Scientists pen memoirs.
Preachers sing the blues.
Historians catalog their prayers, and
homileticians dream in sci-fi, and
clergy tell new origin stories, and
all creation praises:
for the Love of it all.
A thousand beautiful things happened in the meeting of 26 souls at a five-day spiritual retreat for eco-writers. But it’s a rare reader who wants the scrapbook version, soup to nuts. So, I’ll just share three takeaways with you. Three things I learned or had reaffirmed.
1. For better and for worse, there is no single story.
There’s no single best story, and there’s no right way to tell it. There are only the stories we have and haven’t told.
Not every book makes it to a library shelf. Not every poem lands in a journal. Some sermons are preached once, and some articles get published in a journal that wasn’t your first choice.
But some books, in their writing, are a runway for healing – your own or someone else’s. Some poems land like a tree trunk across a stream, altering its course and, by it, everything else.
Some sermons are preached at all – once, like a thunderclap, or once, sotto voce. Some academic articles nestle like an unhammered chisel against the status quo.
What I don’t mean is that “your story matters” in a “participation trophy” kind of way. But how your story “matters” is too early to say. (How could Vincent Van Gogh have guessed that his sunflowers would light up the city of Boston 150 years on?) What if we treat storytelling less like the key to the gate of planetary well-being and more like a sapling in the grove of spiritual imagination?
2. If we can honestly meet grief, then we can honestly meet joy.
All of that “mattering” is beside the point, which is that it doesn’t need to “matter” — at least not as a reflection of utility. (In what units do we measure kinship or healing?)
Would it suffice for story to exist simply because writing is what writers do, in the same way that dance is what dancers do, or flowering is what flowers do?
Said one retreat participant: “I am writing about the denial of darkness in our religious and secular lives. It occurred to me that humor plays a role.”
By some cosmic good fortune, where two or more of us are gathered, eco-spiritual people find their way to delight. This particular experience was shaped by awe, friendship, gratitude, humility, and wisdom. But that isn’t rare in the landscape of eco-spirituality. In sharing grief through conversation and by sharing our writing, we found ourselves strengthened enough to hold the dangerous weight of joy.
3. Story is multidimensional, not a straight line.
To ideate resistance to polycrisis, it helps to be in range of one another. When we find ourselves uninspired, we may be reanimated by the awe stirred up by the god-in-us.
If we want a better capital-S Story than the script we were given, then we will need to tell it for a very long time in many different ways. What is the substance of a world unrestrained by extractive capitalism and oppression? Tell the Story of a worthwhile future full of life, texture, cultures, fables, and imperfections. Tell the Story of what it looks like from your point of view.
The Story of our future is not a single edition. It will require reminders, affirmations, corrections, and challenges. So, come with citations and rhythm, lyrics, cameras, book binders, stage lights. The living canvas of your life. The suspension of disbelief.
Images from the Thrushes’ Hermitage spiritual retreat for eco-writers
What’s next for some of the writers:
I was able to claim the vastness and ambition of what I was working on.
I left feeling eager to press forward with my project, despite the ongoing mental inventory of why it will never work!
I feel less pressure to write now, interestingly, but I certainly learned and reflected, and benefited very much by sitting by the water, praying and reflecting.
I am newly aware of many concepts regarding climate change and its impacts. I got a wonderful new perspective on climate and ecological challenges from the clergy perspective. And I take heart from the activist spirit that seems to be alive in many of the participants.
I come away from the retreat with a clear sense of the arc of the book that I need to write - and a newfound willingness to trust my own voice.
The conviction that I must speak more forcefully about government leaders and climate care.
It strengthened my sense of purpose in my work.
The retreat has caused me to review my body of work over the years - not only the books I have written but also the retreats I have facilitated. I think this process will help me know the direction I am meant to take going forward and how I continue to deepen my commitment to being a voice for the sacredness of nature.
I am joyful and inspired to have been robustly supported in my emergent fiction writing.
I had an “aha” experience about writing as a result of conversations and location.
If you’re interested in next year’s spiritual retreat for eco-writers, you can fill out this non-binding interest form to be alerted when registration opens.
Ophelia Hu Kinney is the child of Chinese immigrants. She is a mother, sister, and wife who lives on the land of the Wabanaki Confederacy. Her writing treads the rabbit trails of spirituality, ecology, queer and Asian American perspectives, and the practice of awe. Ophelia’s writing has appeared in The Common, The Christian Century, Geez Magazine, Inheritance Magazine, Unbound Justice, Our Bible App, and at Discipleship Ministries (UMC), to name a few.
At The BTS Center, she gets to tell the stories of people becoming more human in a more-than-human world.
You have framed the idea of the capital-S Story so beautifully, Ophelia. There is so much to think about here. Also, thank you for including some of the participants' takeaways from the retreat. I still feel very "held" by the emotions and collaborative spirit of our week together.