Doom castles, Earth our Mother, and evangelicalism
(or, happy Mother's Day to Earth?)
For some reason, the phrase “doom castle”—from Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead—has stuck with me.
I think about it sometimes when I see apartment buildings or hospital buildings, or when I think about buildings I used to live in. I think about it when I read how research shows that spending time in natural spaces is ridiculously good for our holistic health (mental, physical, emotional—none of it is separate from any other part).
In Kingsolver’s novel, “doom castle” is what apartment buildings in the big city of Knoxville look like through our young protagonist Demon’s eyes, after spending most of his childhood in rural Lee County, Virginia. The kind of living situation that felt natural to me in my twenties struck Demon as abhorrent.
Observing the building his aunt lives in, Demon notes: “A thousand other families living there, every front door opening into one hallway. Stairs going down past other hallways. Outside the main front door, a street full of cars and cars, people and people. There was no outside anywhere.”
Even when you do go outdoors, from Demon’s perspective, “Whenever Aunt June took us out, we'd drive down twenty or thirty streets with buildings only. You couldn't see the end of it in any form.”
Demon is used to trees, pastures, mountains, making a home in the midst of the natural world. He wasn’t prepared for the reality of so many parts of so many cities that so many people live in.
I hesitate in writing this because the last thing I’d want to do is place any blame at all on people who live in places that feel disconnected from our natural world. We are all enmeshed in a system that intentionally separates people from land. That’s part of colonization; that’s part of oppression—of people, and of Earth. The less we feel a connection with Earth, the less we will protest when she is exploited. No blame for the people most victimized by this system.
I wish it were not a privilege of the relatively-wealthy, at least in the kinds of urban areas I’ve always lived in, to have easy access to soil or native grasses under our feet. To look up and see tree branches waving back. To spy a robin or bunny hopping along or a finch alighting on a bush.
Thinking about Demon’s “doom castles,” I wonder: What do we become accustomed to that is really rather shocking when you take a minute to think about it, to see it through different eyes? What seems natural because it’s so common but is actually deeply unnatural?
And how do we seek out different eyes to see through? I think we need this now more than ever.
One pair of eyes I’ve been seeing through recently is that of theologian and Choctaw elder Steven Charleston. In We Survived the End of the World, Charleston reflects on the climate crisis from an Indigenous perspective:
“Mother Earth is a living being. She has a heart. She has a spirit. When we recognize her for who she is, we open the door of our souls to welcome her as our Mother. And once enough of us have made that intimate connection with her, once we have accepted our covenant with life, the quicker we will act with a common intention. Like siblings of one great Mother, we will stand up for what is right. We will make the changes and the sacrifices that will be needed if our Mother is to be healed.”
Happy Mother’s Day? Maybe thinking of Earth this way helps us better honor her. Hopefully not just one day, but every day of the year.
According to Charleston—as well as many others who have thought deeply about these things—our crises of climate and soils and waterways and bees and whole ecosystems are less about scientific knowledge and more about relationship. We know plenty. We need to develop the collective will to act on it. Healing our Earth looks more like a revolution of love than it looks like simply finding the right technologies to undo the damage we’re doing—although I believe that’s part of it, too.
I think about this love revolution, and I think about how I’m privileged to live in a place with relatively easy access to beautiful spaces of evergreen trees, bubbling creeks, and, in the springtime, flowering dogwoods and salmonberries and lilacs everywhere. (Oh hey, Pacific Northwest.) Even so, how often do I make time to sit or stroll in these spaces, to listen and learn from them?
At the beginning of Lent this year, I set an intention of making frequent visits to the water. (I’m kind of done setting goals like “daily” that I know I’m not going to be able to meet. But I wanted to go often.) For me, that meant Whulge / Puget Sound, which is a couple miles away from my home at its nearest point.
Lent is six weeks long. I took about a week to warm up to the idea and get going with it. For maybe another two weeks, I actually did visit the Sound several times—not every day, but probably more days than not.
