Like There's No Tomorrow: Climate Crisis, Eco-Anxiety and God
Ebook
Christians often find it difficult to talk or preach or engage with the possibility of climate catastrophe and an uninhabitable earth, for the questions are enormous. Faith in God needs to engage with the reality of the tragic loss of creation through anthropogenic impact.
If we're living in the end times, then how should we live? Wracked with grief, anxiety and guilt, with foreboding deep as death? How is it possible to live hopefully, even as we face realistically the inevitability of the radical impact of an unpredictable climate, rising sea levels, the collapse of biodiversity? How do we remain faithful to God and loving to our neighbour, particularly if our neighbours are exiles and immigrants because their homes are no longer inhabitable? What do we tell our children and grandchildren, so they don't grow up completely overwhelmed by anxiety, such that mental illness levels continue to soar?
Frances Ward attempts to think through some of these questions; to continue to have faith, hope, and love in response to God. It is a Christian response to eco-anxiety, a theological and contemplative reflection to sustain a fierce hope that hopes against hope. It is a deep lament that provokes a fierce hope to enable humanity to live life to the full, like there's no tomorrow.
Without any preamble, Frances Ward, in chapter 1, sets out her rationale for writing her book Like there’s no tomorrow: Climate crises, eco-anxiety and God. She talks about her journey both physically and spiritually as she travels on her new narrowboat from March to Skipton in the early summer of 2018.
Ward talks about her anxiety and restlessness and how in hindsight she sees that her underlying anxiety ‘was a deep foreboding about the future of the planet’ (p. 2). She reflects on the six-week journey and she reflects on becoming ‘immersed in the world of the canal bank, the history of the English canal system and the people of today’ (p. 8). Ward talks about rediscovering the God who regenerates and sustains life. She speaks of the need to lament in order to find hope; the hope that comes from the internal journey of deep contemplation on the ‘grace of God’ at work in our lives and in the world (p. 15).
The next 14 chapters speak of that physical and spiritual journey described by Ward in chapter 1. Each chapter of her book sets out the journey in the narrow board and each chapter is a theological reflection on Ward’s personal spiritual journey with God and God’s creation through the beauty of the countryside and the beauty of the English canal system.
Chapter 3 begins Ward’s physical canal journey as she travels along the River Lark to Prickwillow to launch and bless the narrowboat named the Lark Ascending. In her spiritual journey, she feels as if she is heading backwards, as the River Lark runs through Bury St Edmunds, her previous home. Ward comments, ‘we are heading backwards, into the past, before we could make for the future’ (p. 36). As Ward journeys she reflects on nature, humanities desire to control nature and water in particular.
Chapter 4 reflects Ward’s desire for transformation. Transformation from the desires and duties that had once held her. She talks about ‘the journey from despair to fierce hope’ (p. 49). In the chapter, she reflects on the words of the Psalmists and on the classic book The cloud of unknowing.
This pattern of the physical journey alongside the spiritual set out in chapters 3 and 4 continues throughout the book as Ward journeys from Ely to Prickwillow, to Peterborough along the River Nene, on to Northampton and Rugby, along the Oxford Canal and the Coventry Canal towards Stoke-on-Trent. From Stoke-on-Trent Ward journeys north through Cheshire towards Manchester and Wigan. From Wigan, the journey continues to Blackburn and finally to Skipton.
In her spiritual journey, Ward reflects on the issues around creation and she begins by talking about ‘A lament for creation’. She raises issues around care of creation through domination and dominion. She speaks of the rivers running dry and forests destroyed because of the breakdown of the covenant between God and humanity.
She does, however, offer hope as she continues to journey. Ward speaks of God as light and salvation. She recognises and sees God in creation and in the challenges of life, ‘even through the shadowlands of anxiety and depression’ (p. 152).
Ward draws on different literary forms but uses the Psalms consistently throughout her book. The Psalms, for Ward, are powerful as they ‘enable lament, emotional and moral resilience to cope with the challenges of life’ (p. 185). For Ward Lament is the best thing to do with despair. As she looks back over the changing landscape she laments the England that was, she laments the changing landscape and she laments the destruction of the ecosystem. She ends the book with the hopeful words: Christ’s self-sacrifice lies at the heart of the love of God. This is a God in Christ who gives, and gives, and gives again in order that we and all creation might have life. Let us not take, and take, and take in return, but grow in self-sacrificial love ourselves, for the sake of God’s creation’. (p. 235)
Ward’s book is an example of how to reflect theologically. The book is well crafted and explores both her personal journey and her physical journey in the light of the scriptures and other literature.
