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PHILIP JENKINS’ REMARKABLE  Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval leads off with Voltaire: “Three things exercise a constant influence over the minds of [humankind] — climate, government, and religion ... That is the only way of explaining the enigma of this world.”

Climate and geology are now the new prisms for our shared discernment of how we are to live in our own time and place as followers of Christ. We’re driven to centering climate because we can no longer live with the expectation of the balanced climate of the last 12,000 years, the geologic epoch called the late Holocene. We are now in a new geologic epoch: the Age of the Human, or the Anthropocene.

Anthropocene reality leaves Christian ethics nowhere to hide. Nowhere to hide because unprecedented cumulative human powers doubled down on planet-spanning changes that launched the first geological epoch created by human choice and action. The fact that human choice and action has done this means that everything, including extinction, turns on ethics. As Christians, we can look away and abdicate our responsibility, but we cannot escape the massive human presence that lines out our lives — and all life. We’ve become totalizing creatures. We humans are, for the first time, both ark and flood.

This extraordinary power has been recognized for a while. In 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that the unprecedented powers of modern science and technology led to a world in which “it all comes down to the human being,” a world where “everything turns upon humanity.” He thus set out to reconceive human responsibility for a world that had come of age. For Bonhoeffer, “world come of age” was not a statement of moral maturity. It was a statement of moral accountability. People who legally come of age at 18 or 21 are accountable, whether they exercise their agency maturely or not. When everything turns on humanity, Bonhoeffer said, the whole human world has arrived at that point of accountability.

A current term for human powers and their collective impact is “assisted evolution.” But the phrase is deceptive because it hides the depth, breadth, and temporal reach of those powers. Does the phrase “assisted evolution” reveal that the carbon people produce has the ability to alter marine chemistry, flood coastlines, strip glaciers “to bare bones,” embolden deserts, warp the circulation of ocean currents, “supercharge extreme weather events,” and rearrange “the distribution of animal, plant, and microbial species across the globe,” as author David Farrier puts it? This isn’t evolution “assisted”; it’s evolution hacked and hijacked.

MUSIC IS MY safe space. When all hell is breaking out, I can put in my AirPods and turn on part of the soundtrack of my life and reset. The pandemic created a chronic hell that illuminated oppressive forces that have existed for centuries. Music became even more essential for my survival.

I am a Black clergywoman who is clear that “my emancipation doesn’t fit” many people’s equation. Let me say that another way: My authentic expression of self makes some people uncomfortable. My unapologetic expression of womanist Blackness often sheds light in the shadows of a corrupt world.

I won’t pretend that I have always felt free to be me. It took a pandemic to give space to be reminded by theologian and prophet Lauryn Hill that “deep in my heart, the answer, it was in me.” Hill’s lyrics and very existence compelled me to “[make] up my mind to define my own destiny.”

Some consider Hill to be one of the greatest lyricists of all time. An eight-time Grammy winner (with 19 nominations), she sings, raps, and acts. She is hip-hop royalty. In the ’90s, I wanted to be her. She wore the dopest locked hair style, had the most beautiful brown skin, and expressed her Blackness with boldness and class. She had, and still has, a lyrical flow that men and women couldn’t ignore. She was fly. (Translated as cool, sexy, smart, and stylish.)

Her industry-shaking debut solo album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, released in August 1998, will stand the test of time. Hill speaks truth in ways that penetrate the soul. I was a young mother when the album came out. She articulated things that only a Black woman could identify with. She spoke of the tension and beauty of having a child when society was telling her that motherhood and a career couldn’t coexist. She sang and rapped about self-respect, love gained, and love lost. This album is life. This album ministers. This album is sacred.

APRIL 2019. On the second day of our 65-kilometer walk on the Jesus Trail in Galilee, I began feeling dizzy and faint. Berry, my hiking partner, told me to drink more water. That helped, and we were able to make our way from Nazareth to our next stop in Cana, site of a wedding Jesus attended.

But the Jesus Trail continued, often on narrow stony paths speckled with animal droppings, up and down hillsides, across streams of springtime water where thistles grew over our heads, through meadows of waist-high grasses, and finally up and over Mount Arbel leading down to the Sea of Galilee. Our destination was Capernaum, site of Jesus’ headquarters during his ministry.

