Riven: A Mysticism of Place in Times of Grief    
Riven A Mysticism of Place in Times of Grief Patricia M. Zimmerman, St. Olaf College
 
Keywords: mysticism, ecogrief, climate crisis, materiality, place, Julian of Norwich, Mechthild of Magdeburg, John of the Cross, Robert MacFarlane Abstract: What does a particular place and its unique yet integrated life-force do for our lamentation amid ecocide? Do we suppose that nature mourns for us? Restores us to full resurrection? I avoid either/or solutions as at best a misplaced romantic optimism and at worst escapism enabling capitalist exploitation. Rather, I draw upon Christian mystics Julian of Norwich, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and John of the Cross alongside contemporary nonfiction authors Robert Macfarlane and Annie Dillard to move us beyond metaphor into the material. Masters of holding complicated paradoxical truths in real bodies and time, they wake the dying and entice us into spiritual practices as poets of apocatastasis, postulants of apophatic energy, and epistemologies of integration.
   
It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. Did the wind use to cry, and the hills shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of earth, and living things say very little to very few. Annie Dillard, “Teaching a Stone to Talk”i
 
All of these landscapes offer the reassurance of nature’s return; all incite the discord of profound suffering coexisting with generous life. Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journeyii
 ^ Annie Dillard, “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” in Teaching a Stone to Talk, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013), 85–94. ^ Robert Macfarlane, The Underland: A Deep Time Journey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2019).
      
   INTRODUCTION    In the far southwest of the US state of Minnesota, the land writes a story of itself transitioning from glacial drift to savanna, to wetlands, and eventually to the dried remnant of a 10,000-year-old moraine. Nineteenth-century Anglo-European settler farmers surveyed, ditched, and tiled the land to pronounce it valuable in their accounting. They brought up southern Texan-Mexicans to labor alongside the multiple bands of Dakota and displaced Winnebago who had long waded, hunted, and made home in the area. Quieter and more hidden perhaps than other subjugations and displacements, their colonizing logic and tools transformed a calibrated marshland ecosystem into a drained 18,000-acre lake of cropland that floods a bit too often. Today people call it the Big Marsh. It remains, as Cheri Register lyrically writes, a story of a “lost landscape.”[1] Here where human communities commingled with geology, flora, and fauna in mechanistic patterns unknown to previous millennia, we see now the graveyard that reveals such a betrayal. Everything is riven.[2] We humans have fractured it. In order to tend the bodies, into the rupture we can root mystical strategies of contingent knowing and compassionate contemplation. Really, though, what could such meditations on an integrated life-force and our capacity for discernment accomplish in the presence of our deep unremitting lamentation amid ecocide? Long positioned as methods of spiritual action within temporary earthly exile, medieval mystical teachings need not be locked in an antimaterial escapism. They can indeed give us some needed grounded focus exactly here amid creaturely admiration and love, not exile but continuing Eden. Rather than fold under the immense grief of likely irredeemable destruction, the methods and teachings of a contemplative Christian mysticism can accompany and even rescue those working to slow the rending. Many Christian pieties profess hope by taking an easy if dishonest turn to insist everything will resurrect in glory. Just as everything here and now in this material earthly life is riven, all there and then in some heavenly spiritual realm will magically transform into joy and repair. All fragments shall become one again. This presumes a concept of unity or wholeness as salvific. It also diminishes the way “wholeness” often limits imagination and conscribes plurality reductively, rather than celebrating interconnected multiplicities. The cycle of death breeds the cycle of life. The green blade riseth and all that. But a temptation to happy ending resonates at best as misplaced romantic optimism and at worst as escapism that enables capitalist exploitation. The overly cheerful resurrected ending often abandons rather than heals the material world for which we mourn. And it sidesteps accountability for our complicity in the violence. More helpfully, we must write from injury rather than recovery.[3] We can rest in the visceral, embodied nature of our spiritual center rather than retreating to an otherworldly future state. With eco-poet Wendell Berry we can long for a power of heaven on this ground, in our sacred places, where our pain mixes with beauty as redemption itself: 
Heaven enough for me would be this world as I know it, but redeemed of our abuse of it and one another . . . A painful Heaven this would be, for I would know by it how far I have fallen short. I have not paid enough attention. I have not been grateful enough. And yet this pain would be the measure of my love. In eternity’s once and now, pain would place me surely in the Heaven of my earthly love.[4]
 Attention to place can be a measure of our love. Presentist hubris often masks a reluctance to see wisdom outside our own paradigms of salvation. Deep attention to place can draw us back. Premodern mystics can help speak to this very (post)modern crisis in our behaviors and our ecologies. In abject contrition, we best confess that sometimes we have damaged the world too deeply for healing.[5] Honest reckoning with that brutal fact refuses acquiescence and inaction. It accompanies. Our response need not resign us to infinite paralyzing despair. Christian mystics interweave contemplation and action into extreme meditations on material, bodily suffering—suffering of divine and human bodies and their paradoxical admixture—to assure us that we can rapturously adore even while infused with eviscerating sorrow. They train us to see the interconnections between the Divine and the rest of creation. Practicing in their spirit changes the call to action. When we listen, we will have the integrity of confessional ardor and the balming comfort of divine accompaniment. Drawing on Christian mystical traditions as companions within climate catastrophe, we can find strategies to endure and to emerge. We find strategies to wake the dying. Wake here stands in both senses of the term, to enliven and to hold vigil. We will mourn, telling full stories of beloved creatures, places, and connections even as we awaken the connective life-force that will surpass any one location. We can develop sustaining spiritual practices and contemplations without looking for extra-worldly, antimaterial solutions or saccharine denials of acute pain and anxiety. We can plant firmly here even while stretching for ongoing healing. Here healing means salvific teachings and practices. By refusing to cheapen hope and to avoid saturating ourselves in grief, we elude a debilitating avoidance of lament’s power: “Lament is not anti-hope. It’s not even a stepping-stone to hope. Lament itself is a form of hope . . . Our hope can be only as deep as our lament is.”[6] These mystical approaches promise an already-not-yet posture with what theologians like to call realized eschatology but what might more simply be called an enduring and inherently present hope. This truest form of hope will help us, bound as it is within a full system of radical rupture. Confessional, practical, and active in nature, mystical wisdom will carry us in this honest hope. The world provides many helpers, many wise teachers from various religious and secular traditions who could help us reenvision a future of healing even in our present of traumatic breach. They offer nuanced work that avoids perennially naive or reductive categories of our Ultimates and speaks honestly to environmental desecration. Generously comparative work on mysticisms across global locations, historic periods, and distinct religious traditions opens up helpful large-order questions: How do conceptions of God thwart or encourage deep interrelational identity? Do humans need some kind of “saving” and why/not? Is there a part of the human intimately or essentially connected to the Divine? Though recent Religious Studies scholarship can ably question the comparative task, especially with its frequently sloppy elisions and too-tidy presentism, nonetheless capacious comparisons that honor difference and seek commonalities can emerge responsibly to harvest the energy of broader queries.[7] We trade wisdom among communities. Some of the work we do within the family, and some we do across peoples and species. We mourn both in solidarity and specifics. Here I look to medieval Christian mystical traditions not because they contain all wisdom or speak for the whole, but simply because they are my “place” and my people. When we prepare ourselves for practices of eco-justice, we incorporate change. To incorporate is to take within our own bodies and our collective bodies, as activist Tim DeChristopher challenges us, embracing not empty tolerance but an activism borne into connections among the wounded. He worries that climate justice work without deep, even spiritual attention to the grief of it will not suffice: “But I think it’s that period of grieving that’s missing from the climate movement.”[8] In order to survive the paralyzing grief of fully recognizing what we humans have wrought on this earth, we need deep spiritual practices and concepts. We have a responsibility but also a tender mandate to render visible fields of interconnection. To settle into our mourning and refuse to treat our landscape as if it is devoid of “the living, the unborn and the animate deceased” can propel us to interrupt the excruciating and slow violences against our habitats.[9] The scale and pace of such destruction may be masked by a relentless consumptive drive that marks our present era, but we have learned with Darwin and others that we evolve glacially and must sit in the branches and ruptures to understand our true identities. Douglas Christie’s ongoing contemplative ecological work marries just such honest attention to loss and mystical wisdom.[10] He offers a method to invite mystical writers of darkness, annihilation, and nothingness to accompany us in our unremitting grief. He stays attuned to teachings that ask us to bear vulnerability amid unfathomable, abysmal experiences while promising sacramental, sublime continuity. Christian mystics of many eras, then, have bequeathed us ways to hold onto our hope, to aim for repair, even amid annihilating woundedness. These contemplatives offer broad techniques and teachings. They offer dispatches and legacies as mystics who have rooted around in the very darkest nights of the human soul.
