This Fall every couple of weeks, green team members and supporters will be sharing some personal stories and insights on what embracing values of sustainability means to them in their own lives and as members of the Hamline Church community.  We invite you to learn and become inspired to take further action in your own life or as a member of our community.

by Valentine Cadieux

Valentine Cadieux

As the days grow darker this advent season, I find they also make me more sensitive to the dual pressures of the holidays:  the extreme consumerism along with the space and time we need to meaningfully process its effects. So as a visiting scholar on this blog, my Christmas gift to you all is an argument from a sustainability perspective about how and why to build the time for refuge in this season, and in all seasons.

American trash production doubles in the month around Christmas.  This is not only what is left over after the gatherings and gifting, but the idea of “trash” can also include all things and people we wish could be magically spirited away because we don’t need or want them anymore, or they present difficulties we would just rather not contend with.  After last year’s election and the increasingly extreme political, economic and cultural dynamics that began to emerge then, Hamline University students and faculty returned to a January term, and I could feel the despair pouring off the students and my colleagues.

Sustainability is not only accounting well for where our things come from, and where they go, but it is also a set of relationships and practices that help us understand what in our lives and culture are worth sustaining, along with how that might be possible, especially in the face of what daunts us. Clued in to the impending despair last year by many people’s desperate visits to the sustainability office – not a place we had adequately understood to have a pastoral mission – I spent the J-term learning how to build refuges.  What does it mean to meet the other face to face, especially when it may be with others whose experience we find daunting – whose perspective we might prefer to just trash, send away, where we don’t have to experience it.  How does one keep an open heart during such times?

This is the heart of sustainability:  to meet each other well, to build refuges for and with each other to find what we need, for the emotions we have trouble acknowledging, to create space we can learn to live vulnerably and wholeheartedly.  I don’t know about you, but in my line of work, when I let myself be vulnerable – to all of the connections and implications that my privileged life, built on a sustained history of colonial and extractive oppression, inherently entails – I feel so vulnerable that my heart isn’t big enough for the amount of breaking it needs to do. But this seems like the crux of building a refuge:  you have to do it with others.  At the same time, it can become the death knell of colonial whiteness that contributes to so many of the problems sustainability work is trying to fix: our individual compulsion to fix things, often badly.

This fall I heard a remarkable talk by Desirée Williams-Rajee, on the occasion of accepting one of the first decadal awards from the U of M’s Institute on the Environment, where she delivered her speech while weeping through almost the whole thing.  Learning to talk through crying is something I talk with my students about. Particularly in fields like academics, where women struggle to be taken seriously, the idea of speaking in public with emotion is anathema to most of the things we’ve been trained to do to be able to pass as academic, and this fear is real and valid.  Right now though we need those people who are willing and able to lead with wholehearted experience more than ever, who don’t excise the emotion or water down what needs to be said and what we need to hear. The institutions we build to teach communities and students how to live toward futures we want need to model practices that are “body-ful”, that are refuges for our embodied experience and emotion along with our thinking. Hamline Church’s vision to be a Sanctuary for the City is about creating these refuges of sustainability for our spirits as well.  In this act of creating refuge, we might learn sustenance such that there is no trash at the end of it of things or people.  I invite you to reflect on how you can create with others a refuge during this holiday season.