Exhausted at the end of our hike and with blistered feet, I turned to Mark’s gospel. Already in 1:21, Jesus “went to Capernaum”; the next morning he “went to a deserted place to pray” (verse 35). Then he “went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message” (verse 39). I will never read the words, “Jesus went” the same way again. Not by horse, carriage, automobile, train, or plane. Not communicating by telegram, radio, phone, email, YouTube, or Zoom. Just trudging by dusty, sandaled feet, bereft of Nikes!

‘Lords of the world’

SINCE THAT HIKE, I have been pondering the Incarnation. Was it necessary for the Infinite One to go that far down? To be born a lower-class, brown-skinned, black-haired Middle Eastern Jew whose only means of transport was by scratched and calloused feet? To live under an enemy occupation determined to keep its subjects poor and politically powerless?

TO THE LEFT of a buffalo photograph on my wall, a rosary hangs from a thumbtack. Frequently, my eyes linger there. It came to me a couple of years ago on my birthday as part of a gift from my mother — looped through the ribbon of a wrapped box that contained a tea set. When I held the rosary before my face, I found it curious. My mother explained that it had been my late father’s, and that it was one of his most prized possessions. I was a little stunned because I had never seen it before. It was a gift, my mom continued, made by his grandmother who died two years before I was born. Now, it had come to me.

My great-grandmother’s parents were part of a group of 25 Red River Métis families who settled on Spring Creek in central Montana in 1879, an area now known as Lewistown. They, like all the tribes of the region, were pursuing the final dwindling herds of buffalo. It was a tumultuous time to be Indigenous, with settlers flooding the landscape from all points east and gobbling up land, whether it had been promised to Indians or not.

The origins of my Métis people can be found in the late 1600s, and likely earlier, when the first European traders first began establishing trading posts in the Red River Valley. This region, named for the mighty Red River of the North, is centered at what is now Winnipeg, Manitoba, and extends into today’s Minnesota and North Dakota. These early Europeans, mostly from France — with some coming from Scotland, Wales, and England — married into the Indigenous people already inhabiting the region: Cree people and Ojibwe people. From these unions sprang descendants who created their own unique, mixed-culture people — the Métis.

THE EARTH SEEMS ablaze. Each year, flames appear more savage, more far-ranging, and more inescapable. The prophecy of Ezekiel is coming to pass: “They shall go out from one fire, and another fire shall devour them” (15:7). The planet is, as some see it, careening toward a secular apocalypse.

To be caught between two fires is an old notion. But a lot has changed since Ezekiel’s warning. Today, we do not have to cope with two fires but with three. The first is the fire that has burned as long as terrestrial vegetation has existed. The second is the fire that humans tamed from the first. The third involves burning fossil fuels. The three fires together are shaping our world, which makes humanity uniquely suited to serve as a steward, for we are Earth’s fire creature, the only one with the systematic capacity to start and stop flame.

WESTERN CIVILIZATION HAS a long heritage of fire myth, lore, religion, and science. Early Indo-Europeans seem to have worshiped a fire deity. Of the 12 ancient Olympians, two were gods of fire — Vesta for the hearth, Vulcan for the forge. Ritual fire became a fundamental practice of Zoroastrians, among the first of the monotheisms. New colonies or dislocated peoples would take fire from their mother city to literally “rekindle” its offspring. The hearth fire, most famously in Rome, stood for both family and state. Pyromancy, the practice of divining meaning in flames, is an old practice.

This article is adapted with permission from Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future by Patty Krawec. © 2022 Broadleaf Books.

I WAIT AT the back of the stage, behind the curtains, holding my hand drum and listening to the low buzz of a theater filled with people. My friend Karl stands in the darkness at center stage, waiting for me to start singing and make my way to where he stands. We are providing an opening for the Niagara Performing Arts Center’s season preview. It is not a Native event. The center is a public arts venue that showcases a wide range of performers, and the artistic directors include Native artists throughout the regular season. They have asked Karl and me to open this particular night as an acknowledgment that this and future events take place on Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe land.

