The Sacred Place of Connection | July 13, 2025 | Rev. Liz Olson

Dear beloved Fellowship community, today I would like to explore with you about the root causes of the climate crisis that we are living into and what we can do to address it. I don’t mean the scientific causes – the “greenhouse gases” that trap heat and wreck havoc with the interconnected balance of living systems. I would like to look deeper to the other anthropogenic (human-caused) root causes of climate change where I believe we will find spiritual disconnection. This spiritual disconnection has developed especially in the Western world where capitalism’s inherent greed, power and fear has been unleashed. I believe too that this same spiritual disconnection is also at the root of our worst human exploits - slavery, abuse, murder, war, genocide, the destruction of our natural world ­– the “polycrises” that we are living through now.

Last week Dr. Benton spoke about a “dynamic connectedness” (Jantsch) that exists in life, and how the revelation of quantum physics is that all life exists in relationship, that relationships “are the fundamental ingredients of creation” (Wheatley). I had to laugh with her after the service because this principle of connectedness is what I was working on for this week’s message. However, this is such an important paradigm shift that it will no doubt warrant many more messages and sermons.

Let’s start first by looking at the definition of spirituality, a clinical definition of spirituality that I followed in my palliative care chaplaincy work (and discussed in a previous message.)

Spirituality is the aspect of humanity that refers to the way individuals

seek and express meaning and purpose

and the way they experience their connectedness

to the moment, to self, to others, to nature, and to the significant or sacred.

-National Consensus for Palliative Care

As you see, part of this definition explains that finding meaning and purpose is a key part of our spirituality. But we have to be careful in looking at a lack of this as a root cause, because while meaning and purpose are important to our spiritual wellbeing, they can also be a way to justify cruelty and to perpetuate systemic injustice. Indeed, Steve Bannon said as much - formerly of Breitbart News, sentenced for fraud and contempt of court, now podcast host of War Room, and a darling of the populist Trump MAGA movement - in a 2024 New York Times interview with David Brooks:

This (podcast) is a military headquarters for a populist revolt. This is how we motivate people. If you watch this show, you’re a foot soldier. We call it the Army of the Awakened…. People in this movement, when they talk to me, they say they have a purpose. Once they have a purpose, you can’t stop this movement.

In a similar - but instead life-affirming way - the climate mental health field promotes that one of the key antidotes to climate distress is also to take action – finding purpose and meaning in joining with others who are taking actions to address this existential threat.

But it is this spiritual concept of connection and reconnecting that I believe is where the deep movement of transformation must take place. In the past seven years of my own involvement with the impacts of climate change on our physical and psychological wellbeing, I have been tickled/surprised/relieved to see this spiritual concept of connection appear throughout the literature and the field of “mental health.” LaUra Schmidt is a founder of the GoodGrief Network, a climate support group program that uses a 10-step approach for ecological grief (based on the 12-step path of Alcoholics Anonymous.) She says:

The major crises of our time are caused by disconnection. The solution, as simple as it sounds, is to deeply reconnect on all levels. We must reconnect to ourselves, each other, and the more than human world.

Our disconnection stems from many things, so I’ll touch on just a few here. First off and most basically, we are blessed and cursed to have a neural system that triggers fear for anything threatening, thereby ensuring physical safety and protection. When this happens, our prefrontal cortex’s discerning capacity shuts down and we react, rather than respond. We go into a protective mode and distance ourselves from the Other, even making them an enemy. Yet, in modern times it can simply be a threat to our identity, or a trigger of any unprocessed trauma or shame, that sends our cortisol into action.

Religious and spiritual practices have various ways to address our neural contraction of fear and bring us into centeredness and inner peace. Buddhist mindful meditation and its sophisticated brain study encourage us to, as Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh said, “change our habit energy.” Pranayama breathing techniques stem from ancient Hindu traditions, and are designed, among other goals, to regulate the nervous system. Islam has the practice of stopping, prostrating on the ground, and praying five times a day. Catholic practices include the use of a rosary that brings a calming effect by touching the prayer beads in a methodical way while reciting prayer - and this becomes wired into the brain from repetition. Singing alone, singing in groups, and singing familiar hymns have the same effect. I have led weekly worship services for people in memory care who exhibited such peace and joy from singing old Christian hymns that had been burned into keeping, somewhere deeper than the dementia could reach.