      
   PARTICULARS MATTER AND MATTER PARTICULATE    We carry our climate grief particularly. Particular trees fall to specific alien infestations, habitat barriers, and certain human destruction. Accelerated rates of deforestation, species extinction or isolation, and global warming all provide active data from identifiable subsets of humans, practices, and cultures. There will be less snowfall in my back forest this winter. Emerald ash borers decimate the trees just north of my children’s playground even as the displaced pests move their way south. Ash trees recede or travel upslope from their current locations in response to warming weather patterns making a challenge for expert ash weavers on Native lands.[11] We disrupt migration patterns and undermine relational ecosystems. How many funerals for how many glaciers will we need?[12] How many love stories like Icelander Andri Snær Magnason’s integrated spiritual autobiography and ode to the “white giants”?[13] How many Red Lists as elegiac catalogue?[14] How long will we retell with Terry Tempest Williams our detailed ritual mythic tales and lamentations amid the erosional landscape of the North American West, in particular for her the leks of sandhill cranes and Bears Ears and Grant Staircase–Escalante National Monuments.[15] How indeed can we endure the art of living here, now, on our damaged planet with all her ghosts?[16] How can we listen to centuries of Indigenous peoples who have been singing this lament in the face of what Amitav Ghosh calls extractive “terraforming”? In his parable for our planet in crisis he traces spice routes and buffalo paths, but the voice of an Omaha man may code this modern lament most tenderly of all: “I see the land desolate and I suffer an unspeakable sadness. Sometimes I wake in the night, and I feel as though I should suffocate from the pressure of this awful feeling of loneliness.”[17] Particular places matter. They are our kin and kith. They are cohabitants and habitat itself of our bodies. We increasingly understand that our human microbiome contains much of our environment—with microorganisms outnumbering human cells ten to one so that as even we move on the earth, the earth also moves within us.[18] Places will call us into particular actions because we wake up first to our own circumstance and then to the connections among all circumstances. In what follows, I converse with great mystics in the European Christian tradition. Their writings and lives offer pathways of integrative repair while acknowledging sharp anguish.[19] Julian of Norwich invites the readers of her carefully revised and constructed set of revelations into an epistemology of integration. Simply, how can we truly know that we know our interconnection? She shows, and shows again, how to both name our part in the destructions around us and also to rest in an assurance that all may be well, modeling for us how wellness might sit uncomfortably but understandably in suffering. In Mechthild of Magdeburg we find a catechism of wounded love and annihilation that can paradoxically restore and attend to intimacy. We may be singed by the fires of holy encounter and reckoning, but we will not be destroyed. From that place we can meet the energizing life-force in a union of indistinction. We can become God with God, as her Dutch counterpart Hadewijch of Brabant testifies. And John of the Cross composes a poetry of darkness and void that refuses trite common experience. What would it mean not to overcome the dark night but to work from within it, to insist on sustained practice amid grief? To conclude, Christian mystical authors including testimony from contemporary Eastern Orthodox poet Scott Cairns can offer a hope of ultimate interconnectedness among all creatures, what Christian doctrine labels apocatastasis. Viewed ecologically, this offers not a final end but an ongoing ecology of grace.