It is fall 2017, 150 years since Canada’s confederation, and I’ve made a ribbon skirt to wear at this event. Ribbon skirts—long cotton skirts embellished with rows of ribbon and sometimes with appliqued designs—are a contemporary innovation of an older style of clothing that we wore before settler contact. The ribbon skirt I’ve made for this evening is black with wide ribbons in the colors associated with the medicine wheel: red, black, white, and yellow. I have appliqued red maple leaves falling down the front of the skirt until they are covered by ribbons. I like the imagery of Canada being absorbed by Indigenous ideas. Later, during the gathering after the event, a couple of women will come to speak with me. They will comment that the leaves are upside down. A nation in distress flies their flag upside down, I will tell them. And Canada, like the United States, is a nation in distress.

There is the beat of the drum in that darkened theater and then my voice coming from the back of the stage. I move toward the front, singing each verse louder as the lights come up. When I finish, Karl speaks the words of the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address in Oneida. Then we simply leave the stage. Not explaining the song or our actions or our words is deliberate. We let the audience sit for moment and consider that what feels profoundly alien to them is not alien at all. For one brief moment, they are surrounded by the sounds of this place.

That evening before we go on stage, Karl and I talk about whether Christianity and Indigenous worldviews can ever be reconciled, if there is any common space. He doesn’t think so. Karl is Oneida and part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Hundreds of years ago, when it became evident that the newcomers were going to stay, he says, the Confederacy made a treaty with the settlers called the Two Row. This is written in the form of a wampum belt made of oblong purple and white beads, with two white rows on a purple background. The agreement was that we would travel together, the Indigenous peoples and the settlers, each in our own boat but on parallel paths in a relationship guided by peace, honesty, and respect.

The principle of noninterference lives at the root of many Indigenous philosophies and is exemplified in treaties like the Two Row: We would live according to our ways, and the newcomers would live according to theirs. Although colonization is clearly a violation of this treaty, the Haudenosaunee people I know remain committed to it and continue to try to live within these principles.

IN APRIL, Pope Francis made a long-awaited apology to a Canadian delegation of Inuit, First Nations, and Métis leaders at the Vatican for the “deplorable” violations children suffered at Catholic-run Indian Residential Schools for more than a century. The pope committed to come to Canada in late July to make his confession personally to residential school survivors and their descendants for “the abuse and disrespect for your identity, your culture, and even your spiritual values.”

In this historic apology, Pope Francis stated, “Clearly, the content of the faith cannot be transmitted in a way contrary to the faith itself.”

This watershed moment comes 25 years after Harry Lafond—a Catholic and then-chief of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation in Saskatchewan—raised issues of Indigenous faith and culture in a historic audience with Pope John Paul II during the Vatican’s 1997 Synod of the Americas. An educator and Catholic deacon, Lafond and his ancestors have a long history of building bridges between settler and Indigenous communities. J.B. Lafond, Harry’s great grandfather, was a spokesperson for Chief Keetoowayhow at the sixth of the 11 numbered treaties signed by First Nations with the Canadian Crown between 1871 and 1877. At the Treaty 6 table in 1876, J.B. Lafond negotiated with a British colonial government for relief from the flood of encroaching European settlers on the prairies. The parties were trying to avoid the violence waged against the Lakota, Dakota, and Cheyenne to their south. Though traditional Muskeg Lake Cree territory covered hundreds of square miles, Treaty 6 allotted a reserve of only 42 square miles.

Harry Lafond’s family has lived on the Treaty 6 reserve since then. He and eight of his 11 siblings attended nearby St. Michael’s (Duck Lake) Indian Residential School, run by the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1975, after marrying Germaine Laplante, a former Catholic sister of Métis (mixed European and Indigenous) heritage, Lafond worked as an educator and then served for a decade as chief at Muskeg Lake. Later, he directed the Office of the Treaty Commissioner of Saskatchewan, formed to bring Indigenous views of treaty covenants to the wider settler community. His tenure coincided with the years of Canada’s groundbreaking Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

In 2015, after six years of gathering testimony from across Canada, the TRC issued 94 calls to action to repair past and continuing damages wrought by the residential school system as an instrument of colonization. These included 10 calls directed toward churches, one of which demanded an apology from the pope on Canadian soil for abuses—which is being realized this summer, thanks to seeds planted by leaders such as Harry Lafond.