At Fellowship Church you could say that our core purpose is precisely to create connection, and with great intention to do so across differences in race, ethnicity and faith. We do so by worshipping together in services and by sharing with each other during the Fellowship meal hour. We also forge connection online at the monthly personal “check-in,” as well as through group study of texts at the monthly Engaged Spirituality gathering, where deep conversations can be heavy and are held together by a respect and care for each other. For a small congregation, we make a lot of connectedness happen!

All this to say, we have so many tools at our disposal for addressing and regulating this fear-activation in us, which, while intended for protection, is causing separation and disconnection…. And the tools that are rising up in mainstream teachings now are stemming originally from spiritual traditions.

Another cause of disconnection comes from our object-oriented perception of the world. This is primarily true for the Western, non-Indigenous humans, and developed especially during the Renaissance era when philosopher René Descartes ushered in a mechanistic way of understanding the human being. The object-oriented view of the world is the mindset of colonization, when people are considered objects to be used for profit, such as slavery, cheap foreign labor sweatshops, human trafficking, prison-industrial labor (the old and new Jim Crow and now the new immigrant detention centers.) The devastation of this object-oriented mindset has resulted in profound trauma that is often intergenerational. With the growing understanding of our brains and our neural systems over the past couple of decades, we are starting to bring awareness to this trauma and the deep effect it has on peoples’ lives, on societies, and to address what can be done to heal and repair.

Prentis Hemphill, Founder of The Embodiment Institute (initially The Black Embodiment Institute) describes the psychological effect of this mindset in a class that I took on “Resilience in the Anthropocene” (University of Wisconsin EdX):

I want to bring some attention to the fact that many of us live in societies and inside of cultures that have been heavily shaped by capitalism, by imperialism, by militarism. And the way these forces attempt to turn life into object will exploit bodies, will exploit the Earth for the sake of profit. In order to do that, part of what is necessary inside these systems and in these forces is the suppression of feeling. A lot more is possible when we don’t feel what is in the trajectory of exploitation. Many of us have been encouraged to suppress our feeling or sever our relationships and the intimacy that’s possible between us, the love that is possible between us, and to stifle feeling through all the many options we have to numbing our feelings. We’re incentivized away from feeling.

…Our grief isn’t a distraction from real work, but it is the seeds of real revolutionary action. The work of coming alive to our feelings is a very intimate and depthful work. Especially when there has been so much encouragement to ignore, to turn away. But I believe that when we don’t feel, it moves us more towards crisis, death for a lot of people around the world, for many of us. It keeps us from these experiences of love and intimacy, of connection.

In a similar teaching, Joanna Macy, one of the earliest environmentalists and systems thinkers, focused her work on the premise that our “Industrial Growth Society” has taught us to “deaden our hearts and minds.” She developed a profound group process called “The Work That Reconnects” that supports people in opening to and moving through their grief and their distress so that they can feel reconnected to life, to the earth and to each other in a powerful way. The eventual outcome is an increased capacity to care, which leads to engagement in change-making. (See Coming Back to Life, second edition 2014, co-author Molly Brown.) She teaches that denial happens because people don’t want to feel this pain. I want to honor her and her work, as she is presently in hospice and approaching the end of her amazing 96 years.

