Seeking Forgiveness/Searching for Hope in Our Anthropocene World

May 2021

by Norman Wirzba
Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology at Duke Divinity School and Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics

When I talk to people about climate change and the multiple forms of eco-social damage that punctuate our world, I now know that I risk inducing the symptoms of what some mental health professionals are calling Pre-Traumatic Distress Syndrome. This form of PTSD happens when people are bombarded, like so many concussive blows, by an unrelenting stream of bad news. They recognize that multiple disasters are here and on the way, but also feel powerless to extricate themselves from the impending doom. It is too much to bear, so they retreat, detach emotionally, and look for ways to shield themselves from yet one more catastrophe. They don’t often want a detailed exposition of what is happening. They want, instead, to get straight to the heart of the matter: are there grounds for hope in a world that is being steadily degraded and becoming increasingly uninhabitable? Young people routinely ask me if they should still plan on having children.

So, how might we speak about the grounds for hope? I propose starting with two principles. One is from Wendell Berry, who says that “hope lives in the means, not the ends.” The second is from Quoheleth, the Sage of Ecclesiastes, who said, “whoever is joined with all the living has hope” (Ecclesiastes 9:4). Together, these two principles suggest that hope resides and manifests itself in a commitment to honor and nurture life with others. It does not depend on having figured out what the future will be. Hope withers when people detach and withdraw from others. Hope grows when people discover and commit themselves to furthering the goodness and beauty they believe to animate this world.

As researchers have considered the hopelessness that people often feel, they have, quite rightly, made grief a focal concern. Expressing grief can help humanize the hard, scientific facts that climate and earth scientists give us. And the experience of collective grief can bring people together, make apparent their shared love and anger, and thus inspire political action. But is it not equally important to learn to confess, repent, and seek forgiveness, especially when we know that so much of the damage is anthropogenic? Ecological destruction didn’t/doesn’t just happen. It is the effect of social/political priorities and economic practices that violate land, water, air, and fellow creatures alike. Clearly, not all people are directly implicated in these practices or implicated to the same degree. Even so, I think practices of confession and repentance are important in our Anthropocene epoch because they communicate that we take some responsibility for our roles in the wounding of our world. I don’t suppose this is easy. Our culture is not good at training people in the arts of confession or apology.

Practices like confession and repentance communicate an earnest desire to be in right, or at least agreeable, relationship with each other. The aim of forgiveness must not be to enable the guilty to live with impunity, since it would be a great injustice to claim that the guilty party did nothing wrong. Nor should it attempt to erase or evade the wrongs that have been done to another, because it is precisely the history of wrongs that needs to be kept in view so that a less violating future can be imagined. This makes forgiveness an uncommon effort. Following Paul Ricoeur, it is important to understand that both the seeking and the granting of forgiveness do not operate on a contractual level. Forgiveness cannot be negotiated or demanded. If it comes at all, it will be as a gift beyond deserving, much like the experience of unconditional love. This keeps the practices of forgiveness at the level of a desire, or in the optative grammatical mood expressing a wish and a hope: “If only…”

A desire for what? Not for erasure or closure. Not even for dissonant-free harmony or wholeness. The desire to be forgiven is fundamentally a desire for the kind of personal and communal transformation in which people are enabled to be in supportive, on-going relationships with others. When people lament histories of wrongdoing, and then commit their efforts to being a helping and healing presence going forward, they also begin to shed the self-justifying strategies that keep them from living peaceably with the wounded. They shed the illusion that they are innocent and exempt from a need to change. Confession and repentance signal the commitment to be open to, and instructed by, the pain and suffering of the past so that people can work together for a more just future.

Seeking forgiveness matters because it communicates a desire to join with the living and contribute to the healing of a world that is both good and beautiful, perhaps even sacred. People who live in hope believe that being joined to others is a fundamental good. There is no hope being alone in a mute, commodified world. There is no hope in an unsympathetic existence. A hopeful life is founded upon resonant relationships in which confession and care are primary practices. If hope presupposes an abiding affirmation of the goodness of this world and its life, and manifests itself practically in a dedication to join with all the living in the work of nurture and respect, then it is clear that the desire for forgiveness registers as the commitment to be in life-affirming relationship with others.

Hear more from Norman Wirzba in this “Facing the Anthropocene” webinar

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