On each visit, I felt so much peace in my body-mind-spirit. I felt more connected with Earth, God, and myself. I saw harbor seals on multiple occasions; one of them came right up to the beach when I was the only person there, and we looked at each other for quite a while, and it felt like a blessing.
Then life got busier and more difficult. And my intention of visiting the water daily was one of the first things to go.
In a past life—a more evangelical life—I might have felt guilty about this. I failed to honor my Lenten commitment. I must confess this in my quiet time.
Now, I don’t really feel that way. But I do take note of how easy it was to drop this renewing, calming, peace-promoting practice entirely when life got harder. Because really, isn’t it when life feels more difficult that we need to engage in what feels grounding all the more?
Earth is our Mother, and she is good. I say this as a (progressive) Christian. I see no tension and only synergy between following Jesus’ way of love and honoring the intricate created world to which we belong.
While many evangelicals think our world is meant to burn, and we just want Jesus to come back and take us up to heaven with him—and so we support environment-degrading politicians and policies accordingly—the Christian tradition holds other possibilities. Possibilities for reading biblical creation stories through a lens of interconnectedness and interdependence among humans and all other created beings. Possibilities of learning from wildflowers, from birds.
We can be connected to Creator as our parent and also to Earth as our parent, in a different but related way. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
I like what Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer says about Mother Earth in The Serviceberry, about our intimate connectedness with all living beings:
“Water is life, food is life, soil is life—and they become our lives through the paired miracles of photosynthesis and respiration. All that we need to live flows through the land. It is not an empty metaphor that we call her Mother Earth. Food in our mouths is the thread that connects us in a relationship simultaneously spiritual and physical, as our bodies get fed and our spirits nourished by a sense of belonging, which is the most vital of foods.”
Earth as Mother is not just a metaphor. She is literally our life-giver, continually. And our health depends on hers.
Sustainability is a worthy goal. But I wonder if sometimes it feels like a do-gooder thing, a selfless thing, all sacrifice and moralism and goodheartedness. As if it’s about us being good people. When really, as we seek to sustain Earth and her systems, ultimately we’re seeking to sustain ourselves. We do not survive without her.
Steven Charleston puts it this way: “Sustainability does not begin in the cold mathematics of production and consumption but rather in the human heart, in how we see the earth as a living being and how we choose to respect her in our exchange of mutual sharing.”
I write about these things because we’re living in a time when paying attention to the daily onslaught of New and Awful News can easily overwhelm.
How do we engage with the awfulness and its impact on us and our communities, not putting on privileged blinders or a mask of toxic positivity, but also not collapsing into a heap of despair? I don’t really know. But I do know we need the groundedness of intentionally building a relationship with Mother Earth. It helps.
I don’t want us to cover our ears to the cries of people who are suffering right now—which includes most of us in some way, although of course some much more acutely than others.
I do want us to make room to connect in meaningful ways with our natural world. To get out of our doom castles and touch some native plants, some healthy soils. To notice a “weed” that has lovely flowers. (I hear it pisses God off if we don’t.) To stop by a creek or river or lake or ocean and stare at the water for a few minutes.
This is part of how we affirm and seek life in a time of so much death and destruction. We ground ourselves, and in doing so, we proclaim that our wellbeing matters. Our wellbeing matters in a world not designed for it. And maybe this is how we begin to heal Earth, too.
So Happy Mother’s Day to Earth, and to our human mothers, and to all of us in the ways we guide and teach and support and cheer one another on.
In this with you.
If you need more…
To celebrate
’s very recent (like, 3 days ago) book launch of Tiger in a Lifeboat, is hosting a panel next Tuesday (5/13) to chat about courage, learning to trust yourself, and becoming brave. While I can’t say I know much about any of that, I get to be on the panel anyway, and it should be a fun time. Would love to see you there. More info here!Did you read Eliza Griswold’s Circle of Hope? Omg, what a book.
was kind enough to let me hop in for a guest post with a bunch of thoughts on it. I’d love to hear yours!
I loved that part of Demon Copperhead! As a person who grew up rural and couldn't wait to get to the city, it was such an eye-opener