Teaching Thick Hope in the Middle of an Apocalypse
Christopher Fici, PhD
A found poem from notes my students sent me following the conclusion of our Religion and the Natural World course at Iona College, NY:
I feel more connected to the natural world and I have you to thank for that.
Robin Wall Kimmerer inspired me to take up a minor in environmental studies.
I feel a certain indescribable connection with the natural world.
I learned a lot about myself and the world around me.
I also would love some tips on how to meditate because I found the guided meditation to be so helpful!
Thank you for giving me a brand new perspective on Earth.
I wish I gained this new perspective earlier in my life, but I’m glad I have it now.
I wish others could know how beautiful our home really is, and make an effort in protecting it.
Maybe we can work on something in Iona to create an ecological sound environment.
You really helped change my whole outlook on life and this planet and things I can do.
What does it mean to teach thick hope in the middle of an apocalypse? What does it mean to hope when the world is ending every hour on the hour? Hope is one of those categories of being we take for granted until the marrow has been sucked out of the bone. Hope, like sustainability, like progress, hell even like climate change, has become a term which lends itself easily to the service of commodification, complacency, turbo-capitalism and the banality of evil. Hope, when abused, becomes an obstacle to hope. Our hope is nothing but hoping against hope. So what then is thick hope?
When “facing” (mostly digitally, with most of their cameras turned off) a group of vulnerable, sincere, very earnest, and some intensely religious undergraduate students for the first time as a professor-in the middle of a historic pandemic in the middle of all of America’s traumas erupting all at once in the the righteous flame of movements for justice mixed with Twitter hissy-fits on the daily, the whole sacred vocation of teaching illuminates. Fear and confidence and surrender to all manners of complexity and chaos and joy and disappointment and the surprise of students experiencing genuine metanoia-all of this swims in my head, heart, and body as I finish my first full semester as the teacher, the professor, all of my spiritual and professional credentials have called me to be.
Somehow, by the grace of Krishna and Saint Francis and Pope Francis and Robin Wall Kimmerer, as expressed in the found poem which we opened with, many of my students experienced what, to be honest, I didn’t even fully consciously intend for them to learn. Teaching is a whirlwind. Teaching in a pandemic is a tornado. Teaching in a pandemic in a job you are offered just a few weeks before the semester begins is and was at times a full-on cyclone. It wasn’t until I began to hear from my students at the end of the semester that I was able to take a deep breath and realize what we had all been doing all this time. We were cultivating thick hope.
Lis O’Kelly, 2020
Nursing thick hope from the soil of so much wisdom, turning our away through the garden of Franciscan and Thomas Berry-ian and Indigenous and Hindu Earth Spiritualities, revealed to me that no matter how much the winds of chaos and a shattered academy can throw at us, teachers always can and must and do do what is most sacred and holy. Teachers are sacred and holy. This is not to puff me up or us up. It is only to acknowledge that there is a sacred kernel to the art of teaching which cannot be touched or truly affected by the winds that blow away the various husks.
What is thick hope then? How do we cultivate such a strange vine in the middle of an apocalypse? What is apocalypse anyway? Why do I say an apocalypse? Don’t I mean the apocalypse? Let me turn to one of my teachers who gave me a “brand new perspective on Earth.”
The constructive theologian Catherine Keller thickens hope back into its tangibility and Earthiness by calling upon the Hebrew concept of tiqvah. Keller explains that tiqvah means:
...literally “a collection of fibers that are twisted together to make a strong and firm cord.”
It comes from the verb root meaning “to collect”...This fibrous hope has nothing to do with a future abstracted from the present, with pictures of a heavenly happy ending or just a markedly better tomorrow...Tiqvah names not a projection of future but an interweave of now; it signified a cord “collected,” made strong, by interweaving multiple fibers of time and narrative...It is a twisted hope that binds us to the loom of life now, in the now-moment that knots or nets the past and its traumatism to the possible. To the future not of an illusion but of the present. If we cannot hold it, bind it, in some fleshly mattering sense, it is not hope. [1]
Thick hope emerges from sitting within the shadow side of five centuries of colonization, exploitation, abuse, objectification, and un-Earthiness. How do you teach a sincerely Catholic 20-year old young adult about climate catastrophe? Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you listen and learn from them. A teacher is always blessed by the student who is themselves the teacher. I was blessed by this numerous times over the past few months. When I always already achingly stepped into my vocation as the professor, it was with an attempt at sensitivity without sugarcoating. After all, how can one even conceive of teaching a course on Religion and the Natural World without mentioning like that whole climate catastrophe which is enveloping us? So, with care and with definite attention we leaned immediately in to the multiple complex emerging entangled challenges of our climate catastrophe. During a week in September in which Iona faculty were asked to engage in a #ScholarsStrike, I taught the students about decolonization, the Doctrine of Discovery, and climate justice. If it was the first time they’ve ever heard of these concepts, I fervently hope I planted enough of a seed in their understanding that will grow as they encounter these realities throughout their educational experience and their human journey.
