POINTSOFVIEW | AT HOME ON EARTH
By Kyle Kramer
Battling the Darkness
Kyle is the executive director of the Passionist Earth & Spirit Center, which offers interfaith educational programming in meditation, ecology, and social compassion. He serves as a Catholic climate ambassador for the US Conference of Catholic Bishopssponsored Catholic Climate Covenant and is the author of A Time to Plant: Life Lessons in Work, Prayer, and Dirt (Ave Maria Press, 2010). He speaks across the country on issues of ecology and spirituality. He and his family spent 15 years as organic farmers and homesteaders in Spencer County, Indiana. EarthandSpiritCenter.org
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WOMB OR TOMB?
I don’t deny the march of human progress and the birth of new possibilities. I don’t deny the millions of acts of kindness going on this very minute across the globe. When I am in a better frame of mind, I celebrate those acts and I’m moved by them and I root for them. But these days, I find myself wanting to reverse Kaur’s question: What if this is not the darkness of the womb, but the darkness of the tomb? Don’t those old, unfashionable Christian verities—sin and death—still indeed hold sway over us? If you asked me for a boiled-down version of my faith, it would be this simple: We come from, are held by, and return to love. Sin is not simply “breaking the rules,” but on a much deeper level, it’s turning away from love, as individuals and as a human species. Sin causes untold death and destruction, personally and collectively. And yet, I also believe that love is stronger than death, or rather that love is larger than death: Love can contain death and bring meaning out of it. Love can redeem both sin and death. I feel that our sins—our turning away from love—have brought darkness upon us and our beautiful world, and that we’re in the tomb right now. There is so much death, whether from COVID-19, violence against our fellow human beings or other-thanhuman creatures, or the past-the-point-ofno-return destruction of the earth’s delicate ecosystems. I want to believe, as I wrote above, that love can redeem sin and death. But I wonder what redemption looks like at this moment in human and earth history. Does it look like the human species turning away from the brink of self-destruction and getting our collective act together? Does it mean we go over the brink, and love catches us—or doesn’t, and
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NATURE MANIA/FOTOSEARCH
Kyle Kramer
aybe it’s the multiple crises of pandemic and recession and ecological collapse. Maybe it’s racial tensions and unrest. Maybe it’s shootings by madmen and angry men and policemen. Maybe it’s the cynical, post-truth character of our public discourse and the angry partisanship of our politics. Maybe— almost certainly—it’s all of the above. Whatever it is, though, to paraphrase Dante’s famous opening lines from the Inferno, I find myself “within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.” It’s hard to admit that I feel so hopeless right now. It’s hard to admit it to myself and to my wife and children. It’s definitely hard to admit it publicly to those of you who read this column. I’d like to help shine a light in a dark time. I’d like to provide encouragement, comfort, inspiration, and clear thinking about a better future for our world. As someone with a public voice within the Church, I feel a duty to do those things. But you can’t shine a light that isn’t glowing in your own heart. “When your eyes are tired,” writes the poet David Whyte, “the world is tired also.” Over recent weeks, I started several completely different drafts of this column, all of them trying to paper over or navigate around this central struggle. None of them worked. None of them felt authentic. They all felt like whistling in the dark, being naively optimistic, or fleeing to the realm of platitude or abstract argument. I’ve tried to tell myself that it is always “darkest before the dawn.” I’ve tried to believe Sikh activist Valarie Kaur’s beautiful expression of hope, that these trying times are “not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb,” with some new thing waiting to be born. But birth is a dangerous and uncertain process, and I know that births sometimes go catastrophically wrong.
LEFT: COURTESY OF KYLE KRAMER; RIGHT: HIKRCN/FOTOSEARCH
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