      
   HERRING AND HAZELNUTS IN JULIAN OF NORWICH    The medieval English anchoress Julian of Norwich († after 1416) entrusted to us a series of “showings” in which she meditates on suffering, grief, good intentions gone wrong, and the possibility that the Divine Mother continues to nurture us even amid catastrophic pain.[20] Thirty years old and deathly ill with a three-day illness, losing all feeling in her body, she looks to the priest summoned to offer her holy anointing. He presents her with a crucifix and begs her to take comfort in it—a traditional iconographic practice that may sound especially strange to modern non-Christian ears. It does not have immediate restorative power but seems to her “ugly and terrifying,” an understandable reaction to late medieval graphic portrayals of bodily mortification and attendant viewing of a human in excruciating suffocation. Beholding the pain of Christ, her own pain exacerbated, she reels. Yet unnaturally, she tells us, God’s secret action holds her pain, and she begins to wish for more wounds in order to emulate the crucified figure before her, terror or no. Her impulse to suffer alongside remains even in her own extreme physicality. Surely this compassionate impulse does not reverse Christ’s execution or diminish his torture? It does not undo the damage done. Jesus remained crucified. Julian remains in pain. For Julian this painful reckoning offers another path. She asks for wounds not as some kind of internalized masochism or violent punitive obsession. This is not God the Father Judge or Executioner extracting the price humanity owes an offended righteousness. Rather, this is a reassuring God who values compassion and pities creaturely pain. Julian offers an honest reckoning of the wounds humans inflict on the Divine and on creation. For her, matter can indeed be holy, especially in the flesh of Jesus. Her Mother Jesus nurtures humans on Earth, sustains humans, even when humans persist in attempts to torture her and seek to annihilate her. She is a material incarnation of the holy. Julian’s God understands human limitations and meets humanity precisely where humanity wounds even the divine self. Julian can thus offer a method for maintaining the difficult gaze on our own complicity in divine suffering while avoiding punitive, damning theological warnings. Instead, without cheap absolution or sadistic atonements she offers attendant divine love and understanding. Julian consoles her readers through her Showings, offering a way to survive amid a life of brutality. To reckon with our own accountability and to mourn our complicity in abject violence, we need contemplative rituals. Sometimes we need to sit wearily in utter despair at our own destructive nature in the face of such wondrous creation. Sometimes we need to wonder at creation. Julian offers hope, but not certainty; she provides assurance, but not optimism. She gives no escape from the wounds we have cut through the very body of God. In her agonizing meditation on how we wound the holy, she reaches for the particularity of her place, the church of her anchor hold. Here she focuses less on human exceptionalism than human particularity. Humanity shows here not as saving species, but as one of the web of the creatures to whom the Creator offers sustaining care. Julian immerses herself completely in the image to find all its power. When Christ interacts with her here, he appears not as the comforting Mother Jesus, but as the tortured and bleeding crucified one. Walled in to the side of the cathedral, Julian meets a Christ who communicates through wound itself. His blood rolls down as agonized droplets on his forehead: “And in their roundness as they spread over the forehead they were like a herring’s scales . . . like a herring’s scales as they spread, they were like raindrops off a house’s eaves, so many that they could not be counted.”[21] In her vision, Christ’s blood assumes the characteristics of the common fish so abundant in her region. Everyone nearby regularly ate these sleek silver fish. The markets brimmed with them as local fishermen brought them to town center. They were the high-protein livelihood of the region, not the plate of fancy feasts but of the mundane reality in Norwich’s interconnected web of life. They sustained. They surely found their way into her anchor hold, and no doubt her visitors wafted their oily remnants while making their supplications. This blood traveled not as magical elixir or vicarious payment for an offended majesty of God. Rather, it held the tension of sustaining, magnanimous grace and gift together with brutal reality of murder. Life for life. “This vision was living and vivid and hideous and fearful and sweet and lovely . . .” Here not the crowned Christ in glory, but an ichthus whose everyday scales write the history of our collusion in a cycle of death and sustenance, provides the meditative focal point. Ever gracious, Christ remains “courteous” while revealing this rupture in the divine continuum in such “wonderful familiarity.” By centering our vision on two types of flesh, Christ’s and the local catch’s, Julian places us in our own stream to calculate the horrifying abundant nature of this sustaining sacrifice. The vision will remain, she again pledges, even after the revelation passes and hides. Julian’s most famous and most frequently cited showing involves an assurance directly from her good Lord. “Every kind of thing will be well . . . you will see yourself that every kind of thing will be well.”[22] In bewildering and violent times, the reader could be tempted to lean into her assurance and put out of mind any meditation on our violent natures with their very material consequences for our world. But if her Showings together ask anything of us, they request that we not replace the confessional accounting of our offensive natures. Rather, we commingle the acutely regional effects of our own complicity in severing the life-force from its Creator. How does the blood fall from God’s suffering among us in our own environments? Which primary creature bears our particular marks? Nest Christ within that scene, her Showings challenge us, in order to fully meditate in our compunction, trusting that our honesty will help us to make amends and repair the riven divine human continuum. She takes great pains to reassure us that we can trust that the offended Creator will not abandon us, indeed understands our tendency to stumble and fall in the ditch in our misguided and misdirected energy. Sin for Julian is just this, a misdirection out of good intent but into shortsightedness or overexuberance. It can lead us astray and strand us. We can recover from this wayward consequence of our own naive excitement. While sin may not be a juridical or punitive debt repayment model in Julian, even more profoundly we have an obligation to reap the benefits of raw, direct contemplation on the pain we have instigated. Alongside the accusatory reminder of our ability to wound the Divine itself, Julian persistently offers spiritual insight of a more “familiar love.” God is our clothing “who wraps and enfolds us for love, embraces us and shelters us, surrounds us for his love, which is so tender that he may never desert us.” While this God may indeed pull back the veil to show in excruciating detail the blood of Christ while hanging in agony, her loving God also drops a connective force into the eye of her understanding. Her God shows her something small “no bigger than a hazelnut,” which opens another coterminous reality about human-divine interrelation.[23] There in the palm of her hand she observes the small round ball and recognizes with it a deep integration and interrelationship between creature and Creator. Three properties spring from the sphere into her spiritual knowledge. God makes, loves, and preserves the nut. She can extrapolate to the human condition from here. Mystical union, a persistent contemplative integration with the Creator God even amid the sorrows and disruptions of the world, proves the certain path, the posture that allows further works of love in the world. “For until I am substantially united to him, I can never have perfect rest or true happiness, until, that is, I am so attached to him that there can be no created thing between God and me.”[24] In other words, contemplating the nut moves her to union of indistinction, where differing traits of Creator and creature blur and commingle until they are one. From persistent meditation on a common, local staple of nut, she offers rescue. Or rather, God offers rescue, and in her focus she can now understand that rescue has been there all along. Here she names the Divine with male pronouns, although elsewhere she will press to abandon even such singularly delineated gendering of God. She insists it is possible that “a simple soul should come naked, open and familiarly” to all of creation and from this initial naked yearning will participate in a continually recurring union. We may just desire our way right into divinity. What a deeply miraculous possibility. Confusingly, she teaches both that the soul has to “despise as nothing all things which are created” and to recognize that God’s “goodness fills all his creatures and all his blessed works full, and endlessly overflows them all.” Which is it—an immanent life-force or created matter as despicable? She never entirely resolves this fundamental tension. We must hold in revelatory friction both the idea of surmounting the created world and immersing ourselves within the flow of it. Today, we might reach for the notion of “fields” from physics to both surpass and access ultimate essence and meaning. While we cannot know entirely what Julian intended with such a contradiction, we can recognize in it her naming of how outsized human power damages the fuller creation, less to crown humanity as superior than to focus on more widespread effects of our missteps. If we recognize how we promote ourselves outside of other creatures, will we be forced to attend to our interruption of the otherwise God-filled creation? Perhaps it is a matter of scale(s). She returns repeatedly to God’s desire for connection with us. In the end she can only fall back into the trustworthy certainty that God made everything in love and pervades everything in love. Human contemplative practice can reveal the ruptures and the counterforce of a God who loves everything even while attending to the grief of how humans sever unitive connection. She notes we have two kinds of sickness from which God hopes we can be cured. “One is impatience, because we bear our labour and our pain heavily. The other is despair, coming from doubtful fear . . .”[25] We can access true wisdom through spiritual vision and through contemplating the mixed nature of our existence precisely as God intended it. God longs for us to breach this separation, to mend every riven thing. God “loves and longs to have our love.” Amid grief and impatient sorrows of a world wounded by our shortsightedness, Julian calls us to bear our pain heavily, not giving in completely to a despair born of “doubtful fear.” Succumbing to quietism within despair is succumbing to these “two secret sins [impatience and despair], extremely busy in tempting us.” Even more pointedly, this acquiescence to fear and grief is the “ignorance which most hinders God’s lovers” who mistakenly believe fear is humility. To believe in God’s extravagant love of creatures does not position humankind above the rest of the created realm. Rather, a focus on this Love calls us to submerge ourselves into the full and honest reality of our complex and imperfect relationship with God and God’s emergent creation. Here she offers an antidote to human exceptionalism as cautionary humility. Properly directed and remembered, fear propels us to rightsize our relationships, to recognize our place amid the other beautiful creatures of God. It will help us aim for our utmost connection, a union without distinction. With such union we answer the invitation God continually sends. God wants this for us. This mutual desire Julian depicts involves both wounding and healing. Julian tenderly offers us a rescue wisdom. She asks us to attend to our grief, confess our complicity, and stretch for the union without distinction willed by a loving, compassionate Divine One. That will not alleviate the cycle of despair and further wounding, but it will provide us with a centering, prayerful way to attend to its mitigation. She invites us into our particular ecosystem to draw the imagery of theological contrition and reconciliation. No task is too big, no crisis too universal or too far gone. Even acute climate despair in the 21st century, one can extrapolate, could not sever the herring and hazelnut’s Creator from Her magnificent creation.