Thick hope comes from leaning into the very apocalypse we are experiencing every day and at every hour, if we are doing this all properly. What do I mean by this? Let’s hear again from Keller and another one of my dearest teachers, the comparative theologian John J. Thatamanil:
When the term is understood as “unveiling,” we can then ask the right questions: What does this pandemic unveil? What have we refused to see about ourselves and the precarious world we’ve built, a world that now stands exposed and tottering in the harsh light of this unasked-for revelation? If we permit this crisis to expose the fissures of our failing world, this pandemic will have served as properly apocalyptic. If instead, despite its devastating toll, we return to an obsolete and unsustainable world, nothing meaningful will have been revealed. [2]
David Zung, BLM Day of the Dead, 2020
Apocalypse is not a one-time event. Ask the peoples of color and peoples of poverty and their ghosts and ancestral spirits about the apocalypses they have experienced and continue to experience at the hands of the white supremacist-patriarchal wetiko ahankara (false ego in the Bhagavad-Gita) monster-demon-energy. In every rupture is revelation. Revelation of the inconceivable, unforgivable evils a human collective can participate in in the name of progress or God or insatiable perversion. There is also revelation of that kernel of sacred and holy truth which can never be destroyed or affected by human evil. The returning revelation of the wisdom of Earth, of the Divine presence in every atom and quark and quantum strangeness, when “even a top quark becomes a sacrament, and the universe of stars and galaxies becomes a heavenly dance for the betrothal of human and divine love.” [3]
David Zung, BLM Day of the Dead, 2020
Teaching thick hope in the middle of an apocalypse requires revelation of the shadow and the light. The teacher must demonstrate to the students that we cannot just get stuck at the white-wall of despair and hopelessness and ecological grief and criticism for the sake of criticism. We must carry our grief forward as the sustainable fuel for constructing and anticipating the way forward. These pathways lead us into the places of anticipatory community, as described by the Christian eco-ethicist Larry L. Rasmussen, and into the Ecozoic era as described by the Catholic priest, historian of religions, and geologian Thomas Berry, in which we are present to each other, to Earth, and to the cosmos in a mutually enhancing manner, in which “we discover that every being has its own spontaneities that arise from the depths of its own being. These spontaneities express the inner value of each being in such a manner that we must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” [4]
What my students helped me realize is that the sacred vocation which connects teacher and student is about the realization and experience of the numinous-as that which we describe variously as the divine, spirit, goddess, ineffable, mystical, erotic, and ecstatic. Certainly Berry, underneath what appears to be an unassuming surface, was uncompromisingly prophetic and radical about the state of millennial education, deeming it an absolute failure and catastrophe if it did not teach the students about their own ongoing and unending connection to the numinous. Certainly education fails if it does not reveal that perhaps the primary doorway into the numinous is through our Earthiness. Certainly I made that clear to my students more intentionally and intensely than anything else I taught. And for that I am grateful to have entered into the Berry sampradaya (Hindu term for a lineage of teachers) under the guidance of dear mentors and friends Sr. Kathleen Deignan of the Institute for Earth and Spirit at Iona College and Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim from the Yale Forum for Religion and Ecology.
What I came to discover was a natural craving in my students and amplified in my own journey, for the very experience that, like gravity, the universe always tends to turn, when unimpeded by human false ego, towards relationality and compassion. As Berry suggests:
...we might consider our intimate compassionate presence to Earth as originating ultimately in the curvature of space, as it is presented in modern science. The entire Earth community is enfolded in this compassionate curve whereby the universe bends inwardly in a manner sufficiently closed to hold all things together and yet remains sufficiently open so that compassion does not confine, but fosters, the creative process. [5]
On more than a couple of occasions my students, especially those of who came from Catholic school backgrounds, told me that this was very unlike any religion course they had ever taken (this usually came after the part of the course where I began to gently introduce them to critical takes on religion which question the very category itself). By and large this was a positive and enlightening experience for them, especially since I took care to illuminate the lasting legacy of the Franciscan tradition for ecological consciousness, change, and hope. They also especially appreciated the encounter with Robin Wall Kimmerer and Indigenous earth spirituality. Many of the students deeply resonated with Kimmerer’s call to move from it to ki or kin to re-discover our intimacies with every living being around us. Many of them also especially appreciated encountering the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, especially when we did a guided meditation in which I asked them to express gratitude and devotion to an aspect of Earth they feel strongly about.
There is a joy in teaching which always must be re-discovered and cultivated. What has now enhanced that realization is the understanding that this joy emerged through an embrace of the pastoral role that teaching calls us to. I am utterly incapable of teaching in any way other than care for the whole being of my students, from atomic to cosmic. The fact that many of my students will now experience Earth around them in an increasingly enchanted way gives me a sense of profound contentment. The only way we can actually cultivate thick hope is through a deep rooting in our Earthiness, in our sacred embodiment. That is the root from which thick hope grows. Gathering the hopes of our students into this unbreakable cord is what makes the teacher sacred and the students sacred.
Christopher Fici, PhD is an ecotheologian and scholar of religion based in New York City. He currently teaches in the Religious Studies department at Iona College, NY. Christopher's project and passion is participating in the creation of anticipatory communities-communities which develop eco-social practices and ethics, exposing the fault lines of modernity, in regenerative response to the challenges of our climate catastrophe. Christopher is a member of the Sequoia Samanvaya community, where he has taught the ReMembering for Life course and engages in vision and content development for Sequoia's educational curriculum.