Some thoughts on Anglican Franciscanism - part six - Jeff Golliher and the Climate Emergency (part one)

The second half of the mornings that Cathy spoke were led by Jeff Golliher. Jeff is one of my heroes. He has been a gift to the Order and to the wider church for a long time now. I first met Jeff in October 2018 at a meeting of the Chapter of the Province of the Americas. On the final day he took us through the very recently released IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. 

Jeff is a Franciscan, a retired Episcopal priest, and a cultural anthropologist. He has travelled widely to explore the spiritual path in the Western and Eastern traditions and among indigenous peoples. Much of his work has focused on the spiritual dimension of the environmental crisis. For more than ten years, he served as Canon for Environmental Justice and Community Development at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan. For nearly 30 years he was the environmental representative for the worldwide Anglican Communion at the United Nations. He is an author and speaker, and seen by many as a guide for those who wish to follow the spiritual path. He is currently the Assistant Minister Provincial for Sacred Ecology and Colonialization/Decolonization for the Province of the Americas. 

It was from his experience of being the Anglican spokesperson on Climate Change at the UN that he spoke to us. With tears of frustration, he outlined how we had nearly reached the tipping point and how humanity needed to act now! We have until 2030 to halve our greenhouse gas emissions, and until 2050 to entirely eradicate them. It was a shocking moment for many of us. I knew climate change was a pressing issue, but, like many, I had lived in the mistaken belief that we had lots of time to act. It was important but not urgent. It was a very rude awakening to discover we have little or no time. I felt paralyzed with fear, disbelief and despair. Sadly as I look around the world, and at the polices of our own government we are simply unwilling to act or to change. Short term comfort and economic gain trump all else. And we are gifting our descendants an increasingly perilous world, and we don't seem to care. It would be easy to get lost in hopelessness and despair.

While I still find myself drifting back into this response, for those of us who listened to Jeff that day, and at the meeting of the Minister Provincials who met a year later, the challenge is how to respond from our Franciscan charism. We do not need more fear. What is needed is an urgent re-framing of our relationship with God’s gift of creation and for people to act on this. Or as Jeff says, we like Francis, need the Spirit to open our souls to the sacred in the whole fabric of life so that we might put our Franciscan principles into action. From 2019 to 2021 Jeff wrote three reflections to help us as Franciscans to use our three ways of service as outlined in our rule to as an invitation to deepen our understanding of the Rule and Principles of our Order as a means for the Spirit to lead us in the Franciscan way of hope and discernment. The Order published those in The Franciscan Forms of Service - Hopeful Reflections in a Perilous Time

Jeff was not with us in person. But he pre-recorded his input sessions and then held question and answer sessions with us. You can find these sessions here.

In the first of his sessions Jeff talked about Listening to Mother Earth. He was clear that we are all involved in the situation of our changing climate and the  ecological emergency that we facing. He talked about the Paris Agreement to cut the carbon emissions by half by 2030 compared to pre-industrial levels (though he noted that some said 1.2⁰ would be necessary). We are a long way from that goal. And far too oil interests are working behind the scenes to subvert the agreed goals. We cans ee that in the current COP. It is time to listen. The wake up call is getting louder. He reminded us that indigenous voices have been saying for some time ‘the earth is exhausted. The earth is now trying to cleanse itself’. We need to help Mother Earth to heal.

Jeff is trying to change the nature of the conversation. Rather than environmental care, where ‘environment’ as somewhere ‘out there’ to be exploited, we need a sacred ecology, which is about our relationship with creation. He noted that since 1980s corporate control of global economy has become a part of the colonisation process, exploring that in with communication, social media, artificial intelligence, etc  e.g. use of Zoom (ironically as he was speaking to us on Zoom), and how these changes are removing us from the web of life in what we perceive and the way we live. We need to be getting more into our bodies, to be incarnate. 

Like Cathy he asked some questions.

- Do we know where we live?  - ‘Think globally, act locally’.

- What do we see?

- Who is my neighbour?

He would come back to these in his second session