And companies and governments, though fully aware of what they’re doing, continue to tug voraciously at the threads that hold our ecosystems together, permitting more pipelines and drilling and business as usual.

Some have called our current era “the dying gasps” of late capitalism. The bubble of exponential economic growth, powered by the extraction of millions of years of decayed organic matter stored as carbon-rich fuel beneath the ground, can’t last forever. Neither can our living beyond the Earth’s means, though the endless options on e-commerce sites suggest otherwise.

It is too easy to surround myself with shiny new things to ease the sense that the world as we know it is ending, to buffer my sense of self with what feels familiar and safe. But then I wouldn’t be awake to what is being birthed in the wake of the dying colonial project. As much as it’s terrifying and full of risks, I want to get my hands dirty in the collective creation of a better world.

ALONG INTERSTATE 10 in southeast Texas, a billboard showcases a wrecked house, presumably from a hurricane, and the words, “The Next Disaster Is Coming. Are You Ready?” I spent a month this summer driving past this sign, enduring a heat dome while
visiting family.

A year of intensifying disasters, from wildfires to extreme heat to flooding, has all of us thinking about how to prepare for the next “big one,” whatever that may be in our area. Ready.gov, which this billboard points to, offers practical tips for everything from attacks in public places to tsunamis: Create a plan, gather supplies, map an escape.

While I want to be ready for a disaster, it’s too easy to go from thatto catastrophizing, from storing supplies to sitting back under the illusion of self-reliance and control. The billionaires who build luxurious bunkers and the preppers all-consumed with societal collapse show us the extremes of disaster preparedness. It can come with spiritual pitfalls, as the Parable of the Rich Fool illustrates.

In the parable, found in Luke 12:13-21, Jesus warns about relying on lots of stuff for a false sense of security. The rich man stored his surplus grain in huge barns and then sat back to enjoy life, but his life was taken from him that very night. All his efforts couldn’t keep him from harm. Jesus concludes, “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”

IN COLOMBIA, the highest rainfalls in 40 years had reduced coffee production by nearly one-third at the end of 2022. In the United States, tornado deaths for the first quarter of 2023 were already nearing the annual average. In Jakarta, Indonesia, the government barrels forward with constructing a 29-mile sea wall to protect the city, which is sinking under rising sea levels.

Everywhere, the planet is changing. Land once known for certain weather patterns, flora, and fauna is becoming strange and unfamiliar. Ways of life forged from old patterns are crumbling. Communities scramble to find new ways to farm, fish, graze, and live in what increasingly feels like uncharted territory.

Many have taken up the language of grief and loss to guide us through this turbulent era. Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht even coined the term “solastalgia,” which describes “the homesickness you have when you are still at home.” We long for the forests and meadows of our childhoods, alive with spring peepers and monarch butterflies, which today seem diminished or have completely disappeared, paved over by strip malls and subdivisions. The land that shaped us is still there, but it’s not the same.

AS SOMEONE WHO has lived with chronic pain and come to terms with being a body with limits, I struggle to square a theology of limits with a theology of abundance.

I have limits on my time, energy, and what my body can do. I’ve made peace with and even come to appreciate God’s elegant design of bounded human bodies and an Earth with limited, depletable resources. And yet, our faith speaks of a God who can do “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20, NIV), the same God who led the Israelites into a land “flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8) and pours oil over the psalmist’s head until his cup overflows (Psalm 23:5).

In a world rapidly running out of arable land, fossil fuels, and healthy soil and water, how do we rightly interpret a theology of abundance?

This election is just the most recent manifestation of deeper social divides in both the U.S. and Brazil. Benjamin A. Cowan, a historian at the University of California San Diego, notes that, since the 1980s, both countries have experienced a coalescing of “moral majorities” and right-wing populist groups, often with conservative Christians on the front lines. In Brazil, like in the U.S., certain affinities are grouped together. In the United States, a political slogan like “Jesus, guns, babies” attracts conservative constituents. In Brazil, conservatives rally around “beef, Bible, and bullets.” No wonder it feels like Texas.

WE OFTEN UTTER the phrase “Christ bore our sins” in a metaphysical sense, assuming sins occupy a place in our hearts, consciences, or spirits. Jesus died, we think, because of our spiritual transgressions. But I’m starting to see that sin isn’t just spiritual (as if anything could be just spiritual in our very physical world). Sin is also environmental. It impacts our air, water, and soil. It alters our ecosystems.

Sin might be defined as stepping out of right relationship with Creator and the rest of creation. The standard American lifestyle, which would require five Earths to sustain if everyone lived this way, puts the U.S. in a state of dire transgression. Pursuing a bloated illusion of progress, so many businesspeople, decision-makers, and culture-shapers have ignored the cost.

The wages of sin is death, says the apostle Paul (Romans 6:23). Today we are witnessing mass extinctions of species, destruction of homes and habitats by climate chaos, and premature deaths in communities closest to pollution sources. I live in one of these communities, though I didn’t know it when we moved here. My town is home to four Superfund sites, legacy pollution from a gaslight mantle factory that later produced thorium for the country’s atomic bombs in World War II. Though the sites have been remediated, residual contamination will pervade the land for millennia to come. Researching this history, I notice who moved away—white folks with resources—and who stayed—brown and white working-class folks who had no choice. Who would choose contamination?

ALINE MELLO WAS 7 years old when she left Brazil with her parents and sister for what was supposed to be a short-term stay in the United States. Growing up undocumented, Mello turned to writing to process her questions about belonging and relationships. More Salt than Diamond (Andrews McMeel Publishing), her debut poetry collection, pulses with themes of identity, religion, and living as an immigrant in tumultuous times. Sojourners columnist Liuan Huska spoke with Mello, a graduate fellow in creative writing at Ohio State University, about race, language, and coming back around to God after disillusionment with the church.

Liuan Huska: What were the circumstances of your family’s emigration from Brazil?

Aline Mello: We emigrated in 1997. We were pretty poor. We had a lot of faith that if we were going to the U.S., it was because God wanted us to go. My uncle got a tourist visa for the four of us to go to Somerville, Mass. It was just going to be three years.

My father had this thing where he would follow charismatic pastors, and we followed one to Atlanta in 2000, right before 9/11. I had been told [incorrectly], “If you stay here for 10 years, you automatically get papers.” I thought, “Okay, I’m going to be fine.”

Right when I graduated high school, in 2007, my father left us. My mom literally got home from work one day and got a voice mail from him saying, “Hey, I left the country.” I realized I couldn’t go to college in Brazil because I didn’t know college-level Portuguese. And I had scholarships here. The goal was to go to college and then go back. Then DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] happened. So I thought, “Obviously, God wants me to stay.” You keep getting scraps enough [that] you don’t starve.