      
   THE ANNIHILATING WOUND OF LOVE IN MECHTHILD OF MADGEBURG    Medieval women inhabited their religious landscape in abundantly various forms. One particularly verdant mode of living involved groups of lay women joining together in houses and villages to form their own kind of ecosystems. Joining economic resources, caring for the ill, practicing piety, these women, called beguines, also nurtured a bold mysticism of integration in their vernacular languages.[26] When the medieval beguine mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg († ca. 1282) leans into her deepest teachings about the relationship between the Divine and human, she, like Julian, reaches for languages of love. From the registers of high medieval secular courtly romance and the biblical Song of Songs she draws fully on lovers’ urgent seeking and consummation, complete with secret chambers, nightingales, and ladies-in-waiting who gossip while offering clothing and courtship advice. Amid such lovesickness, she maintains a painful tension modern climate grievers may recognize. Always seeking a fuller union, the lovers keep missing one another. They grasp for the means to unite in the shadow of the lovebed, a place so intimate even narrators do not fully describe it. This overpowering consummation of love could truly destroy a human, could it not? She promises that humans are so “ennatured” in God that nothing can extract us from deep unity pictured as Trinitarian habitat. 
A fish in water does not drown. A bird in the air does not plummet. God in fire does not perish. Rather, it gets its purity and its radiant color there. God has created all creatures to live according to their nature. How, then, am I to resist my nature? I must go from all things to God, Who is my Father by nature, My Brother by his humanity, My Bridegroom by love, And I his bride from all eternity.[27]
 Water, air, fire form images of God in which we immerse ourselves and sing of our mutual inhabiting. How can we resist? We are kin, then, with the Ultimate, the Creator, what Mechthild calls Lady Love herself. While sometimes Mechthild presents a path to divine connection that involves dances, music, feasts, and gentle quiet moments, just as often she insists on the pain of utter annihilation—“to become nothing.” What will a life of contemplation and immersion in the Divine entail? Moments of exquisite ecstasy, surely, but also searing pain. Mechthild teaches that the very love we seek wounds us. She puts these wounds of love familiar to lovesick courtesans everywhere into theological service. Paradoxically, these wounds can heal. Modern grievers of climate catastrophe parallel this heartsickness. How often have we driven past an abundant prairie that is now a parking lot for a generic box store? As we decimate unprecedented species per day globally in what ecologists call the Sixth Mass Extinction, we must find a way to navigate the numbing state of loss even though we cannot completely reverse it. [28] If not for our deep love and animacy with the intricate web of life, we would not mourn its passing.[29] Because we have experienced abundant integration with creation, we lament any loss of our alliance. We fall in love with our ecological home as it nourishes and sustains us, it touches us, and we participate in it. We bewail the limited nature of our current connection. Yet if we dare to open the false boundary between self and environment, even or especially within ruptured ecosystems, what restorative healing we unleash. Kathryn Savage’s powerful memoir of multigenerational living beside pollution in brownfields traces our mourning for the power of restoring connection.[30] We can analyze our ruptures, the class, race, and gender of them, through such secular lamentations in ways parallel to theological inquiry. How far we have fallen; how exiled we live. To repair is to sit in this full understanding of the rupture-rapture continuum. To repair is the nature of integrative adoration. This is the heart of mystical encounter. Mechthild describes suffering variously as consolation, adornment, sweetness, imitation of Christ, gift, bitterness, strangeness, and nobility.[31] Suffering has incredible power fueled from the wound of Love itself. That ecstatic, ever-longing torment is more akin to lovesickness than other forms of anguish. She insists suffering cannot be self-inflicted if it is to be redemptive.[32] We cannot damage creation to enact some kind of theurgic end-times summoning of the apocalypse.[33] Mechthild instead provides a script for reintegration. She narrates episodic dramas of love between God and the soul, full of wildly diverse images of the Trinity and of reciprocal longing. She insists on an honest rendering of the torments of desire. Even when so much of our activity severs pure connection, she shows the possibility of immanence. Reading along in these recurring love stories gradually conforms attentive readers to our Love. She romps through short sequences of lovers uniting, heightened erotic pleasures, and inter-creature connection. The accompanying pain of missed connections, violent estrangement, of knowing how humans ought to align with the creative Power of the universe but do not, shows up in sweet moments of bliss. She acknowledges, however, that such connections never persist, leaving humans with a gaping wound of love between what is possible and what is regularly experienced. We are love-sick to connect to the wholeness of the Divine. Enduring anything but that full connection leaves us in despair at our own natures and failures. Our only hope is to work from within that pain, vicariously lifting up all those affected. Here is the potential to burn away, as if in a refiner’s fire, that which separates us from the web of creative life and return us, beloved companions in tow, to our loving union. Mechthild thereby teaches that grief and suffering stem ultimately from a rift, a dramatic rupture in grand connection. From a broken link in the shared nature of the soul and God, humans suffer, often incapacitated before the enormity of it all and before our accountability for the broken link. The absence of the Divine Lover creates a kind of vacuum where the soul can intervene and insert her own suffering on behalf of others. Her suffering fuels the capacity to restore and reconnect. The lack, or emptiness, readies a place for the absent lover. Wounded desire itself summons a unification energy. This annihilating pain propels the mindful practitioner into practices that can take on the pain of the world in order to reconnect the wounded with the lover. A wounded one heals a beloved in perpetual cycle of interlocking excess. For Mechthild, we can trust that our suffering is a measure of our love, and we may use it to repair the disconnection among creatures and their source. The beguine’s body produces a sacred exchange wherein she substitutes her own pain for that of a living or dead soul in order to free the soul into a newly transformed salvific state. During purgatorial journeys and directly intervening with the Divine on behalf of individuals, these beguines tender their direct encounters with God to enable their power. They insist that their own bodies and, importantly, their own spiritual anguish mark a power of reconnection. What makes this possible? As Steven Rozenski, Mary Suydam, and others have argued, beguine suffering was a technique that afforded women a different kind of sacredness than other medieval holiness cultivation practices, and a lively relic culture followed as a response.