Gray Skies Are Gonna Clear Up. But If They Don’t?

more on holy indifference, radical acceptance, and the climate

A few weeks ago on the Sunday before the July 4 holiday, our congregation sang the hymn “This is My Song,” which features this verse:

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too, and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
O hear my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for their land and for mine. (Hear a solo version here)

I chuckled grimly as we sang, because that day, our skies weren’t bluer than the ocean. They weren’t blue at all. A thick haze had fallen across the Northeastern US, where it would remain for days, weeks on end—a product of wildfires burning out of control in Canada. 

Set aside the alarming health hazards, and the sense of foreboding that such disasters can stir up in us—one writer sighed, “The sky is full of the corpses of trees.” The view was also just… ugly to me. Day after day of dull gray, the sun occasionally searing a garish orange hole into the curtain of haze. The whole thing put me in a bad mood, and I wasn’t the only one.

Southeastern Pennsylvania

Here’s something I think about a lot. As climate change bears down on us, many of our most ingrained values will need to change: endless cycles of growth and production, acquisitiveness, planned obsolescence, competition, rugged independence. If humanity is going to survive and also thrive, we can’t just grieve what we’re losing; we must also embrace what we have the potential to find: a more sustainable pace of living, cooperation and mutuality, radical communities of care. 

And as our values will have to shift, so will our aesthetics, I believe. When I visited the Holy Land in 2019, I met a woman who gestured toward the scrubby sun-bleached hillside near her home and declared it the most beautiful place on earth. To be honest, I didn’t see what she saw. The view was… interesting, maybe even arresting—but the most beautiful? (Have you seen the Rocky Mountains???)

Yet of course it was beautiful to her, because it was home. 

As climate change alters our most beloved landscapes—as beloved beaches disappear, for example—will our sense of what is beautiful change along with it? Surveys show that blue and green top many lists of people’s favorite colors. It makes sense—blue and green are abundant on our little planetary marble. What happens if and when that starts to change? Can we grow to love gray skies, if that’s what it comes to? Or dusty brown vistas? Can we come to redefine “gorgeous day” in light of new realities? 

I have to believe we can… and it will be key to our survival. 

One of my favorite TV series from the past few years is Station Eleven, in which a global pandemic wipes out 99% of the population, leaving a remnant who must eke out an existence and maybe even find some beauty in what remains. Despite that harsh premise, it was one of the more hopeful and kindhearted bits of fiction I’ve encountered recently. The show toggles between two plotlines, one in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic and another that takes place some two decades later. We were knee-deep in covid when I was watching it, so I followed the virus storyline with the most intense interest. But what has stayed with me thematically over time is the second plot: the way the world persevered. Children were born in the intervening years, children who never experienced air conditioning or automobiles or stadium concerts and didn’t know what they were missing, so they didn’t grieve it. Generally speaking, those characters fared much better—they were able to accept the world and even see beauty in it, because it was all they’d ever known. It was the ones who remembered the world that had passed away, who pined for how it used to be, who suffered the most. 

My therapist likes to remind me that, when we look at something that’s happening and say “well that shouldn’t be,” we’ve put ourselves in the impossible position of arguing with reality itself. Buddhists might describe that as attachment: clinging to the world as we’d like it to be. In other words, it wasn’t just the aesthetics of the smoky haze that bothered me, it was the overwhelming wrongness of it that sullied my mood. Once I can stop mentally fighting what is, I can come to a more accepting place. “This shouldn’t be” becomes “So it is… Now what?” 

This reframing is not a license to passively accept the brokenness and injustices of the world. Nor should we shame ourselves into stuffing down heartfelt grief or pain. But “this shouldn’t be” can keep us stuck in evaluation, judgment, and lament rather than response. Our goal is not acquiescence, but acceptance and action. (No joke, I wrote this very paragraph and set this article aside, only to discover that one of my cats had peed on the floor in front of the litter box. My first response was to stomp and wail, “Are you kidding me?!?!” And then… Come on MaryAnn. Just take a deep breath and clean it the hell up.)

Listen: the consequences of climate change will be severe. For too many, catastrophic. That can’t be hand-waved away with wishful thinking and a positive outlook. That’s not what I’m advocating; in fact, wishful thinking seems to be fueling a lot of denialism. Much of our inaction, I believe, boils down to some variation of “this shouldn’t be.” The worst-case scenarios are so unthinkable, so unprecedented. How could humanity have failed this one so badly? So we ignore what’s happening or pretend it isn’t. It’s time for us to stop arguing with reality itself, and wake up to what is. 

I continue to hear from a lot of you about my article on Holy Indifference:

One of you wrote this heartfelt comment, lightly edited:

I'm the mom of a trans non-binary adult kiddo. They are coming into their true self at a time the right flank of this country is mobilized against them. And many in the middle and in the left are ignorant, uncomfortable or uninterested in the bigotry directed at my kid, who has experienced direct right wing attacks against them from many powerful political figures. It is a really lonely place to be as a mom. I want to make the world safe and welcoming for my kiddo, and I'll continue to show up, and I can't stop the gathering storm that is coming with the presidential election. I prefer the term radical acceptance to holy indifference. It just works better for me. It seems to be what you are writing about. Thanks for your words, they speak to me.

My heart goes out to this mama, and I appreciate the friendly amendment of substituting radical acceptance for holy indifference. The latter term does feel antiquated—it’s based on the work of Ignatius of Loyola who lived in the 16th century, after all. 

That said, I’m wondering if there’s a subtle difference that can be helpful at different times. Radical acceptance feels up-close and intimate to me, like a fierce stubborn embrace of something we would never choose but can’t change. Holy indifference feels like an arm’s length experience. It invites me into healthy detachment, a deep breath and a letting go. Perhaps we’re called to radically accept the world as it is, doing what’s ours to do, then practice holy indifference to the outcome which is, after all, out of our hands. 

However we think about these terms, I think we’ll need them for the challenges we face. And we’ll also need to find some beauty in what is to come. The Last Jedi is a controversial film among Star Wars fans, but it features the lovely line, “That’s how we’re gonna win: not fighting what we hate… but saving what we love.” 

Can we learn to love a sky devoid of blue? 
And can we work to save the health of that sky and those who dwell beneath it, whatever the results of that work may be?

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What I’m Up To

I’m preaching this Sunday at 10:15 EDT at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Herndon. Livestream is here.

Our summer Celtic Curriculum is back for supporting subscribers. This week: BODIES! Learn more about subscription levels here. Members and friends of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Herndon are eligible for complimentary gift subscriptions; just ask. 

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Steady on, friends.