As climate change worsens, pastoral counselors talk hope
The tower of Fordham University’s Keating Hall, where the conference was hosted. Creative Commons photo.
NEW YORK — By the end of the day’s lectures at a conference about pastoral mental health counseling in the age of climate crisis at Fordham University, the only point of difference was about the role of hope.
Hope is secondary to the responsibility of ensuring care, said Ryan LaMothe, a professor of pastoral care and counseling at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology in Indiana. Hope isn’t necessary to provide effective care. He doesn’t have hope that humanity will overcome its narcissistic nature in time to save itself from extinction, he said, but he does not feel despair. He finds meaning in the work ahead.
Yet hope and optimism help people to grow after suffering trauma, said Mary Beth Werdel, director of the pastoral mental health counseling program at Fordham University. As the cascading effects of climate change get more intense and frequent, the trauma inflicted on people will take longer to rebuild than damaged infrastructure and economies, she said. Hope is an important part of the healing process.
LaMothe called the climate crisis “inoperable” — so large in scale that people living through it will need to deal with its effects in the absence of any hope of reversing it. Good counsel doesn’t require the counselor to have hope, he argued. It simply requires being present with people and attentive to their unique personalities and conditions. It also requires a solid grasp of what is happening.
“We need to be clear-eyed about the nature of challenges that are facing us in the Anthropocene era, no matter how formidable these challenges are,” LaMothe said.
That involves understanding what he called the “trinity of obstacles” that are to blame for the degradation of Earth’s biosphere: capitalism, nationalism and imperialism. In his analysis, capitalism is a “ruthless leviathan” that manifests more as a system of beliefs than of economics, operating on a faulty premise that the universe has unlimited resources available for the taking.
Nationalism and patriotism prioritize national sovereignty over the common good. The Pentagon’s reports on projected sea level rise, resulting population unrest and global scarcity of resources provide a framework for war as the world burns, LaMothe said. The imperial ambitions of world powers stand to pit the strongest nations against each other and those weaker, ensuring a dramatic increase in violence in addition to continuing environmental disasters.
International cooperation is humanity’s best bet for mitigating the effects of climate change, but global politics remain mostly aligned with a capitalistic neoliberal ideology that hamstrings movements for the common good, LaMothe said. Even the notion of the common good becomes linked to the idea of social justice, which then becomes linked to socialism and communism, with all the baggage those terms carry.
Pastoral care must be able to diagnose the sources of a person’s problems within this maelstrom, he said. That requires a broad understanding of how the world’s systems are interacting with each other.
“Theologians of all stripes, for instance, can make use of their traditions to understand how these three obstacles interfere with the core principles of Judeo-Christian ethics, while at the same time becoming well-versed in economics, political science and scientific research on climate change and its effects,” he said.
Deadly sins are bred by the obstacles to addressing climate change, LaMothe said: “Capitalism promotes greed, lust, gluttony and envy. Patriotism often nurtures wrath and pride. Together, patriotism and capitalism promote intellectual and emotional sloth. Our early church fathers and mothers recognized that these sins are not only deadly for the individual, but also the wellbeing of the community. Today, we would say that these sins are obstacles to the wellbeing of the habitat and its residents.”
Werdel suggested that hope and possibility have intrinsic value in faith-informed mental health counseling as long as they are separated from expectation. She listed experiences proved to aid in post-traumatic growth, like social support systems and religious spirituality. Pastoral counseling can use hope to nurture factors that encourage growth, she said, which can feed positively into the larger picture.
“What we recognize is that there’s this cycle that happens,” she said. “That if we’re remaking ourselves in the world, then slowly we’re remaking the world.”
As the event drew to its end, several people in the audience raised their hands to offer thoughts.
“I don’t even know how I got invited to this,” said Joel Grassi, pastor of Commonwealth Community Baptist Church in the Soundview section of the Bronx. “The email showed up and I came.”
He was leaving with more hope than he came in with, he said. He was simply thankful for the discussion. He said he hoped there would be more events like it.
“There’s a tension between the truth that we know and the facts that we see, and how those can fit together in a way that we can make sense of this decaying world,” Grassi said. “Our world is in decline and yet we have our faith in a God who is pristine. How does that all fit together? It’s a great mystery.”
Micah Danney is a Poynter-Koch fellow and a reporter and associate editor for Religion Unplugged. He is an alumnus of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and has reported for news outlets in the NYC area, interned at The Times of Israel and covered religion in Israel for The GroundTruth Project.