[34] Eco-spiritualists today can reach to beguine teachings as relics, access to healing powers amid grief. For Mechthild, it is precisely while in her suffering and despair, wounded by her absent lover, longing for reunification, that he appears (and she uses mostly male images for the Lover God). Those visions and the resulting (re)unification make possible her redemptive acts for others. During her lamentation God appears, in great majesty and indescribable brightness. Our Lord held two golden chalices in his hands that were both full of living wine. In his left hand was the red wine of suffering, and in his right hand the white wine of sublime consolation. Then our Lord spoke: “Blessed are those who drink this red wine. Although I give both out of divine love, the white wine is nobler in itself; but noblest of all are those who drink both the white and the red.”[35] What does it mean to Mechthild for the small soul to drink of both chalices? How does consolation accompany suffering in ways that show a sanctity and vicarious spiritual suffering that avoids simplistic self-abnegation in favor of a nuanced offering made possible by mystical union? In Eucharist imagery here she portrays the soul’s mixed nature, suffering yet elated by possibility, as the most blessed state of all. One could wallow in debilitating martyrdom, but that would not connect one with the Divine as fully as recognizing both experiences the Divine hands out—the consoling presence and the suffering. In Mechthild’s mystical language of pain, Divine Love flows fiercely and demands that we burrow into rupture and decomposition. This is not an argument for Stoicism amid unrequited connection. Far from it. Rather, Mechthild writes a rhythm of coincidences of opposites. She composes. She decomposes. Episodes of sublime union within the Trinity do not last, and the memories of those connections both torment and feed the soul. But it is this rhythm itself, quite psychologically attuned, that Mechthild offers as the pathway to true mystical practice. Mechthild often describes this pathway by teaching through dialogue between the soul and her body. These dialogues form mini-lessons on what it means to be individually embodied while striving for connection beyond one’s own self into ultimate kinship with the holy. When the body complains it cannot take the suffering of life anymore, the soul scolds, 
“Quiet, you are a fool. I want to be with my Lover, Even if it means you would perish. I am his joy, he is my torment.” This is her torment. May she never recover![36]
 The end goal rests not in elimination of all pain, but in an almost unbearable weight and torment of what it means to connect fully with the Creative Life-Force of the cosmos. To live fully while recognizing such sorrow constitutes the only path. This is honest assessment of what it means to live in a world so unbearably injured. To be wounded by Divine Love entails urgent, exiled desire to return to love, regardless of the cost. For Mechthild this does not consist solely of some kind of immaterial Active Intellect connecting with the image of God in humans (pace Avicenna et al.). This is not some disembodied spiritual, intellectual “aha” moment. The body rooting around in her particular place sends out forlorn messages to her Beloved in her own particular dialect. Chemicals, perhaps, or electrical firings of synapses, but all aspects of the very body of the lover here calls for a reintegration of an exchange that has been lost. Planetary crisis or acute spiritual crisis? Both. This never-ending cycle of wounding and healing gives voice to a world plagued with its own demise. Yet within the cycle, within the depths of annihilating woundedness, some loving consolation promises return, a return based on mutual nature or kin. 
Whoever at some point Is seriously wounded by true love Will never become healthy again Unless he kisses that same mouth By which his soul was wounded.[37]
 Only by complete immersion in the Loving Godhead can humans find true health and healing. To heal here involves not eliminating all suffering, but naming it as a measure of our mutual, attentive love. Here is a great testament to the range of power of suffering in Christian thought and practice. Christianity often has a wrestling match with suffering. Does it valorize it at the expense of quietism? Or does it show the real consequences of love in a broken world? Mechthild’s theology of suffering—written here in creative genre itself that shows the dialogical character of the suffering—answers to a feminist critique of suffering in Christianity aimed at those who already bear a more painful burden in society. Her soul is no suffering underling asked to continue in pain when others can be released. Here suffering produces an empathetic, radical connectivity. Participation produces power. This can expand how we name Christian understanding of God’s redemptive work in an incarnational system. It remains honest to the realistic suffering of radical love, while refusing to valorize abusive power dynamics. Compassion integrates, but not without a cost. The soul’s power to enact redemptive suffering stems from direct mystical encounters. Submerging oneself in wonder produces great highs of connection, but inevitably plunges one into despair that connection cannot sustain itself. This preaches a kind of experiential power that speaks differently of God’s nature than a juridical exchange. Humans serve as conduits for divine power of compassion; mystic souls redeem not by satisfying a debt to a God, but to mirror in love the Divine outpouring in love, advocacy, compassion. The inevitable price of entering a world infused by such Love? Suffering. And this suffering, in the face of such brokenness in the world, offers a bittersweet consolation.