Another forerunner is climate psychologist Rosemary Randall who saw that grief for the climate crisis was rather taboo to bring up in public, in social settings, within families, amongst friends, even to ourselves. She taught that when our grief gets tucked away and never dealt with, there can be negative consequences in our own personal life and for society. She wrote an early paper (Ecopsychology, 2009) that laid out the consequences of unaddressed grief, based on the “Four Tasks of Grieving” from William Worden. The consequences of unaddressed grief are:

•       denial of the facts

•       denial of the meaning of the loss

•       shutting off of all emotion

•       idealizing what is lost

•       numbing through substance use or manic activity

•       and just not adapting, becoming helpless, bitter, angry, depressed, withdrawing

Denial and even mockery of climate grief and distress is something I’ve witnessed many times in my work and experienced first-hand from the reaction to an NPR story last fall on how eco-chaplains are supporting people, which featured the group I co-led in Oregon. Apparently, this topic hit a funny bone with the conservative and right-leaning media and they had a field day with it. “The Five” on Fox News is a roundtable of Fox personalities who discuss the day’s news and they took on this NPR story. In their discussion entitled “Climate Crazies Go Religious” the host felt that “climate people” put their grief at center of their lives, rather than their family, and deduced that this is why “climate people don’t have families, like why Greta Thunberg is alone” and that they’ve “pushed God out of their lives and now this is their ideology.” Judge Jeanne Pirro (now serving as top federal prosecutor in D.C.) felt that there was something lucrative behind the work of this eco-chaplain (me) and deduced that eco-chaplains are playing up these “sensational” life and death emotions because “it’s great business.”

The online news media Daily Mail did a full rewrite of the NPR story and, similarly, rather than face the topic of emotions, also tweaked the focus to being something about religion: “Climate chaplaincy is a new strain of religious teachings, and notably veers away from focusing on faith in favor of climate anxiety.” Although the original NPR story made no mention of my ministry at Fellowship Church, this Daily Mail writer did some digging around and found our church website, pulled a couple of photos, no doubt saw the interracial mission, and titled his article: “Woke Oregon chaplain is helping eco-warriors ‘say goodbye to species’ while activists deal with anxiety from ‘climate grief.’” The article had a derisive tone throughout, and many of the comments afterwards were full of eyerolls and nasty remarks. And yet! I noticed that almost at the end of the comments, someone wrote about all the animals and insects that they used to have in their backyard that are now gone… “It’s heart-breaking,” she admitted …and another agreed. To me, these reactions by the conservative media were revealing of their fear – fear of the depth of the emotion that is part of living in the time of climate change. Very hard to talk about and much easier to joke about… plus, better for clickbait.

Local climate maverick Paul Hawken, founder of Project Drawdown and Project Regeneration, was recently interviewed by Kaméa Chayne on her podcast Green Dreamer. Hawken and his teams’ work has excelled at identifying top issues to address and solutions to take. And yet, still on the cutting edge of this work, he now asks us to reconsider the term “climate crisis” because

 …it puts it “out there somewhere”, as if it’s happening to us, but rather the crisis is our relationship to the living world… the problem is caused by humanity objectifying the living world and selling it to the highest bidder. This includes selling actual human beings, by the way, in the Atlantic passage. Not just animals, but forests, minerals, whales, and so forth.

Paul Hawken and Kaméa Chayne discussed how the English language has an orientation to nouns, whereas Indigenous cultures have languages made up of verbs …and how just this orientation in our language causes separation. Hawken mentioned his great reverence for the teachings of Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. 

Kimmerer explains that unlike the English language, Potawatomi is 70% made up of verbs. Words are not divided into masculine and feminine, but rather animate and inanimate. For example, she explains how the word “red” is “to be red,” and “a hill” is “to be a hill.” The words are conjoined with the verb “to be” because, as Kimmerer says, “the world is ALIVE!” She says “We use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family.” To ask about an apple they would say, “Who is that being?” “And reply, “Mshimin yawe” or “Apple being that is.” I realized that if you say that aloud, you might notice that the verb “to be” – “Yawe”– sounds like the Jewish word for God – Yahweh. Kimmerer says that Yawe is the verb used to animate all of the world.

So, how do we truly and deeply address the root causes of the climate crisis that we are in? As Audre Lorde said, “the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house.” So that means carbon capture and a carbon credit economy isn’t going to do it. Even solar panels and offshore wind are just external fixes. The deep, lasting work to be done is with ourselves, with each other, transforming ourselves and our communities, waking up to the grief we feel for the separation we have been living with, the pain that has been suffered, and arriving at the sacred place of connection.