Frances Ward’s book is a deeply reflective and interior exploration of her response to the emergency. … The slowed-down pace of the canals as the boat moves through beautiful landscapes allows time for deep and slow spiritual reflection on God’s world and our relationship with it.
This is a beautiful book, accessible because it follows the thread of her voyage; and enlightening because it follows the thread of her spiritual reflections.
[This book] spells out the disastrous, humanly generated threats that are now radically changing planet Earth and every living creature that inhabits her. And it is way past time I faced up to that and stopped putting my head in the sand. Furthermore, it spells out my own complicity with this tragic state of affairs. And if I have any desire to live truthfully and faithfully before God in our time, I cannot duck this responsibility. So I must buy this book. […]
If you feel the tension between turning away and turning towards the disasters that are the defining features of our times, this is a work that will speak to your soul.
A heartening read for anyone who cares even slightly about the major moral and ethical conundrums of our day, seen here through a theologian’s lens. It casts a Godly eye upon the Climate Change crisis, so often seen as the sole province of scientists. How refreshing to find the whole area firmly situated in terms of what it is and always will be: a moral and philosophical challenge. […]
This is a welcome addition to any library, representing less anxiety and more celebration of creation, creativity and the wilder recesses of all our minds. […]
Frances Ward tackles her subject with a confidence, brevity and wit sorely needed in an epoch which will be defined by its adherence to polarisation, opposition and strife.
The book will be particularly enjoyed by those who appreciate poetry, as much is quoted, Psalms included, and also by bird lovers and those interested in England’s varied geography. The very style of writing helps to slow us down, to reflect, to pray, to lament; it covers the journey lock by lock; companions and those she meets are also introduced. For Readers, this book introduces an important theme for life and ministry today, with no easy answers but gentle encouragement to align our lives, individually and as church, with values and deliberate choices for the good of our beautiful world, the poor, and the future.
Ward gracefully weaves together observations of the natural and human world she encounters on her journey with reflections on Scripture, poetry, environmental writing, history and theology. Realizing that releasing the grip of fear requires letting go, she turns to the Psalms to give voice to her lament for what has been lost, perhaps never to be regained. The learned simplicity of the slow and fluid journey is combined with the restorative effect of immersion in a landscape that speaks to her of both loss and hope. This ultimately merges with her lament, allowing her to find a new way of being present in a world of climate change and giving her a sense of the presence of God within it.
Catastrophic climate change is the issue of our age—ethical, political, scientific, and theological—but few theologians have attended to it with the urgency and passion that it deserves. Not so with Frankie Ward. In Like There’s No Tomorrow emotion is allowed to be raw, and lamentation be loud, but equally there is hope here: for the climate, but also for an all encompassing reorientation to a better way of life.
The poet Emily Dickinson tells us that hope 'perches in the soul'. Frances Ward asks here what it would take in our day to make it fly. We are a people on the verge of extinction. Progress is never made by contented people, nor will the necessary ruptures needed to stop our damaging behaviours ever be made convincing by them. However, Frances Ward's discontent understands the deep connections between the inner and outer landscapes. She scrutinizes both on a journey, with a restless attention, and writes this journal of soul and world in a poetic voice. The result is a holy and subversive protest for creation and for God.
Facing up to apocalypse is not a new challenge for the people of God. But rather than fearing an apocalypse at God's hand, we now fear an apocalypse where it seems God has left the building. Like There's No Tomorrow records two journeys: a canal boat voyage through the heart of England and the heartfelt pursuit of faith in a time of climate crisis. Buoyed beautifully by scripture, poetry, natural history, and theology, Ward invites us to turn fear to lament, finding the courage to be truthful, to grieve, and to give thanks.
- Title: Like There's No Tomorrow: Climate Crisis, Eco-Anxiety and God
- Author: Frances Ward
- Publisher: Sacristy Press
- Print Publication Date: 2020
- Logos Release Date: 2023
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781789590906, 9781789590883, 1789590884, 9781789590890, 1789590892, 1789590906
- Resource ID: LLS:9781789590906
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2023-06-15T01:13:13Z
Frances Ward is a freelance theologian, researcher and writer, preacher, speaker and teacher. She is half-time Priest in Charge of St Michael's and St John's Churches in Workington, Cumbria.