      
   CONTEMPLATIVE DARKNESS: OF NIGHTS AND CAVES    Julian, Mechthild, and many other medieval mystics teach about the radical connective possibilities between human creatures and the Divine. At the same time they recognize the pain of disjuncture in the severed mutuality that recurs. Their teachings of natural mutuality and disruptive pain can help us today recognize that climate grief stems from an existential loss and a perversion of our abundant interconnected nature. Dwelling on such pain need not shut down all action or acquiescence to powerlessness, but can sustain us as we do the hard work of ecological unfolding and repair. We have wise guides amid the bewildering darkness. Reading contemporary environmental writer Robert Macfarlane together with early modern Carmelite friar John of the Cross offers a master class in contemplative grieving practice.[38] John († 1591), who is too readily invoked in our era to describe episodic depression cycles, speaks more deeply and more existentially than to the psychological alone. He wallows in the very intersection of acute grief of the broken, wounded world and the image of a fully integrated kinship with its Creator. His is not merely a recipe for enduring periodic lethargy or justifiably anguished helplessness, but a prescription for new modes of being altogether. John’s poetry, and his essential learning at the feet of his teacher St. Teresa of Avila, impart a strategy and wisdom for managing lifelong despair at the eternal distance between our possible thriving within the Godhead and the exquisite but ephemeral beauty of our realistic place. We do well to apply his strategies to our 21st-century climate crisis. We could have less trustworthy guides. The Doctor of the Church offers an itinerary and practice that maps readily alongside 21st-century secular forms of knowing. For John, wounding opens the soul into a rawness. That rawness can soften the soul, initiating real transformation. Through attendant practices of despair, the soul eliminates the boundary between self and other. He enlists classical Christian theistic categories revealing the nature of a triune God to welcome the contemplative into participation in the very life of God. If one considers the natural world and its interconnections as holy, the translation works well to attend to climate crisis. The intense psychological practices of John’s contemplative consciousness will not stop the hurting or the destruction, but those anxious states of acute pain will no longer feel pointless. Such honest pain can feel like backsliding or powerlessness, he warns.[39] We simply must learn patience and perseverance. We must bear the pain, for “wisdom is painful, afflictive, and also dark for the soul.”[40] John recognizes that in such a heightened state humans can feel bitter. When we open ourselves to truly feeling the despair of our current ruptures, we may not recover a blissful ignorance. But he entices us that in time these miseries open up a more perfect union, an honest and vulnerable space from which the human as beloved creature of God can marry the Beloved Creator God: “For the sickness of love is not cured except by your very presence and image.”[41] Reaching for the Psalms, John draws out annihilation language to explain that as rapturous as the soul’s eventual union can be, the pain of purgation enflames the soul like wood in fire. We burn with transformation when we honestly attend to grief. A nuptial promise, even without clear eradication of the state of grief, may not alleviate much of the acute sting of debilitating sorrow, but it does provide meaning. It opens up the fuller self to be vulnerable, refusing the harsh and solid distinction between the self and the Divine. Many a diagnosis of climate grieving sits in a similar place of enduring anguish.[42] Refusing to collapse the dire into a rosy hopefulness invites more trustworthy, if less optimistic, climate work. The view from this newly married union between God and the soul expands further and further until a consummation will be all that remains. It tenders the pain of loss while integrating the consolation of connection. In Robert Macfarlane’s marvelous book Underland he traces networks of caves and chambers our usual modes of seeing cannot register.[43] He travels webs rarely navigated, sliding into narrow cave entrances, mapping alternate realities under cities, excavating our most atrocious battles and their dead who often lie hidden from view. All the while he elevates extraordinary travel into new modes of understanding our place in the world. His chapter on dark matter helps us tie our current climate afflictions to John’s wrestling with spiritual hiddenness or darkness. In ways akin to the Christian mystic’s love of paradox, Macfarlane suggests that “darkness might be a medium of vision, and that descent may be a movement towards revelation rather than deprivation.”[44] Just as Christian contemplative theologians found their way to the holy through coincidences of opposites and a debilitating “darkness” that crushes the usual modes of perceiving, we humans as scientists can find our way to dark matter by inference, by seeking the missing mass. “To perceive matter that casts no shadow, you must search not for its presence but for its consequence.”[45] Like planetary scientist Sara Seager, who combines her search for exoplanets with her interior work of widow’s grieving, we can discover in darkness a solace. What at first feels alien begins to reveal itself to us with whole new modes of exploration.[46] If one conceives of the Ultimate not only as Nature but also as Creator, one could not offer a more profound theological statement. Mystical theologians insist human language works at the intersection of what we can understand and what persists as suprarational, reveling in the painful mortifying consequences of inhabiting the pain that accompanies superseding certainties of more dogmatic formulations. So too in our contemporary world dark-matter physicists and literary guides seek devastating darknesses. We find in reading all of these sources together parallel modes on mythic quests.[47] What scientists call “annihilation products” or “annihilation’s afterglow”[48] mystics might well call annihilation’s afterburn of the Godhead itself. In the Anthropocene, humans instinctually reach for confessional self-examination of our contributions to our current devastation. In this mode, we may rediscover a positive presence of the image of God within us by searching for its absence. These incarnations exist like a trace fossil, “a bracing of space by a vanished body, in which absence serves as sign.”[49] Those signs and wonders unveil a deeper, substantial truth among species. Our era exposes more acutely than ever our troubled complicity in not only our own demise but also that of our habitat and its co-inhabitants. This confessional cycle will bring with it deep mourning, calls for atonement, and a firm resolution to see ourselves most fully—to confess our alienations and destructions, to mourn our complicities, and to continue nonetheless to seek at least a partial existence beyond such wounds. “We’re beginning to encounter ourselves—not always comfortably or pleasantly—as multi-species beings.”[50] What opens in the darkness as we feel our way amid the walls and boundaries of our un-sight is the possibility for a broader integration than we had imagined. Where self ends and other begins we now feel our way to mutuality. New sensory awareness can emerge and repair even as we recognize our limited notion of self. Here in the darkness, the honest despair and grief, we can recommit to an intimacy born of power and connection between the life-force and human creatures seeking to emulate it.
      
   CONCLUSION    
I have tried for a long time to figure out how E. B. White did what he did, how he told the truth and made it bearable . . . E. B. White loved the world. And in loving the world, he told the truth about it—its sorrow, its heartbreak, its devastating beauty. He trusted his readers enough to tell them the truth, and with that truth came comfort and a feeling that we were not alone . . . How do we tell the truth and make that truth bearable? Kate DiCamillo3
 
Protect the part of you that still winces at pain. Refuse to become too familiar with tragedy. Our souls were made to stir. Cole Arthur Riley4
 When committing to hold steady, to not recoil at the near unbearable enormity of environmental catastrophe of our era, we can summon mystical wisdom. For mystics, this rupture exists not solely as metaphor. It is metaphysics. They tend to a knowledge that we exist simultaneously within love that recognizes, as E. B. White did, that our love for the world comes with an accompanying heartbreak, devastation, and beauty. They root that splendor in the creative energy of the universe itself, in their theistic languages “God.” There is nothing static, remote, or unavailable about such a God or the relationship with God. Rather, because God made humanity in God’s very own image, because God tends humanity in pain, journeys alongside all beings amid excruciating violences, and commingles with creation, consolation emerges in accompaniment. We can tend to God in God’s pain as well. Sometimes a union of energies produces a reminder of the interconnected universe as small yet precious as a hazelnut or as mundane as a fish scale. Sometimes the painful union nonetheless haunts in its ruptures but clarifies that a shared nature and source undergird all beings. Sometimes only darkness can bring to light what forms the core of our existence and our perhaps limited capacity to enact hopeful redirection. If we root ourselves in place, both metaphysically and physically, though we have indeed desecrated the grove, as Annie Dillard bewails, we may begin with poet Scott Cairns “to advocate the sacred possibility” that we can collaborate with a “graceful metanoia” after all.[51] Christian mysticism can be a powerful accompanying resource and explanatory guide. It can help us tell the truth. Mystics offer multivalent voices to meet us in times of mourning, amid imminent extinctions and catastrophic violence. They offer a sustained understanding of suffering within bounty, torment within abundant grace, and transformation within contemplation. From poets of apocatastasis, to honest catechists of apophatic energy and creative integrators of multiple epistemologies of integration, these are the wise ones who may sometimes help restore, but will always most tenderly attend. ^ Kate DiCamillo, interview by Krista Tippet, On Being, March 17, 2022, https://onbeing.org/programs/kate-dicamillo-for-the-eight-year-old-in-you/. ^ Cole Arthur Riley (@blackliturgies), “Protect the part of you that still winces at pain. Refuse to become too familiar with tragedy. Our souls were made to stir,” Instagram, February 15, 2024, 12:00 p.m., https://www.instagram.com/blackliturgies/p/C3YEosUudh1/?img_index=2.
