Hope

 Hope. It’s hard to hang on to right now.

I had lunch with a younger friend last Saturday. They are leading Sunday’s service at church, and I am their Worship Associate. Their topic is ‘“The Discipline of Hope.” We had a good conversation about the service and the topic, and I found them very inspiring. But then we left the cafe and went back out into the world.

Over the last five or six years, I’ve come to struggle with the topic of hope, which has been complicated by the current regime in power now. It came to a head several years ago, when I heard a sermon by Rev. Michael Dowd. He was an American author, Christian minister, lecturer, and advocate of ecotheology and post-doom. 

The Wikipedia article about Michael Dowd states:

In 2015 Dowd read the 1980 book by William R. Catton Jr.: Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. That reading "changed everything" for Dowd and launched him on the path he would later call postdoom.[30] John Halstead described Catton's influence in a memorium for Dowd that he wrote in 2023: "Post-doom teaches that, ironically, it is the very urge to cling to hope and the faith in progress and technology that is driving us faster and faster toward our own annihilation. When we refuse to acknowledge natural limits, then we end up hastening the very outcome that we want to avoid."[31]

By 2019 Dowd had pivoted his message to a pastoral form of support for those who, like himself, had lost hope that climate change, ecological overshoot, biodiversity loss and other causes of civilizational collapse already underway could be halted.[25] Post-doom was the word he coined for the process of moving through the stages of grief,[30] then beyond mere acceptance and more fully into "calm, clarity, and courageous love-in-action."[32] Increasingly, he became known as the "postdoom pastor."[33]

After I heard Rev. Dowd preach, I was depressed for a week. And yet I also felt a kind of calmness and clarity as well. Rev. Dowd captured in his sermon what I had been suspecting myself for quite a while by that point. I read Catton’s book “Overshoot” myself, and it made sense to me. The book demonstrates how environments can support only a limited amount of life. And when an environment is overtaxed, the life that is there goes extinct. Per “Overshoot,” the earth in its entirety has become overtaxed.

One of the things that “Overshoot” discusses is what can happen in human society in an overtaxed, dying environment. And one of those things is facism. “Overshoot” discusses how the scarcity in Germany caused by the sanctions placed on the country as a result of the First World War fed into the rise of facism in that country. And now we see it happening not only here in the US but elsewhere in the world.

And yet. And yet. There is something in me that hangs on. When my mom says things like, “As long as there are people, there will never be peace on earth,” I cringe. I want to believe that the Beloved Community that MLK spoke about is possible. I want to believe that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” 

And even if climate change is too far gone for us to reverse it, I still think about a quotation attributed to Martin Luther: “If I knew that tomorrow was the end of the world, I would plant an apple tree today!” This is the mindset to which I aspire.