Today, Lafond continues to foster dialogue about what it means to be both Cree and Catholic. He works to renew Cree language and traditions among his people, while accompanying settlers interested in restorative solidarity. In May, the first federal study of Native American boarding schools in the U.S. identified more than 400 Indian Residential Schools and more than 50 associated burial sites. We interviewed Lafond in March and May 2022 by Zoom and email about his journey toward restorative justice and how the church might be replanted in Cree culture and land.—Elaine Enns and Ched Myers

Elaine Enns and Ched Myers: How did you feel when you heard Pope Francis’ apology in April to the First Nations delegation?

Harry Lafond: Pope Francis is an exceptional man with a very strong instinct to find the right path to the hearts of his visitors. I felt great hope and comfort that together we will find our way to wahkohtowin, Cree law for making relatives. And I recognize that it is an event that should have taken place 500 years ago.

LASCAUX IS FAMOUS for its Paleolithic cave paintings, found in an underground complex in southwest France. The biggest area of Lascaux with the most abundant paintings is an echo chamber. Enveloped in sound, our human ancestors may have drummed and danced around a flickering fire whose shadows animated the natural scenes of people, animals, and their environment on the surrounding walls—all inviting transcendence. In ancient Greek religion, the lyrical music of Orpheus charmed the gods and compelled animals, even rocks and trees, to dance. Early Christian iconography developed a practice of liturgical art that both offered theological instruction and included details of the plant and animal world, both literal and allegorical, to foster spiritual reverence.

Closer to our time, great thinkers such as 19th-century German explorer-scientist Alexander von Humbolt looked beyond isolated organisms to the unity among plants, climate, and geography. In the 20th century, French Jesuit and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s perception that the universe is an evolutionary process moving toward greater complexity and consciousness furthered the understanding that humans are interdependent with the created world. Albert Einstein wrote that human beings experience ourselves “as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of consciousness” and that “we will have to learn to think in a new way” if humanity is to survive. This view is echoed in new developments in quantum physics that we may be evolving toward a more coherent wholeness among spirituality, science, and art.

The icon paintings of Angela Manno, an internationally exhibited and collected artist, are yet another expression of this lineage in her series “Sacred Icons of Endangered Species.” I interviewed Manno by email and telephone in March.

Andrea M. Couture: As a contemporary artist, what attracted you to icon painting, one of the oldest forms of Christian art, going back to the third century?

Angela Manno: I’ve been fascinated by non-Western and ancient art forms throughout my life, from illuminated manuscripts as a child to batik while traveling through Indonesia in my early 20s; icon materials—gold leaf, pigments made from ground up semiprecious stones, earth colors; and the ethereal look of the finished product’s images of angels and saints.

In the 1980s, I developed my own personal idiom, combining the ancient art of batik with color xerography to symbolize the merging of intuition and reason. My aim was to convey a sense of the sacredness of the planet Earth. In the 1990s, no longer having access to my large studio and a photocopier, I searched for a medium that would allow me to work in a more modest space and, at the same time, I wanted to explore a truly liturgical art form. In a stroke of synchronicity, I had the opportunity to begin studying with a master iconographer from Russia in the Byzantine-Russian style, and became completely captivated by the symbolism, not only in the images, but in the process itself, and studied with him for over a decade.

IN 1876, LAKOTA SIOUX rode on horseback from South Dakota to Montana Territory to help the Northern Cheyenne at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in one of the most important actions of the Great Sioux War.

The battle was inevitable. The rights promised through the Second Treaty of Fort Laramie, which gave the Sioux and Arapaho possession of the Dakota Territory, were being ignored. White miners had come to settle on part of the land that was sacred to the Lakota Sioux. The U.S. government ordered the Indigenous communities to return to their designated reservations. Instead of complying, they banded together as an act of resistance. Led by Lakota Sioux Chief Sitting Bull, the Indigenous resistance grew several thousand in number and ultimately defeated Lt. Colonel George Custer and the 7th Calvary—one of the worst U.S. army defeats during the Plains Wars.

Nearly 150 years later, members of the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne have joined forces once again to defend themselves against a new threat to their communal life: fossil fuels.