      
   WORKS CITED    Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Belser, Julia Watts. “Vital Wheels: Disability, Relationality, and the Queer Animacy of Vibrant Things.” Hypatia 31, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 5–21. Berry, Wendell. Leavings. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2011. Cairns, Scott. Philokalia: New and Selected Poems. Lincoln, NE: Zoo Press, 2002. Christie, Douglas. The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Loss, and the Common Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Dahl, Thomas E., and Gregory J. Allord. “Technical Aspects of Wetlands: History of Wetlands in the Conterminous United States.” National Water Summary on Wetland Resources, United States Geological Survey Water Supply Paper 2425. https://water.usgs.gov/nwsum/WSP2425/history.html. DiCamillo, Kate. Interview by Krista Tippet. On Being, March 17, 2022. https://onbeing.org/programs/kate-dicamillo-for-the-eight-year-old-in-you/. Dillard, Annie. Teaching a Stone to Talk. Rev. ed. New York: Harper Perennial, 2013. Dumitrescu, Irena, and Mary Wellesley. “Encounters with Medieval Women.” London Review of Books podcast series. https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/encounters-with-medieval-women-anchoress. Ghosh, Amitav. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Frykholm, Amy. Julian of Norwich: A Contemplative Biography. Brewster, MA: Paraclete, 2013. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Heglar, Mary Annaïse. “Climate Grief Hurts because It’s Supposed To.” The Nation, November 7, 2021. Heise, Ursula. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meaning of Endangered Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Holdrege, Barbara. “What’s Beyond the Post? Comparative Analysis as Critical Method.” In A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, edited by Kimberly C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray, 77–91. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. John of the Cross. Selected Writings. Edited by Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. New York: Paulist Press, 1987. Julian of Norwich. Showings. Translated with an introduction by Edmund College, O.S.A., and James Walsh, S.J. New York: Paulist Press, 1978. Kelly, Devin. “Repetitive Stress: On Injury, Compensation, and Living with Pain.” Longreads, February 2, 2021. https://longreads.com/2021/02/02/repetitive-stress/. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. “Speaking of Nature.” Orion Magazine, June 12, 2017. https://orionmagazine.org/article/speaking-of-nature/. Kolbert, Elizabeth. Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. New York: Crown, 2022. Magnason, Andri Snær. On Time and Water. Translated by Lyton Smith. Rochester, NY: Open Letter Books, University of Rochester, 2021. Macfarlane, Robert. The Underland: A Deep Time Journey. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2019. McKibben, Bill. “How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet.” The New Yorker, November 26, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/how-extreme-weather-is-shrinking-the-planet. Mechthild of Magdeburg. The Flowing Light of the Godhead. Translated by Frank Tobin. New York: Paulist Press, 1998. Murk-Jansen, Saskia. Brides in the Desert: The Spirituality of the Beguines. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1998. NIH. “NIH Human Microbiome Project Defines Normal Bacterial Makeup of the Body.” News release, June 13, 2012. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-human-microbiome-project-defines-normal-bacterial-makeup-body. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Patton, Kimberly. “Juggling Torches: Why We Still Need Comparative Religion.” In A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, edited by Kimberly C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray, 153–170. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Register, Cheri. The Big Marsh: The Story of a Lost Landscape. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2016. Riley, Cole Arthur. This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us. New York: Convergent, 2022. Rozenski, Steven, Jr. “The Promise of Eternity: Love and Poetic Form in Hadewijch’s Liederen or Stanzaic Poems.” Exemplaria 22, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 305–325. Sanders, Ash. “Under the Weather.” In All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine K. Wilkinson, 231–245. New York: One World, 2021. Savage, Kathryn. Ground Glass: An Essay. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2022. Seager, Sara. The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir. New York: Crown, 2021. Silliboy, Richard. “They Carry Us with Them: The Great Tree Migration.” Emergence Magazine. https://emergencemagazine.org/feature/they-carry-us-with-them/. Starovoitov, Sasha. “Glacial Funerals Offer a Way of Coping with Ecological Grief.” Columbia Climate School, State of the Planet (blog), September 24, 2021. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/09/24/glacier-funerals-offer-a-way-of-coping-with-ecological-grief/. Suydam, Mary A. “The Touch of Satisfaction: Visions and the Religious Experience according to Hadewijch of Antwerp.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 12, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 5–27. UN. “Species Extinction Rates Hundreds of Times Higher than in Past 10 Million Years.” Press release, May 22, 2022. https://www.un.org/press/en/2022/sgsm21291.doc.htm. Williams, Terry Tempest. Erosion: Essays on Undoing. New York: Picador of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. Wiman, Chistian. “Every Riven Thing.” On Being, August 30, 2016. https://onbeing.org/poetry/every-riven-thing/.
      
   NOTES    
[1] Cheri Register, The Big Marsh: The Story of a Lost Landscape (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2016). For a US geological survey and history, see Thomas E. Dahl and Gregory J. Allord, “Technical Aspects of Wetlands: History of Wetlands in the Conterminous United States,” National Water Summary on Wetland Resources, United States Geological Survey Water Supply Paper 2425, https://water.usgs.gov/nwsum/WSP2425/history.html. [2] My meditation on brokenness and rupture, on distance from the Divine, intensifies with each reading of Christian Wiman’s poem “Every Riven Thing.” I wish only for inclusive gendering in the God image as one of the tender mendings. “God goes, belong to every riven thing he’s made / sing his being simply by being / the thing it is: / stone and tree and sky, / man who sees and sings and wonders why / God goes. Belonging to every riven thing he’s made / means a storm of peace. / Think of the atoms inside the stone.” Christian Wiman, “Every Riven Thing,” On Being, August 30, 2016, https://onbeing.org/poetry/every-riven-thing/. [3] Taken from a most profound article on repetitive stress injuries from running, but so helpfully applied to other forms of grief and sorrow amid unrelenting pain. Devin Kelly, “Repetitive Stress: On Injury, Compensation, and Living with Pain,” Longreads, February 2, 2021, https://longreads.com/2021/02/02/repetitive-stress/. See also Julia Watts Belser’s call for the queer animacies of people with disabilities and how they can enter this conversation as beacons of alternative entanglements and more mindful material vibrancy without problematic concepts of wholeness or mastery. Julia Watts Belser, “Vital Wheels: Disability, Relationality, and the Queer Animacy of Vibrant Things,” Hypatia 31, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 5–21. [4] Wendell Berry, “Sabbath Poem VI,” in Leavings (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2011), 73. [5] Bill McKibben, “How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet,” The New Yorker, November 26, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/how-extreme-weather-is-shrinking-the-planet. [6]Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us (New York: Convergent, 2022), 101. [7] For a succinct outline of the problems with comparative approaches alongside their nuanced possibilities, see Barbara Holdrege, “What’s Beyond the Post? Comparative Analysis as Critical Method,” pp. 77–91, and Kimberly Patton, “Juggling Torches: Why We Still Need Comparative Religion,” pp. 153–170, in A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, ed. Kimberly C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). [8] Terry Tempest Williams, Erosion: Essays on Undoing (New York: Picador of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), 115. See also Donna Haraway’s magnificent body of work and especially her call to stay within the inevitable trouble of sustaining such kinship. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).  For direct recommendations on how to survive in the “solastalgia” and “pre-traumatic stress disorder” of acute environmental despair, see Ash Sanders, “Under the Weather,” in All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, ed. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine K. Wilkinson (New York: One World, 2021), 231–245. The narrative arc of this fine anthology will take the grieving reader from root to rising in profound ways. I would caution, with Elizabeth Kolbert, against offering the “additional three pages” that offer an upbeat, can-do attitude pasted at the end of the dire accounting of ecological devastation in order to soften the blow. Endings matter. And we are in one. Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future (New York: Crown, 2022). [9] Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 17. [10] Douglas Christie, The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Loss, and the Common Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). [11] See the interactive Black Ash segment and its portrait of tribal elder of the Aroostook Band of Mi’kmaqs in Maine and master ash-basket maker Richard Silliboy. “They Carry Us with Them: The Great Tree Migration,” Emergence Magazine, https://emergencemagazine.org/feature/they-carry-us-with-them/. [12] Sasha Starovoitov, “Glacial Funerals Offer a Way of Coping with Ecological Grief,” Columbia Climate School, State of the Planet (blog), September 24, 2021, https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/09/24/glacier-funerals-offer-a-way-of-coping-with-ecological-grief/. [13] Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water, trans. Lyton Smith (Rochester, NY: Open Letter Books, University of Rochester, 2021). [14] Ursula Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meaning of Endangered Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), chap. 2. [15] Terry Tempest Williams, Erosion: Essays on Undoing (New York: Picador of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). [16] Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, ed. Anna Tsing et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 2017. [17] Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 71. [18] NIH, “NIH Human Microbiome Project Defines Normal Bacterial Makeup of the Body,” news release, June 13, 2012, https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-human-microbiome-project-defines-normal-bacterial-makeup-body. [19] Douglas Christie, The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Loss, and the Common Life (Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2022). [20] Julian of Norwich, Showings, trans. with an introduction by Edmund College, O.S.A., and James Walsh, S.J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1978). For a beautifully accessible exercise in “empathetic imagination” in Julian’s work, I recommend Amy Frykholm’s Julian of Norwich: A Contemplative Biography (Brewster, MA: Paraclete, 2013). [21] For the herring scale, see Julian of Norwich, Showings, 187–189. Listen also to this excellent conversation between Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley in the London Review of Books podcast series “Encounters with Medieval Women” (https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/encounters-with-medieval-women-anchoress) in which they discuss the everyday nature of the herring and the sensory and visual depth of Julian’s imagery. [22] Julian of Norwich, Showings, 231. [23] Julian of Norwich, Showings, 183–184. [24] Julian of Norwich, Showings, 183–184. [25] Julian of Norwich, Showings, 167–168. [26] For a short introduction to the beguines and their spiritual themes, see Saskia Murk-Jansen, Brides in the Desert: The Spirituality of the Beguines (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1998). [27] Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank Tobin (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 61. The entire vignette entitled “The Sevenfold Path of Love” shows the role of the senses, joy, suffering, and utter union of humanity with God in a courtly dance and erotic love scene (I.44). [28] Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (London: Picador, 2015). On species extinction rate: UN, “Species Extinction Rates Hundreds of Times Higher than in Past 10 Million Years,” press release, May 22, 2022, https://www.un.org/press/en/2022/sgsm21291.doc.htm. [29] Animacy is the term Robin Wall Kimmerer uses for rekindling language that affirms kinship with the natural world. Though much Christian theology insists on an antimaterial understanding of spirit, the mystical authors here show enduring correctives to such teaching. These alternative pro-material animacies have been there all along. The resonances with anima as soul stand as testament to an animacy possible within Christian mystical theology. Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Speaking of Nature,” Orion Magazine, June 12, 2017, https://orionmagazine.org/article/speaking-of-nature/. [30] Kathryn Savage, Ground Glass: An Essay (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2022). [31] Mechthild of Magdeburg, Flowing Light, 325, 77, 180–181, 252, 52. [32] Mechthild of Magdeburg, Flowing Light, 181, 77, 325. [33] See the ongoing work tracing religious views of the end times and climate justice at Arizona State University: https://csrc.asu.edu/apocalypticnarrativescalimatechange/events. [34] Steven Rozenski Jr., “The Promise of Eternity: Love and Poetic Form in Hadewijch’s Liederen or Stanzaic Poems,” Exemplaria 22, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 305–325; Mary A. Suydam, “The Touch of Satisfaction: Visions and the Religious Experience according to Hadewijch of Antwerp,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 12, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 5–27. [35] Mechthild of Magdeburg, Flowing Light, 77. [36] Mechthild of Magdeburg, Flowing Light, 44. [37] Mechthild of Magdeburg, Flowing Light, 79–80. [38] John of the Cross, Selected Writings, ed. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. (New York: Paulist Press, 1987). [39] John of the Cross, Selected Writings, 180–184. [40] John of the Cross, Selected Writings, 201. [41] John of the Cross, Selected Writings, 223. [42] Mary Annaïse Heglar, “Climate Grief Hurts because It’s Supposed To,” The Nation, November 7, 2021. [43] Robert Macfarlane, The Underland: A Deep Time Journey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2019). [44] Macfarlane, Underland, 17. [45] Macfarlane, Underland, 56. [46] Sara Seager, The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir (New York: Crown, 2021). [47] Macfarlane, Underland, 68–69. [48] Macfarlane, Underland, 59. [49] Macfarlane, Underland, 79. [50] Macfarlane, Underland, 104. [51] Scott Cairns, “Adventures in New Testament Greek: Apocatastasis,” in Philokalia: New and Selected Poems (Lincoln, NE: Zoo Press, 2002), 39. “Namely, everything / we know as well as everything we don’t in all / creation came to be in that brief, abysmal / vacuum The Holy One first opened in Himself. / So it’s not so far a stretch from that Divine Excess / to advocate the sacred possibility / that in some final, graceful metanoia He / will mend that ancient wound completely, and for all.”